Church History in Plain Language

Era 7 · 1789 – 1914

The Age of Progress

Revolutions, railways and Darwin shake the old Christian order, while missionaries carry the faith to every continent.

Shelley calls the "long nineteenth century," from the French Revolution (1789) to the outbreak of the First World War (1914), "the Age of Progress." Europeans and Americans believed that humanity was moving steadily upward through science, industry, democracy, education and empire. Christianity faced this new world with a mixture of confidence and alarm.

  • Revolution: The French Revolution attacked the Catholic Church violently. It began a long struggle between the church and secular, liberal states across Europe.
  • Mission: Protestant missionaries, followed by a renewed Catholic mission movement, spread Christianity to Africa, Asia and the Pacific. It was "the Great Century" of missions in the historian Kenneth Scott Latourette's phrase, often entangled with European empires.
  • New ideas: Biblical criticism, Darwin's theory of evolution, and thinkers like Marx and Nietzsche challenged traditional faith. Liberal theologians tried to restate Christianity for the modern mind.
  • Rome's response: The papacy lost its territories but proclaimed papal infallibility (1870) and condemned "modernism."
  • Social reform: Evangelicals fought slavery and founded charities, and Christians responded to the misery of industrial cities.
  • America: Revivals, new denominations and the Black church made the United States the most religious industrialized nation.

The era ended in 1914 with a war between Christian nations. It would shatter confidence in "progress" itself.

Timeline: The Age of Progress (1789 – 1914)

1800185019001784 Methodist Episcopal Church organized in Balt…1787 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the S…1789 French Revolution begins; church lands natio…1792 Carey's Enquiry; Baptist Missionary Society …1793 Dechristianization; Cult of Reason; the Terr…1799 Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to It…1802 Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity1807 Robert Morrison arrives in China1813 Elizabeth Fry visits Newgate prison1825 Finney's revivals in New York's "Burned-over…1844 The "Great Disappointment" of the Millerites1846 Pius IX elected pope1848 Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto1858 Marian apparitions at Lourdes1860 Essays and Reviews controversy in England1865 William and Catherine Booth found the Salvat…1865 Hudson Taylor founds the China Inland Mission1870 Papal infallibility defined; Italian troops …1879 Christian Science founded by Mary Baker Eddy1905 France separates church and state1906 Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus1907 Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social …1907 Pius X condemns Modernism1910 World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh
Selected key dates from each chapter of this era. Click an event to read its chapter, or see every date in this era on the master timeline.

Chapters in this era

  1. 1Revolution and the ChurchThe French Revolution, dechristianization, the Concordat of 1801, restoration and romanticism, and church–state conflicts in 19th-century Europe.
  2. 2The Great Century of MissionsCarey and the missionary societies, Judson, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Catholic missions, women missionaries, African and Asian Christians, and colonialism.
  3. 3Faith, Science and Liberal TheologySchleiermacher's theology of feeling, Hegel, Strauss and the quest for the historical Jesus, Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche, and liberal Protestantism.
  4. 4Rome Against the Modern WorldUltramontanism, Pius IX, the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus, Vatican I, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, and the Modernist crisis.
  5. 5Saving Souls and SocietyChristian campaigns against slavery, Christian responses to the Industrial Revolution, and movements for social justice.
  6. 6Christianity in AmericaThe Second Great Awakening, Finney, Methodists and Baptists on the frontier, the Black church, Mormons and Adventists, Catholic immigration, and Moody.