Social Gospel. The Social Gospel, a moderate variety of Protestant “social Christianity,” took shape in response to the dislocations produced by
urbanization,
industrialization, and mass
immigration in the late nineteenth century and crested during the
Progressive Era after 1900. In contrast to the root‐and‐branch approach of socialist Christians, Social Gospel leaders called for reforms in values and institutions. Rejecting the individualistic social ethic of conservatives, they insisted on addressing the structural roots of injustice and distress.
The Social Gospel was heir to a centuries‐old Protestant belief in a Christian America with a divine mission in the process of world redemption. More immediately, it had antecedents in pre–
Civil War evangelical reform movements for temperance, peace, women's rights, and the abolition of
slavery. If not entirely novel, however, the Social Gospel had distinctive characteristics. The new urban‐industrial order shaped the movement's agenda around such issues as
child labor, the rights of labor unions, factory safety, tenement
housing,
public health, and urban misgovernment. The theological liberalism that emerged out of attempts to reconcile the Christian faith with evolutionary thought, historical‐critical analysis of the
Bible, philosophical idealism, and the study of other world religions lent it a distinctively optimistic rationale. This rationale included emphases on the “Fatherhood of God” (and the corollary, the “Brotherhood of Man”); the progressive character of scripture, culminating in the person and teachings of Jesus; and the coming millennial kingdom of God—a perfected society of love, justice, and peace—on earth and within history.
The Social Gospel emerged most strongly in the Congregational, Episcopal, northern
Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian denominations. Its leaders were typically prominent urban pastors, denominational publicists and other officials, and professors. Congregationalists Lyman Abbott (1835–1922) of Brooklyn and Washington Gladden (1836–1918) of Columbus, Ohio, utilized long ministries to address virtually all public issues that emerged from the 1870s on. Unitarian social ethicist Francis Greenwood Peabody (1847–1936) at Harvard Divinity School and Baptist theologian and historian Walter
Rauschenbusch at Rochester Theological Seminary combined theoretical and practical interests in their seminary settings.
The Social Gospel was not limited to northern, urban, and liberal sectors of
Protestantism, but where social change was less pronounced, or resistance to theological modernization more intense, it appeared in truncated form. The
South, rural and orthodox, was not fertile ground. Northern conservative evangelicals, whose commitment to biblical inerrancy and premillennialism led eventually to militant fundamentalism, despite their own heritage of social reform, generally rejected the Social Gospel because of its theological liberalism.
As a reform movement, the Social Gospel was first and foremost an effort to reform the churches, so they might advance God's will on earth. To this end, its advocates introduced numerous changes into church life. Their sermons and Sunday‐school literature applied Christian ethics to social, political, and economic issues. Social Gospel fiction, exemplified by Charles M. Sheldon's best‐seller
In His Steps (1897), gave an element of fantasy, and even romance, to readers’ contemplation of their social responsibilities. A sense of estrangement between middle‐class Protestants and the poor crowding into once‐genteel neighborhoods led some congregations to open their facilities—or even construct new facilities—for weekday social services to the immigrant newcomers. A few congregations actually established
settlement houses. To train ministers for their widened calling, seminaries added courses in
social science, social ethics, and new forms of parish work.
The problems that Social Gospel leaders addressed often involved some resort to politics, and these leaders endorsed many Progressive Era causes as steps toward the kingdom of God. Urban pastors and their congregants supported municipal‐reform crusades to eradicate prostitution, regulate saloons, break the power of political machines, and regulate streetcar and utility companies in the public interest. (A few ministers, like Gladden, ran for and won public office.) Social Gospel principles also led naturally to support for worker‐protection laws, the conservation and
consumer movements, and corporate regulation.
If the Social Gospel redirected congregational energies and drew thousands of comfortable churchgoers into reform causes, it also profoundly affected the structure of American Protestantism. Under Social Gospel influence, leading denominations established commissions or agencies for social education and advocacy, and Protestant ecumenicity came to fruition in the Federal (later National) Council of Churches (1908), with its influential “Social Creed of the Churches.” Although the Social Gospel lost buoyancy and its theological grounding eroded after
World War I, organized social concern and many of the reforms it inspired in church life remained intact throughout the twentieth century.
See also
Conservation Movement;
Fundamentalist Movement;
Labor Movements;
Methodism;
Millennialism and Apocalypticism;
National Council of Churches;
Peace Movements;
Prostitution and Antiprostitution;
Religion;
Socialism;
Temperance and Prohibition;
Unitarianism and Universalism;
Urbanization;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Charles Howard Hopkins , The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915, 1940.
Robert T. Handy, ed., The Social Gospel in America: Gladden, Ely, Rauschenbusch, 1966.
John P. McDowell , The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886–1939, 1982.
Donald K. Gorrell , The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, 1988.
Ralph E. Luker , The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912, 1991.
Jacob H. Dorn , Washington Gladden and the Social Gospel, in American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary, eds. Randall Miller and Paul Cimbala, 1995, pp. 255–69.
James H. Moorhead , World without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880–1925, 2000.
Jacob H. Dorn
