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The Social Gospel as “the Total Message of the Christian Salvation”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

Christopher H. Evans
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In 1921, Shailer Mathews coined what became a classic, yet somewhat obtuse, definition of the social gospel in North American religious history. He defined it as “the application of the teaching of Jesus and the total message of the Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions such as the state, the family, as well as to individuals.” For all the problems with Mathews's definition, it does serve as a useful template for understating the social gospel, especially interpreting what Mathews meant by the phrase, “the total message of the Christian salvation.”

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Church History , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 196 - 198
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2015 

In 1921, Shailer Mathews coined what became a classic, yet somewhat obtuse, definition of the social gospel in North American religious history. He defined it as “the application of the teaching of Jesus and the total message of the Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions such as the state, the family, as well as to individuals.”Footnote 1 For all the problems with Mathews's definition, it does serve as a useful template for understating the social gospel, especially interpreting what Mathews meant by the phrase, “the total message of the Christian salvation.”Footnote 2

I take seriously the transatlantic character and diffuse theological commitments of what came to be called in the late nineteenth century “social Christianity.” However, I believe what differentiated “the social gospel” from other movements of religious reform was its liberal idealism.Footnote 3 Understanding the durability of this idealism is central to interpreting the social gospel as a distinctive tradition of theological liberalism, its development after World War I, and most important, assessing the social gospel's broader historical legacy in North America.

As the nineteenth century progressed, those who became associated with the rise of theological liberalism embraced emerging currents of biblical higher criticism, developments in the social sciences, and frequently trends of philosophical idealism rooted in nineteenth-century German theology. Yet many liberals showed little interest in engaging questions of social-economic reform.Footnote 4 Also, these liberals (including many social gospel leaders) shared highly conservative suppositions on issues such as racial justice and women's rights.Footnote 5

What ultimately distinguished the social gospel from other forms of Christian theology was how the social gospel called for theology to engage questions of systemic institutional reform. As Gary Dorrien notes, “The notion that Christianity has a mission to transform the structures of society is distinctly modern.”Footnote 6 It is this stress upon systemic social reform, what many social gospelers called “social salvation,” that set the historic social gospel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries apart from other types of religious reform.

The decline of the social gospel has often been linked with the coming of World War I and, in particular, to the deaths in 1918 of key leaders like Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch. However, 1918 is more of a symbolic than an actual ending. While certain theological assumptions of the social gospel were attacked after World War I, historians have long recognized how the heritage continued to develop after 1918—institutionally and theologically.Footnote 7 Recent studies by David Hollinger on ecumenical protestantism, and Elesha Coffman and Matthew Hedstrom on liberal religious publishing provide historians with an enticing look into the way that the social gospel's legacy developed throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 8 These scholars observe how the social gospel's legacy propelled mainline protestantism beyond earlier desires to “Christianize” America to engage a range of issues related to religious pluralism, political activism, and the exploration of alternative models of spirituality.Footnote 9

Certain topics remain sorely neglected. Over the last several decades, historians have paid little attention to the social gospel's impact upon Canada. While many early twentieth-century American social gospelers wanted to have a direct influence upon social-political structures, one could argue that this process went further in Canada than in the U.S. The social gospel's impact upon Canadian politics is seen through the careers of ministers-turned politicians J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. Woodsworth and Knowles were instrumental in the foundation and growth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (later the New Democratic Party) that led to a spate of progressive economic and political reforms in Canada, including national health insurance.Footnote 10 The story of the social gospel in Canada is in need of further study, as that history reflects upon patterns that are in some way distinctive from the U.S.

Finally, the social gospel is central to understanding a wider history of North American religious idealism. The most important historical figure to come out of the social gospel heritage is Walter Rauschenbusch.Footnote 11 However, I'm not convinced that Rauschenbusch was the most influential social gospel leader during his lifetime. Rauschenbusch's books were widely read when he was alive, and were especially influential upon an emerging generation of clergy and laity. However, I don't think his professional networks compare to those of Josiah Strong or Washington Gladden. Nor was Rauschenbusch as vigorous a grassroots organizer as Harry F. Ward, an ecumenical leader like Frank Mason North, a path-breaking scholar compared to some of his colleagues at Union Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, or a “do everything” activist like Frances Willard. Additionally, if one were to connect the early 20th century social gospel to Franklin Roosevelt's “New Deal” economic policies in the 1930s one probably should not start with Rauschenbusch. Rather, scholars should look closely at the Roman Catholic ethicist (and Roosevelt advisor), John Ryan whose classic 1906 book, A Living Wage was published a year before Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis.Footnote 12

However, there are reasons why Rauschenbusch's legacy has grown throughout the 20th century (as well as some of the fiction surrounding his life).Footnote 13 In large measure, this has to do with the fact that theologically Rauschenbusch has aged rather well. Rauschenbusch gave mature expression to a tradition of liberal idealism that believed religious faith and political action could be welded together to change the course of history. It was this insistence that Christian theology had a politically progressive mission to transform the social structures of modern society that represented one of the social gospel's lasting historical contributions.Footnote 14

