Social Christianity, Christian Socialism, and the Social Gospel

SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY, CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM, AND THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

The Social Crisis

American society at the turn of the century stood in the middle of a process of industrialization and urbanization that had begun after the Civil War and would continue until the Great Depression. The gap between upper and lower classes was widening throughout this period, as immigration swelled the ranks of the laboring class while industrialists and financiers—some soothed by the late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestant Gospel of Wealth, which made poverty a sin and prosperity a Christian duty—consolidated their monopolies and raised their profit margins. Labor unions were just beginning to gain a foothold, often being born into an atmosphere of strikes and violence. No safeguards existed to prevent industrialists from demanding long hours and dangerous work, and labor abuses of the sort documented by immigrant journalist Jacob Riis were in abundance. The churches of America could look out their front doors and see immigrant families living in poverty and squalor. Ministers began to ask challenging questions about their Christian duty to rescue and elevate such souls, and few religious people could ignore the plight of the urban working class. But at the same time, there was great disagreement over the proper response to the perceived social crisis. The social reform efforts that were being designed and implemented at the turn of the century constitute the broad category of Social Christianity, which can be subdivided into those who felt reform was best undertaken at the level of the individual and those who sought change at the level of the socioeconomic system.

Christian Socialism

Many who favored systematic change spoke fervently of the need to introduce a morally based cooperative element into capitalism but nonetheless took pains to distance themselves from political socialism. Some, however, were not at all shy about using the term socialist to describe themselves, even when their denominational bodies turned decidedly unreceptive to their work. These politically active Christians included William Dwight Porter Bliss, a former Congregationalist and Episcopalian, who adopted British Christian Socialist ideas and in 1906 joined the Christian Socialist Fellowship founded by Vida Scudder. He also joined the burgeoning Socialist Party, as did George Herron, a former Congregationalist pastor who gave the nominating speech for Eugene V. Debs's presidential bid in 1904. In 1909 a previously existing group, the Catholic Socialists of Chicago, founded the Catholic Socialist Society, which was affiliated with both the Christian Socialist Fellowship and the Socialist Party, despite the pope's repeated denouncements of socialism on the grounds that it violated the sanctity of private property. Even these self-styled socialists, however, were careful to distinguish their views from those of Karl Marx. They spoke more generally of cooperative economic ventures that valued the well-being of all above the profit of a few, and, of course, they sought an economic system that would be grounded in Christian love. But perhaps because of their willingness to become involved in the wider world of socialist politics, the sphere of influence of these radical reformers, both within and outside of the churches, remained small.

The Social Gospel

The advocates for a social gospel, less extreme than the Christian socialists but still committed to reform at the institutional level, included a variety of preachers and theologians who devoted themselves assiduously to the task of defining what would constitute a truly Christian social order. One of the most celebrated early proponents of this movement begun in the 1880s was Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist pastor who worked in Massachusetts and then, from 1882 to 1914, in Columbus, Ohio. Gladden championed the cause of organized labor, called for public ownership of utilities, and propounded—in many of the three dozen books he authored—the need for cooperation (including between labor and management) to replace competition as the driving force of the capitalist engine. In 1900 Gladden ran for a seat on the Columbus City Council, and during his two-year term he gained insight into the ways in which local governments could address the social problems of their constituents.

Leaders

The social gospel found another tireless crusader in Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister who served at a German church in the Hell's Kitchen district of New York City and later enjoyed a long career as a professor at Rochester Seminary (later Colgate-Rochester Divinity School). In a series of influential books, starting with Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, Rauschenbusch set forth his vision of the kingdom of God, which he believed could be realized on earth by Christianizing the social order. Francis Greenwood Pea-body, a professor of social ethics at the Harvard Divinity School, sought to educate both undergraduate and graduate students in issues pertaining to "the social question," and Rauschenbusch pointed to Peabody's major work, Jesus and the Social Question (1900), as a particularly masterful treatment of the topic. Among Catholics, the foremost theologian of the social gospel was John A. Ryan, a priest whose doctoral dissertation for Catholic University, A Living Wage, was published in 1906 with an introduction by prominent economist Richard T. Ely. Ryan became a professor at Catholic University and continued to agitate not only for the minimum wage but also for the eight-hour day, regulations on the labor of children and women, workmen's compensation, and arbitration in labor disputes, thus addressing many of the social ills that social gospelers targeted for reform.

Legacy

Although it has been estimated that the message of the social gospel was embraced by perhaps only one-third of even the liberal theologians within Protestantism, the legacy of its great spokesmen can be traced not only through the history of theology but also through the growing concern many churches would exhibit throughout the twentieth century for social justice and social reform. Perhaps this concern was nowhere more evident than at the founding, in 1908, of the Federal Council of Churches, an ecumenical body composed of thirty-three Protestant denominations that adopted a "Social Creed" calling for the abolition of child labor, regulations on women's labor, a six-day workweek, and conciliation and arbitration in labor disputes. Clearly one feature of twentieth-century American religion would be a belief on the part of the churches that they could and must speak out about the morality of the existing social order.

Individual Salvation

Proponents of the most conservative form of social Christianity inverted the formula of the social gospelers and argued that the salvation of individuals preceded the salvation of society both chronologically and in importance. Many church leaders felt that the proper way for religious organizations to address the "social crisis" was simply to do the job they were meant to do more thoroughly and conscientiously. A purified social order would be the result, not the starting point, for such efforts; the focus was firmly on rescuing the individual, removing him or her from detrimental social conditions, rather than removing those conditions from society. Examples of this approach to social Christianity took the form of various social service agencies. Urban rescue missions, settlement houses, Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, and institutional churches (which offered educational and recreational programs in addition to liturgies and often had a gymnasium and other buildings attached to the main church) had sprung up in response to urbanization in the late nineteenth century, and they maintained a visible presence into the twentieth. Ongoing crusades for temperance also played a significant role in the overall effort to redeem the individual. Many denominations began to extend their reaches so far into the social sphere through rescue and relief efforts that departments of social action or other formal organizations were founded to coordinate these activities.

The Social Mission

Social service organizations sometimes became denominations unto themselves, the most prominent example being the Salvation Army, which often incurred criticism on the grounds that its soldiers focused too much on physical redemption and not enough on the spiritual salvation its name implied. Such criticism may or may not have been justified; certainly Evangeline Booth, the Salvation Army's U.S. commander from 1904 to 1934, resented the charge that her organization was religiously suspect. What it illustrates, however, is the extent to which even conservative religious bodies had thrown their church doors open and carried their message out into the secular world, rather than waiting for individuals to renounce the world and come in to them. Writings from this period often evoked the image of lost souls wandering by the doors of a church where a service or a revival was in progress; the question, either implied or stated, was, what must the church do to reach those wanderers? Increasingly, religious leaders had come to the conclusion that the church must go out to them and make them receptive to the gospel by providing for their most pressing physical needs. Almost across the board Christianity had become a truly social phenomenon.

Sources:

Aaron I. Abell, American Catholicism and Social Action: A Search for Social Justice, 1865-1950 (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1960);

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972);

Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America, revised edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990);

William R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976);

Charles H. Lippy, "Social Christianity," in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, edited by Lippy and Peter Williams (New York: Scribners, 1988);

Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of It Ally 1893-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).