One of the greatest works of my father, Dr. Martin Erdmann, is his series in seven volumes The Triumph of Progressivism (Siegeszug des Fortschrittsglaubens) available to order in German and the summary book in English. On the front I depicted Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Jennings Bryan as stone figures on a church building, Fosdick showing a sign of revolution and Bryan revealing himself as a freemason.
The idea of progress – the belief that humanity has been advancing constantly from past to present, and that this process will continue for the foreseeable future – is a worldview that has developed exclusively in the Western world. The idea has occupied a central position in the thinking of modern civilization from the late seventeenth-century Enlightenment to the present day. It is much more than a political theory. In its heyday, it permeated every area of social life. No one could avoid its pervasive influence; even those who took a negative view of abstract ideas succumbed to its irresistible charm. It came to constitute the predominant civil religion of Western civilization – a general religiosity in the political realm. Furthermore, it became part of the modern idea that every attempt to criticize amounts to an act of infidelity. It is time to realize that the ideology of continual social advance and human improvement essentially constitutes a religion in its own right, which, despite often bearing the name of Christianity, is in resolute opposition to biblical beliefs.