A religious movement affecting mainstream Protestant denominations, the Social Gospel stressed the commandment of Jesus to love thy “neighbor” and confronted the deleterious effects on American society of industrialization and urbanization. Its American roots were in Puritanism, utopianism, and abolitionism, but its intellectual foundation was notably in the English Christian Socialism of Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin and the ideas of German theologians such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. The Social Gospel arose in the 1880s, became coherent in the 1890s, and was passe by 1918, the year in which its earliest voice, WASHINGTON Gladden, and its most eloquent voice, Walter Rauschenbusch, both died. And it paralleled, reflected, and reinforced the Progressive movement of which it was in many respects a religious manifestation. It was distinct from the urban ministries of the Young Mens Christian Association (YMCA) and the Salvation Army, which served the poor in the cities to save souls but not to end poverty or injustice. The Social Gospel in large part gave PROGRESSIVISM its strong religious overtones and its moral fervor.
The first phase of the Social Gospel was intellectual, marked by efforts to create a coherent vision of both the issues raised by industrialism and urbanization and the role of Protestant Christianity in addressing those issues. Gladden laid the groundwork by forging a liberal theology that addressed social needs. Other voices at this time were Francis Greenwood Peabody, Unitarian clergyman and Harvard Divinity School professor; economist Richard Theodore Ely; and sociologist Albion W. Small. With others, they formed the conceptual apparatus that combined theology with the emerging disciplines of sociology and economics that would propel the next phase of the Social Gospel movement.
The second phase was dominated by JOSIAH STRONG, who organized the movement and was its most dynamic leader. He was renowned in his time (and notorious in ours) for his book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885). Modern readers are offended by his assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and his paternalistic embrace of IMPERIALISM, but Strong’s contemporaries regarded Our Country as a call for social reform at home and for Americans to promote peace, prosperity, and justice abroad through service, not political domination. Our Country was the most influential book to come out of the Social Gospel movement, but Strong’s major contribution to the movement was organizing its disparate elements as general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance (1886-90), as leader of the American Institute for Social Service (1898-1916), and in 1908 helping create the Federal Council of Churches. These organizations backed legislation and programs to improve working conditions, combat social evils like drunkenness, eliminate political corruption, and improve the lives of the urban poor.
While both Gladden and Strong advocated state-regulated capitalism and were not socialists, Walter Rauschenbusch carried the social implications of Christianity further. This son of a German immigrant family began serving a Baptist congregation in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1886. Struck by “an endless procession of men out of work, out of clothes, out of shoes, and out of hope,” Rauschenbusch was soon deep into the social ministry. Acquainted with Henry George and Jacob A. RIIS, familiar with the writings of Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, and English Fabian Socialists, Rauschenbusch coalesced his ideas into his 1907 book Christianity and the Social Crisis, which defined the role of the church in a society that had the resources and the technology to provide all with a decent standard of living. Specifically, he advocated legislating public ownership of utilities and transportation, fair wages and better working conditions, and the redistribution of land to provide workers with decent housing. In 1917 he published A Theology for the Social Gospel, which provided a theological base for Progressive Christian beliefs just as progressivism was in decline.
Further reading: Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Peter F. Frederick, Knights of the Golden Rule: The Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976); Robert T. Handy, ed., The Social Gospel in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940).
—W. Frederick Wooden
World History
