The Last 200 Years: Faith in the Modern Age
Through factory smoke, world wars, jail cells, and falling walls: how ordinary believers kept reshaping the modern world, often from its margins.
The last two hundred years are usually told as the story of machines, money, and armies — steam engines and stock markets, world wars and superpowers. But run your finger under that story and you find another one: a Quaker walking into the worst prison in London, a Bristol pastor praying breakfast onto the table for two thousand orphans, a German theologian hanged three weeks before his camp was liberated, a Baptist preacher writing in the margins of a newspaper in a Birmingham jail, and seventy thousand East Germans facing down a police state with nothing in their hands but candles.
This 7-day plan traces how the Christian faith shaped the modern world from the 1820s to today — factory reform and the abolition of child labor, mass education and humanitarian medicine, resistance to Hitler and to communism, the American civil rights movement, and the great migration of Christianity itself to the Global South and East. Again and again, the pattern is the same: the deepest changes came not from thrones and parliaments first, but from people on the margins who took Jesus at his word.
What to Expect
- Day 1 — Machines and Mercy: the industrial revolution's wounds and the believers who bound them — Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Fry, George Müller, and the Booths
- Day 2 — Schools for Everyone, Healing for Anyone: Sunday schools, mass literacy, and how an evangelical businessman's horror at a battlefield created the Red Cross
- Day 3 — The Church Against the Swastika: Germany 1933–45, the Barmen Declaration, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's costly "no"
- Day 4 — A Letter from a Birmingham Jail: the civil rights movement as a church movement — and the white churches that opposed it
- Day 5 — Candles Against the Wall: faith under communism, from Richard Wurmbrand's prison cell to the Leipzig prayer meetings of 1989
- Day 6 — The Great Reversal: how Christianity's center of gravity moved south and east — the most under-reported story of the last century
- Day 7 — Salt, Light, and the Next Hundred Years: what two centuries teach about quiet faithfulness, and where the pattern points
A Note on Approach
This plan does not airbrush the church. In several of these stories, Christians stood on both sides of the line. Most German state-church leaders capitulated to Hitler; a minority resisted. Many white American churches defended segregation or counseled patience; the movement that broke it was born in Black congregations. Missionaries sometimes traveled in the baggage train of empire even while others fought the empire's cruelties. We will say all of this plainly, because the gospel does not need a sanitized past — and because the same Bible that some misused was the book that fueled every reform in this plan.
Each day blends historical narrative with Scripture and primary-source quotes, and ends with a practice you can actually do. The aim is not nostalgia. It is to recognize the family resemblance between their moment and ours.