Upon encountering a reference to Social Christianity or the Social Gospel, many think instinctively of Walter Rauschenbusch, the influential Baptist minister whose books on the topic gave the movement intellectual and theological legitimacy.Footnote 1 Scholars have generally credited him and other middle-class reformers for pricking the conscience of the nation's churches and prompting them to develop a more progressive response to the social and economic inequalities of industrial America.
In this powerful and compelling new book, Heath Carter challenges that narrative by pointing to a different origin story for this religious awakening. Setting his historical gaze on Chicago, he antedates the rise of Social Christianity by tracing its roots to members of the working class themselves, revealing how they drew upon the resources of faith to challenge the economic orthodoxies of industrial America and promote their own vision of the Christian social order. Drawing on a rich array of sources from religious and labor archives, including sermons and speeches, denominational reports and social surveys, and newspaper accounts in both the mainstream and foreign-language press, he reveals how the tenets of Social Christianity sprung forth from the activism of union leaders, working-class ministers, and countless numbers of rank-and-file Christians. The middle-class formulation of the Social Gospel, he argues, was thus “a real but distinctly moderate accommodation of working-class religious dissent” (6).
While telling a story of national significance, Carter's focus on Chicago allows him to capture the on-the-ground dynamics at play. One of the strengths of the book is his reading of the city's shifting social and religious landscape. In his opening chapter, he vividly describes how, in the midst of Chicago's accelerated development in the post-Civil War period, religious life came to mirror the city's growing social divides. Economic prosperity allowed religious communities to build up their institutional presence and replace crude frontier churches with magnificent sanctuaries and towering edifices. The grandest tended to appear in the city's wealthiest residential districts, thereby reinforcing the class character of those communities and shielding the affluent from religious interactions with their poorer coreligionists, who felt unwelcome or unworthy to attend those churches. The social messaging of the buildings was reinforced by the sentiments expressed in the pulpits, as ministers extolled the economic promise of hard work and warned against the dangers of labor radicalism.
Moving ahead, Carter reveals how working-class frustration with the city's religious leaders only grew during the labor turmoil of the 1870s and 1880s. Labor activists pointed to the hypocrisy of those ministers whose close ties with the capitalist class had led them to denounce unions and turn their backs on the poor. Raising their own voices, workers contrasted the “corrupt Christianity” of the religious establishment with the “true Christianity” of the gospel, and pressured the churches to defend the rights of workers. When those pleas went unheeded, working folk expressed their disappointment by seeking out more hospitable religious homes, at times in dramatic fashion. In the midst of the Pullman strike, for instance, workers at Pullman Presbyterian, the company-supported church, staged a walkout in response to the pastor's praise for Mr. Pullman and his defense of the company's decision. Their actions made it clear that no church could ever possess a monopoly on religious loyalty.
By the 1890s, Carter observes, Chicago's religious establishment was “gripped by a sense of full-fledged crisis” (136). Confronting by a rising tide of criticism, including an increasing number of voices from within their own ranks, church leaders worried that it was not only working-class loyalty that was slipping away, but their cultural authority as well. Social surveys and denominational studies confirmed declining religious membership among the working class and their growing alienation from organized religion. These realities forced a moment of reckoning, one that prompted reform-minded ministers and their churches to take up the cause of labor as their own. The principles of Social Christianity thus emerged in reaction and response to decades of working-class activism that took place not only on the picket lines, but in the pews as well.
In recovering these working-class voices, Carter makes a significant scholarly contribution to the field of American religious history while also deepening our understanding of the labor movement during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. More than just recasting the origins of Social Christianity, he reminds us of the profound moral debates that surrounded the rise of industrial capitalism and reveals how workers campaigned for justice as forcefully and ardently within the religious sphere as they did in the political and economic arenas. Theirs was a struggle to redeem the soul of the church and, by extension, the nation.
Carter is careful, though, not to overstate these “union made” victories. He notes that churches continued to withhold their support from labor when their protests turned violent and that Social Gospel policies still faced considerable opposition from church members and denominational leadership. Institutional expressions of the Social Gospel likewise had a tendency to temper its most radical elements. For the most part, however, the internal debate and wrangling that took place as churches sought to formalize these principles and practices fall beyond the scope of this study and its focus on working class actors. By giving them their rightful due, Carter's book offers an evocative account of Social Christianity's emergence and brings to light the story of those whose struggle against inequality has deep resonances today.
