Social Gospel

SOCIAL GOSPEL

SOCIAL GOSPEL was a movement led by a group of liberal Protestant progressives in response to the social problems raised by the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and increasing immigration of the Gilded Age. The social gospel differentiated itself from earlier Christian reform movements by prioritizing social salvation over individual salvation. Although the ministers and activists of the social gospel based their appeals on liberal theology, which emphasized the immanence of God and the doctrine of Incarnation and valued good works over creeds, they usually showed more interest in social science than in theology. Believing that laissez-faire capitalism's understanding of labor as a commodity and its sole reliance on mechanisms of supply and demand to determine wages and allocate resources was un-Christian, social gospel advocates supported the labor movement and called for an interventionist welfare state. They differed from secular activists in that their ultimate vision was not just a more equitable balance of power within society, but a Christianized society in which cooperation, mutual respect, and compassion replaced greed, competition, and conflict among social and economic classes. Despite all of their efforts to reach the working class and to cooperate with the labor movement, though, the social gospel failed to reach far beyond its middle-class liberal Protestant milieu. Ultimately, the greatest achievement of the social gospel was to prepare the ground of middle-class America for progressivism.

Social Gospel in the Nineteenth Century

Washington Gladden was the first person to formulate the ideas of the social gospel. After failing to have the definite conversion experience required by his family's orthodox Calvinist faith, Gladden discovered liberal theology. His editorial work with the liberal journal the Independent and his ministry in several urban churches wracked by labor conflict solidified his liberalism and his concern for the plight of labor. By the mid-1880s, Gladden's name drew audiences across the country to hear his calls for bargaining rights for labor, a shorter work week, factory inspections, inheritance taxation, and regulation of natural monopolies. His charismatic presence, along with his comforting theological exposition of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, made these ideas, radical at the time, more palatable to his middle-class audiences. Gladden never endorsed socialism, but hoped for a gradual evolution toward a cooperative social order. Although he did write several theological treatises, including Applied Christianity (1887) and Social Salvation (1901), Gladden's thought relied more on social ethics and reform than on Christian theology.

If Gladden reveals the social gospel's tendencies to reduce Christianity to a system of social ethics, Richard Ely calls attention to the movement's international influences. Ely was a member of a cohort of social scientists who received their academic training in Germany and who regarded the social welfare legislation of the German Empire with great interest. Ely began his career by studying with German historical economists such as Karl Knies, who rejected neoclassical economics and called for economists to attend to differing cultural and historical contexts. As the principal founder of the American Economic Association and a professor at the social science centers of Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin, Ely advocated the application of Christian social ethics to the discipline of economics. In his economic writings, Ely supported such major revisions to the economic order as public ownership of natural monopolies, factory inspections, and consumer protection.

By the mid-1890s, the social gospel had the support of multiple denominations and a strong foothold in interdenominational organizations. The Episcopal church, which had strong ties to English Christian socialism, the Congregational church, which boasted Gladden and social gospel leader Josiah Strong as members, and a small minority within the Baptist Church were the denominational leaders of the social gospel. The social gospel was particularly prominent within interdenominational organizations. The Interdenominational Congress and the Evangelical Alliance evolved into organs of the social gospel, and social Christianity frequently occupied the podium at the Parliament of Religions at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Beginning in the 1890s, some social gospel ministers, including Gladden, traveled south with the American Missionary Association to address the plight of southern blacks. Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch both denounced racial inequality and lynching and explicitly extended the brotherhood of man to include African Americans. However, the primary geographic and intellectual focus of the movement remained the cities of industrial America.

Social Gospel in the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, the social gospel found its intellectual leader in Rauschenbusch. A theologian, Rauschenbusch's social gospel career began while he was the minister of a German Baptist congregation in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. His witness of urban poverty sparked his passion for social Christianity, and after his eleven years of ministry, he became the theologian of the social gospel. In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), Rauschenbusch united German pietistic evangelicalism, theological liberalism, and social Christianity by connecting the Kingdom of God to social salvation. For Rauschenbusch, the Kingdom of God lay in the unknown future, but was latent in the present and active in moments of crisis and change. The Church's and the Christian's role was to enunciate the Kingdom, to find it in the present, and to look to the future with a vision of the Kingdom as one's fulfillment and end. Rauschenbusch accepted a gradualist, Fabian version of socialism. He denounced what he saw as the evils of capitalism and gave his support to workers, but never joined the Socialist Party.

The social gospel reached its zenith in the decade before World War I. In 1908, the Federal Council of Churches, a federation representing thirty-three Protestant denominations, came into being and immediately adopted the social creed of the churches, which affirmed labor's rights to unionize and to bargain collectively. The Men and Religion Forward Movement, an interdenominational campaign that challenged men and boys to devote

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themselves to Christian social reform, was founded in 1911. An expanding YMCA, the development of institutional churches, and the social direction of the Religious Education Association, which oversaw Sunday-school education, expanded the reach of social Christianity. The social gospel's indirect connection to progressive activist Jane Addams further benefited the movement by drawing attention to the cause of urban social reform. Addams was not, strictly speaking, a member of the social gospel; she did not use the language of social Christianity, and she maintained a skeptical attitude toward the churches, which offered her little financial support. However, her work as a settlement house founder and social activist made her a symbol of the social gospel in action. Hull House workers joined social gospel activists in lobbying for urban housing improvements, shorter working hours, better working conditions for women, unemployment insurance, and against prostitution and other forms of urban vice.

Most members of the social gospel supported World War I, which they saw as a chance to Christianize society and international politics. The Senate's rejection of U.S. participation in the League of Nations and the revelation of the horrors of the war destroyed the cultural optimism that had been the social gospel's emotional foundation. The social gospel persisted through the 1920s, mostly through pacifist and ecumenical organizations. Yet the majority of American Protestants, who remained socially and theologically conservative, had begun to withdraw their support. Fundamentalism, which began its struggle for denominational power in the 1920s, articulated the growing distrust of the liberal theology behind the social gospel. Fundamentalists did not object to Christian social concern, but to the social gospel's prioritization of social salvation over Christ's regeneration of individual souls. The social gospel, fundamentalists claimed, valued Christian faith only for its inspiration of social action. Furthermore, liberal theology's overemphasis on God's immanence in human society had made God an almost irrelevant component in a largely human project of social reform. As the fundamentalist fight against liberalism and modernism became more strident, fundamentalists identified all social Christianity with the liberal social gospel and associated Christianity with social conservatism.

Criticisms of Social Gospel

In the 1930s, neo-orthodox theology, which originated with the work of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, formed a second major critique of the social gospel. Barth emphasized the transcendental nature of God and the apostolic message of scripture, and criticized liberal theology's willingness to alter Christianity to fit the needs of the middle class, modern scholarship, and social reform. Along with his fellow theologians Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr expanded Barth's critique of the social gospel. Reinhold Niebuhr took the social gospel to task for its optimism, inattention to human sinfulness, and avoidance of political conflict. In the early 1930s, Niebuhr called for a social Christianity that possessed a more realistic understanding of power structures and human sinfulness and based its appeal on a deep, biblical faith instead of utopian visions. A new, more politically realistic social gospel did develop in the 1930s, as the changing political mood gave a more radical branch of social Christianity the opportunity to express itself. However, World War I, the growth of Protestant political conservatism, and the critiques of neo-orthodoxy divided the social Christianity of the 1930s from its progressive-era precursor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtis, Susan. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Hopkins, Charles Howard. The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940.

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1949.

White, Ronald C., Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins. The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.

Molly Oshatz

See also Modernists, Protestant ; Protestantism ; Religion and Religious Affiliation .