By Dwight Longenecker
Despite somewhat of a reputation for being a curmudgeon, I have always considered myself an optimist. I usually look on the bright side, try to give the benefit of the doubt and believe a man is more often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies.
Nevertheless, in re-reading William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience I was reminded of the perils of optimism. James outlines a type of unremitting optimism that is often a part of the naturally ebullient American nature. James equates this optimism with progressivism and is astute in recognizing in it not only a form of atheism, but a new kind of religion.
He writes,
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements. But in that “theory of evolution” which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the needs of the healthy minded so well that it seems almost as if it might…