Further, Rauschenbusch helped popularize the theme that all theology needed to be subject to critique and revision. He believed that theology was contextual, shaped not chiefly by doctrine, but by personal experience and social location. As Rauschenbusch noted in his final book, “If theology stops growing or is unable to adjust itself to its modern environment and to meet its present tasks, it will die.”Footnote 15 Rauschenbusch and other social gospel figures did not discount the importance of religious doctrine. But doctrine always took a backseat to how religion should lead one to ethical action. “God cannot be proven,” the social gospel theologian Harris Franklin Rall asserted, “he must be lived.”Footnote 16 These brief examples underscore the ways that Rauschenbusch, among others, not only believed in the achievability of a just (and increasingly pluralistic) world. But that vision emanated from unique theological commitments that require further historical interpretation.

Looking to the future of social gospel studies, it will be important for historians to continue to engage the religious idealism not only of familiar figures like Rauschenbusch. Names such as John Ryan, Reverdy Ransom, Vida Dutton Scudder, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and J.S. Woodsworth demand further study to interpret more fully how their understanding of “the social gospel” contributed to the shape of twentieth-century North American religious, political, and cultural life. These efforts might continue to provide historians a more nuanced view of Shailer Mathews' phrase, “the total message of the Christian salvation.”

References

1 Mathews's definition can be found in a co-edited volume with Smith, G.B., A Dictionary of Religion and Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 416–417Google Scholar. An abridged version of this definition was also used by Charles Howard Hopkins in his classic study of the American social gospel, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940), 3Google Scholar. An updated and expanded definition of the social gospel is offered by Lindley, Susan Hill, “Deciding Who Counts: Toward a Revised Definition of the Social Gospel,” in The Social Gospel Today, ed. Evans, Christopher H. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 17–26Google Scholar.

2 For an analysis on the historiography of the social gospel, see Luker, Ralph E., “Interpreting the Social Gospel: Reflections on Two Generations of Historiography,” in Perspectives on the Social Gospel, ed. Evans, Christopher H. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 1–13Google Scholar.

3 See Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001)Google Scholar, and Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, & Modernity (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, King, William McGuire, “‘History as Revelation’ in the Theology of the Social Gospel,” in Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 1 (1983): 109–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Fishburn, Janet Forsythe, The Fatherhood of God and the Victorian Family (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981)Google Scholar; Deichmann Edwards, Wendy J. and De Swarte Gifford, Carolyn, eds. Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Evans, Christopher H., The Kingdom is Always but Coming: a Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004)Google Scholar

6 Gary Dorrien, “Social Salvation: The Social Gospel as Theology and Economics,” in The Social Gospel Today, 101.

7 While historians acknowledge that the social gospel continued after World War I, its influence is often seen through the prism of Reinhold Niebuhr and the rise of crisis theology in the 1930s. See for, example, Carter, Paul, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Meyer, Donald, The Protestant Search for Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960)Google Scholar. A nuanced interpretation of how the social gospel developed after World War I is offered by William McGuire King, “The Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism in American Methodism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977). King discusses the rise of a more hard-edged theological radicalism that characterized the growth of social Christianity after World War I.

8 See Hollinger, David, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Coffman, Elesha J., The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hedstrom, Matthew S., The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

9 Part of the social gospel's diffusion can also be seen in generations of student activists who emerged in protestant youth organizations prior to World War II. See, for example, Tracy, James, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

10 Classic studies of the social gospel in Canada include Allen, Richard, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971)Google Scholar and Phillips, Paul T.a Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. On the connection to the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation see Stebner, Eleanor J., “Young Man Knowles: Christianity, Politics, and the ‘Making of a Better World’,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada, ed. Van Die, Marguerite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 219–236Google Scholar.

11 In addition to being the topic of numerous monographs and articles, Rauschenbusch was cited as a primary influence by many prominent social reformers later in the twentieth century, in particular, Martin Luther King, Jr. See King, Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958)Google Scholar.

12 See Ryan, John, A Living Wage (New York: Macmillan, 1906)Google Scholar. While Ryan's work draws heavily upon the writings of the economist Richard Ely (who influenced many of the major protestant social gospel theorists), Ryan's thought is grounded in a tradition of Catholic natural law theology. See Beckley, Harlan, Passion for Justice: Retrieving the Legacies of Walter Rauschenbusch, John A. Ryan, and Reinhold Niebuhr (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1992)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)Google Scholar.

13 Dores Sharpe, Rauschenbusch's former secretary, published the first full-length biography of Rauschenbusch. While the book is filled with many personal anecdotes, at points its arguments border on hagiography. See Sharpe, Walter Rauschenbusch: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1942)Google Scholar.

14 Specifically, the social gospel movement was instrumental to the rise of “social ethics.” See Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition.

15 Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 1Google Scholar.

16 Quoted in King, William McGuire, “An enthusiasm for humanity: the social emphasis in religion and its accommodation in Protestant theology,” in Religion and 20th-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Lacey, Michael J. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77Google Scholar.