They did it individually, and as groups of faith, by trusting "Divine Providence," recognizing the "Supreme Judge of the World" and "Creator" and the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," and by themselves spreading those ideas freely in their homes, churches and communities, until their influence enlightened the world, allowing real scientific discovery and advancement.
Despair was not among their options for moving forward, and threatening conformity to a political ideology was not part of their strategy. Instead, they trusted the innate Creator-endowed intelligence and initiative of free individuals--all of which resulted in the greatest explosion of freedom, opportunity, creativity, prosperity and goods and services the world had seen.
We are correct in being deeply concerned about the prevailing counterfeit ideas of those who self-identify as "progressives." We must not, however, subscribe to the negative views of those who despair. To do so would betray a Reality greater than those so-called "progressives" who parade themselves as political "saviors," who, in their enormous arrogance, vainly attempt to deny freedom for expression and exercise of the rights of conscience protected by the same Constitution which limits their own power.
By their aggressive demands to limit free expression and exercise of ideas in the so-called "public square," they expose and reveal the dark under side of their ideology and its totalitarian intent.
America's Founders conceded no acknowledgement a divine right of kings or self-designated "rulers" to usurp power over their rights. Why would American citizens validate the "executive orders" of a mere elected official and his ideological sycophants as superseding their rights under the U. S. Constitution?
Let us become a people as courageous and trusting of Divine Providence as they!
C. S. Lewis seems to have described the "progressives" who inhabit the Administration of our government today: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
With all of their domination of academia and Far Left politics, these so-called "progressives" seem to fit into a category described by T.S. Eliot on Virgil:
"In our time, when men seem more than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information and to try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space but of time--one for which history is merely a chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no share."
Without intellectual anchoring in the enduring ideas which provided the philosophical foundation of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution, their vain imaginations of superiority only expose their limited world view. Yet, the America which rose from obscurity to greatness, from crude hoes and axes to putting a man on the moon, and from oppression by King George to a symbol of liberty for millions all over the world--that America provides shelter for today's "progressives," even as they attempt to "change" her into something unimagined by the Founders.