SOCIAL GOSPEL

The movement in American Protestantism, beginning in the 1870s, that endeavored to answer the challenges presented by the abuses of industrialism. It was also a corrective to the theological individualism and economic conservativism of the churches of that epoch, and an assertion that from the teachings of Jesus Christ the institutions of a just social order can be deduced. Although its theological premises were different, the moral idealism of the social gospel movement and its goals paralleled those of Christian socialism in England, and the efforts of Continental Catholicism that culminated in Leo XIII's encyclical rerum novarum of May 1, 1891. The social sympathies of unitarians and the utopian perfectionism of transcendentalism earlier in the 19th century undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of the social gospel, as did the momentum of the antislavery crusade. These humanitarian protests came at a time when labor leaders, socialists, and reformers were attacking Christianity as a class religion concerned primarily with protecting property and ignoring widespread human misery. Moreover, science was eroding the beliefs of theological fundamentalism, and the recognition was growing that the shocking disparities of wealth were not to be cured by appeals to middle-class piety. A new interpretation of the Christian message was probably inevitable, one addressing itself to the changed world and its problems of the sweatshop, the slum, the company town, and unemployment.

A social order reflecting the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was the essential demand of the social gospel. The ideas of Horace bushnell directly influenced Washington Gladden, who, along with W. D. P. Bliss, gave a new orientation to American Protestantism at the end of the century. Their voices were subsequently joined by those of George D. Herron, Walter rauschenbusch, and Shailer mathews. In a movement climaxed in December 1908, the overwhelming majority of churches of the evangelical tradition formed the nation al (originally called Federal) council of churches of christ in the u.s.a. to secure, as the preamble to its Constitution declared, "a larger combined influence for the Churches of Christ in all matters affecting the moral and social condition of the people, so as to promote the application of the law of Christ in every relation of human life."

The reforms advocated by the exponents of the social gospel were gradual ones. Their goals, partly because of the moral energy they released, have been incorporated into national legislation. Their overly simple belief in the essential goodness of man and in his responsiveness to moral suasion, along with their lack of realism as to the magnitude and complexity of the problems they optimistically analyzed and prematurely "solved," ultimately weakened confidence in the social gospel. Its energies were dissipated in efforts to impose national prohibition. Attacks on its theological adequacy by the disciples of Karl Barth, and on its political naïveté by Reinhold Niebuhr, further weakened the movement. But its activist emphasis and its concern for justice among men left a characteristic stamp on American Protestantism.

Bibliography: r. h. gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (2d ed. New York 1956). f. e. johnson, The Social Gospel Re-examined (New York 1940). j. a. hutchison, We Are Not Divided (New York 1941). c. h. hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven 1940). a. s. nash, Protestant Thought in the Twentieth Century: Whence and Whither? (New York 1951). w. a. visser 't hooft, The Background of the Social Gospel in America (New York 1929).

[e. duff]