This exemplary study of a Southern Methodist settlement house in New Orleans should inspire more research on the contributions of Methodist deaconesses to the Social Gospel. “Saint Mark's” is shorthand for a series of settlement projects, administered by women's missionary societies and staffed by deaconesses that were active in poor neighborhoods of New Orleans through the twentieth century. A practical theologian as well as historian, author Ellen Blue tells their story with one eye on the primary sources and one eye on the ongoing Methodist pursuit of the Kingdom of God. The result is a study that convincingly overturns many widespread assumptions about women, southerners, and progressive Christianity.

I found three of Blue's insights to be especially important. First, building on Nathan Hatch's observation about the “scholarly neglect” of Methodism, she shows that Methodist initiatives were integral to the larger settlement house movement. Though some settlement networks excluded denominationally based houses, these houses blended evangelistic work with a full embrace of the transformative power of living among the poor. Second, she demonstrates that the deaconesses and laywomen who ran settlement houses in New Orleans and other Southern cities were bona fide Social Gospelers, every bit as committed to “social salvation” and a justice-based critique of the status quo as Walter Rauschenbusch and other northern theologians. And third, she shows that when Methodists and women are fully included in the story, it becomes clear that the Social Gospel did not end with World War I but persisted through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Far from being disillusioned by the war, the women of Saint Mark's deepened their opposition to both capitalism and racism, and prepared the way for the civil rights movement.

Blue does all this with a somewhat refractory archive. It is clear that she chose Saint Mark's because she was interested in New Orleans rather than because its records were unusually complete. Blue worked her way through denominational magazines, newspaper obituaries, neglected oral histories and even architectural plans to fill in gaps left by misplaced settlement records. She leaned heavily on such indirect evidence as the curriculum at Scarritt College, the primary deaconess training facility of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the writings of male scholars admired by the deaconesses. The fact that she achieved so much in this way leaves me hopeful that further studies—including perhaps a scholarly history of Scarritt itself—will confirm and nuance Blue's insights.

Such studies might start from some of Blue's more provocative claims. She takes great pains, for example, to refute charges that the Social Gospel was intrinsically racist, concerned exclusively with the needs of the white working class. But almost all of her evidence for Saint Mark's commitment to racial justice comes from mid-century, making it persuasive only to those who accept her argument about the continuity of the Social Gospel. I do accept that argument, and, like Blue, I think Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly understood himself as an heir of the Social Gospel. But those who portray the Social Gospel as racist still make a valid point: in the years between Reconstruction and World War I, when African Americans were being battered by lynching and disenfranchisement, most Social Gospelers put most of their energy into the needs of immigrants. The case of Saint Mark's actually proves this point: even in New Orleans their mission was primarily to Italians. Further study could determine if any Southern Methodist women were reaching out to African Americans in this period, or if the later racial justice work was a byproduct of the 1939 reunion of Northern and Southern Methodists. They might also track the degree to which deaconesses and women's organizations interacted with the Methodist Student Movement, another early champion of racial egalitarianism.

Blue concludes that, because the Social Gospel persisted through the century, it must have been more distinct than is usually thought from Progressivism, which she assumes was destroyed by the war. This is unfortunate, because (as she acknowledges) the rest of her evidence calls into question sharp boundaries between religious and secular activism. She would have done better to rethink the boundaries of Progressivism itself. Though it certainly reached its peak of electoral strength in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, and Woodrow Wilson all vied for Progressive votes, Progressivism lived on in the political campaigns of Robert LaFollette and Henry Wallace and the educational work of John Dewey, as well as in the ongoing efforts of Jane Addams and other settlement workers. Further study might well trace the extent to which deaconesses crossed over into these “secular” initiatives.

Perhaps most importantly, future studies might nuance Blue's claim that Southern deaconesses cannot be described as “conservative.” In her eagerness to show that they were racially progressive and willing to criticize capitalism, she sometimes fails to give a full account of how their diverse commitments fit together. Challenging both contemporary critics and subsequent scholars who assumed that “true settlement work” and “evangelistic Christian mission” were incompatible (69), Blue rightly insists that deaconesses were fully committed to both—but her sources do not allow her to quote any of the Saint Mark's women explaining exactly how the two tasks supported one another. (Nor does she follow up on a hostile pastor's charge that one deaconess took “the position that the church is a decadent institution and that these Settlements are to take the place of the church” [63]—a view that was in fact held by many renegade Social Gospelers.) Passing references make clear that deaconesses spent a lot of time fighting alcohol and prostitution, but once again the sources do not help us understand how the deaconesses linked these issues to their critique of capitalism. Nor do they fully explain why the deaconesses of Saint Mark's were so much more racially progressive than the laywomen who administered their board and kept the settlement partly segregated well into the 1960s.

All of this underscores one of Blue's central points, which is that abstract categories like “liberal” and “conservative” cannot do justice to the lived complexity of a community like Saint Mark's. And that is why many more studies of this sort are needed before anyone can claim to understand the Social Gospel as a whole.