Column: IS IT REALLY SO? – Core Cause of WWII Was Darwinism Recognized in 1941

By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio

The Sunday-School Times was a weekly newspaper created in 1859 by The American Sunday School Union. This newspaper, which was published until 1966, provides a historical perspective of the Christian mainstream in America. Congregational clergyman Henry Clay Trumbull (1830-1903) was the long-term editor of the newspaper.

After Trumbull’s death, Trumbull’s son-in-law Philip E. Howard edited The Sunday School Times in America. The publication continued under The Sunday School Times Company until 1966.

The Sunday School Times, Aug. 2, 1941, vol. 83, No. 31, under the title “Evolution and the War” printed the following column on the front page.

My thought when I read this was the editor was very perceptive, correctly noting the core cause of WWII four years before it ended! The article relied on a book review printed in the June 16, 1941, edition of Time magazine. A summary of the article is here:

Europe’s conflagration has been traced to its source. In a recent book, Dr. Jacques Martin Barzun, assistant professor of history at Columbia University, in his book Darwin, Marx, Wagner, points out that “the Nazis have simply carried Darwinism to its logical conclusion, an idea that is shared in some degree throughout Western civilization—the fatalistic idea that evolution and progress are the result of the ‘survival of the fittest’ in a struggle to the death for life.”

The long review of Dr. Barzun’s book in Time dates our present social troubles to 1859 when Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” and Karl Marx published his “Critiques of Political Economy.”

These two people, Time writes, were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini: “Paganism, streamlined and arrogant, has reconquered more of Europe than it has held for a thousand years.” says Time. “Yet, even among Christians few people think of World War II as a religious war—Europe’s greatest since the Franks beat back the Saracens at Tours.

This oversight and the pagan success in converting millions have a common cause: ‘The ordinary educated man of today sees no third choice between the “scientific ideas” of the late 19th century and the “obscurantism and superstition of the Middle Ages.”’

The reviewer adds: Tell such a man that you are not a Darwinian and he will usually conclude that you must be a conservative Christian, a likely conclusion and one which you are not ashamed.

The Christians must have known all along that almost the entire world has been set on fire by the train of inflammable material laid by these enemies of God, Darwin and Marx. They have infected not only our political institutions but also our schools, colleges and churches. It is too late to lay the charge of arson at their door.

But the Bright and Morning Star shines through the gloom and many signs seem to show that it may not be long before the Lord returns for his church.

As one summary of the article concluded about the point of the article: “the Second World War was a direct consequence of scientific materialism and the rejection of divine authority, viewing the conflict as a moral and spiritual crisis rooted in ‘survival of the fittest’ ideologies.”

The Time magazine article added under the title Books: The Struggle of Ideas, “To understand how these two men have dominated our thinking, try to imagine our speech without terms like survival of the fittest, struggle for existence, natural selection, exploitation of labor, dialectic materialism, and scientific socialism” adding:

It is thus no accident that … the most powerful myth of today should be a mixture of biological, economic and cultural dogmas. The 20th Century belongs to Darwin and Marx.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

In Darwin’s words: There is grandeur in this view of life. War is not in contrast to peace, but simply another form of expression of the uninterrupted battle of nations and men.

What gave these men such a powerful hold upon all subsequent thought? Says Author Barzun: they “made final the separation between man and his soul.” Man was no longer a cherished creature of God. … Material things were the only reality—indestructible matter in motion.

One result of this apotheosis of matter: “A premium was put on fact, brute force, valueless existence and bare survival.”

Some three-fourths of Author Barzun’s book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin and Marx, which serve as background for the development of their ideas.

Barzun also describes Darwin’s difficulties in getting famed British publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Darwin’s discovery was “evolution by natural selection from accidental variations which denied God’s role in the universe, ruled out a purpose in existence, and made men mere puppets of mechanical forces.”

Darwinism was an illusion and “The blind play of forces known as struggle replaced purpose. The vast arena of nature was pictured as a scene of ‘desperate’ conflict. … History was a sieve that worked.

Man was the residue. Marx took up the theme in History—man’s history—was the record of dialectically competing classes whose motives were as simply biological as those found in Darwin.”
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com