If you want a primary source, possibly turn to Fosdick’s “Will the Fundamentalists Win?” article. Fosdick was a Progressive theologian (who headed up Rockefeller’s influential Riverside Baptist Church, while his equally Progressive-Postmil brother ran Rockefeller’s influential Foundation).

For an extended neoreactionary argument on all this, a place to go would be Moldbug’s “How Dawkins Got Pwned” series.

p.s. progism: not just for ecumenical postmil protestants anymore. The Pope thinks social justice egalitarian = Christianity. Just see his recent tweet about inequality being the root of all evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pj3bmZZCI0

Ultra Calvinism – or ecumenical postmillenialism – first influenced Marxism before being influenced by Marxism.

What made and makes Marxism, Gramscism, and the like appealing to the Ultra Calvinists is that from the beginning they shared the vision of the ideal society would look like and while they did not totally share the mechanism of how to get there, they did share three very important things with Marxism:

1) a providencial view of history and humanity’s perfection.

2) what that perfection would look like (egalitarianism; what came to be called “social justice”).

3) ultimately a shared belief in the state as redeemer: the redemptive state led by a cadre of experts would create this heaven on earth.

Note that #3 isn’t precisely found in Marx & Engles. But it became what actually existing communism used as their mechanism, and it was what progs tended to admire in Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.

So what happened could be called mutual influence, and ultimately prog DNA is inseperable from commie DNA because they had the same prior types (their lines of descent share many, many ancestors).

It’s hard to say what influences on modern ecumenical postmillenialism are mainly Marxist (I might guess the Gramscian, but others will point out that elements of Gramscianism exist in ultracalvinism prior to Gramsci) and what are just intellectual strains they’d have ended up developing anyhow.

It is true the more Ultra the ultracalvinist, the more overt the Marxist influences will appear to be. IMO mainly Marxism gave them a set of appealing arguments, slogans, and status-poses. It may have accellerated the secularization of postmillenialism.

In other respects Earl Browder was right, though.

But was there a stratal influence from Universalism or its predecessors in Marxism…? Karl Barth called Hegel the Protestant Aquinas, so that’s one point of evidence in favor, even without bringing in the more-X-than-the-X pattern.