The Gospel of Church has lofty ambitions. This book endeavors to tell “[a] more accurate history of the Social Gospel movement” in the early twentieth century (233). Author Janine Giordano Drake explains that scholars usually describe the movement as a “religiously-infused social reform coalition that sought to address the excesses and inequalities of industrial capitalism (4). But because working-class Americans have largely been erased from the Social Gospel story, Drake believes we have gotten it wrong. This book foregrounds the religious ideas of the social democratic labor movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a stance that allows Drake to recast American Christianity as a site of political contestation. Radical wage earners and more conservative church leaders fought for control of the burgeoning labor movement and, most importantly, the authority to articulate the proper relationship between Christianity, economics, and social justice. Drake marshals convincing archival evidence to demonstrate that conservative church leaders, through the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), won this battle in the end. Church leaders “thwarted socialism and encouraged Americans to see the Church as the foundation of the modern nation” (3). Thus, for Drake, the Social Gospel movement was profoundly more conservative than historians have previously suggested.

To build toward this major claim, Drake advances three main sub-arguments in The Gospel of Church. First, Drake contends that “the social democratic labor movement directly competed with conservative church leaders for the authority to set the terms of social justice for the twentieth century” (6). American socialism first flourished within a religious milieu. Drake shows that socialists and other radical members of the labor movement understood their critiques of capitalism within Christian frameworks. They preached a version of Christianity that sought to eradicate social inequalities and foster economic cooperation. These working-class Americans, however, built religious institutions that stood outside mainstream Protestantism because existing churches had been largely ignoring the plight of laborers. Protestant churches thus began focusing on the needs of working people to combat these new labor churches, with many church leaders becoming allies of the labor movement in the early twentieth century. Drake’s second argument, though, is that power was not distributed equally within this church-labor partnership. Protestant ministers, via the FCC, refused to cede control of Christianity or popular labor actions to working people. Drake contends that Protestant ministers only allied with the labor movement to swell their church memberships and cement their moral authority as the spokesmen for working-class Americans. Third, Drake illustrates how the FCC effectively redrew the lines of Protestant religious orthodoxy to cast radical critiques of American capitalism as beyond the bounds of legitimate religious concern. The Federal Council asserted that Protestantism “was a stable institution, existing outside politics and economics, for the primary purpose of personal spiritual renewal” (7). By linking religion to the personal, the FCC successfully defanged the economic critiques of Christian Socialists and socialist Christians. Drake explains that this stance also endeared the FCC to wealthy businessmen, who eagerly funded the institution and endorsed its apolitical messaging that also downplayed racial, gendered, and economic divisions.

The Gospel of Church contains nine chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first chapter establishes the power vacuum within American Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Drake emphasizes that Gilded Age churches, particularly white Protestant churches, struggled to attract the ever-expanding working class into the pews. The chapter uses ample statistical data to demonstrate that “white Protestant churches were small social clubs that ministered primarily to the wealthy and aspirant classes” (18). This idea is crucial for Drake’s argument. For the battle over American Christianity to be considered an equal one, in which working-class people and church leaders fought for control, existing church leaders must have lacked hegemony over the workers themselves. Chapters two, three, and four examine the religious ideas and institutions of American socialists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With quantitative data, Drake shows how quickly socialism grew throughout the United States in the Progressive Era. Drake then illustrates how Christian socialists and socialist Christians rebelled against established churches and “Churchianity” by attending labor churches and immersing themselves in socialist print culture. The religion of wage-earning Americans increasingly focused on the moral example of Jesus. Writers like Cyrenus Osborne Ward articulated the need for cooperative commonwealths, and socialist politicians like Eugene V. Debs successfully incorporated religious language to grow the movement. Chapters five through eight focus on the Protestant denominational leaders who allied with the labor movement in the early twentieth century and simultaneously tried to “co-opt [its] moral authority” (6). Drake chronicles the establishment of the FCC in 1908 and its institutional efforts to coax working-class Americans back into denominational pews. This process included outreach campaigns such as the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a union-building campaign that was co-sponsored by the American Federation of Labor. However, while Charles Stelzle and other ministers in the FCC partnered with the labor movement and advocated for wage increases, Drake convincingly demonstrates that the FCC refused to cede power to working people. White Protestant ministers believed that “churches, not unions, were God’s chosen instruments for establishing democracy and a Christian commonwealth” (202). Finally, chapter nine narrates the conclusion of the battle between the social democratic labor movement and more conservative church leaders – a battle that, Drake argues, the church leaders won. After the FCC achieved the political influence it desired, its ministers ultimately turned their backs on the labor movement. The FCC increasingly cozied up to wealthy business leaders, such as John D. Rockefeller Jr., who funded a Christian revival campaign to distract from the Great Steel Strike of 1919.

The Gospel of Church is an engaging and well-researched story of American socialists, their religious ideas, and the white Protestant ministers who successfully co-opted their message of Christian cooperation and silenced their demands for racial, gender, and economic equality. Drake offers compelling historical evidence that white Protestant ministers in the early twentieth century consciously tried to decouple religion from structural critiques of U.S. capitalism to protect the racial, gender, and economic status quo. Drake thus reminds us that socialism was never synonymous with atheism in the United States. Rather, conservative church leaders pushed socialism and socialists out of American Christianity. The Gospel of Church also makes a historiographical intervention regarding the relationship between big business and Protestant ministers. Drake shows that wealthy business leaders such as John D. Rockefeller eagerly funded and supported Protestant ministers who blunted working-class critiques of industrial capitalism. Corporate tycoons thus began funding more conservative ministers at scale in the 1910s, while historians have previously traced the origins of this relationship to the New Deal era.

While The Gospel of Church mostly focuses on the FCC and white Protestant hegemony, the explanation of the Catholic Church’s opposition to socialism is not as convincing as it might have been. The book suggests that in Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII primarily worried “that socialists would find so much satiation in the material world … that it would foreclose the need for churches” (89). However, Rerum Novarum also made clear that the Church vociferously supported the right to private property and opposed any state-led redistribution of land. The Catholic Church even excommunicated an American priest, Father Edward McGlynn, in 1887 because McGlynn supported Henry George and his radical single tax. This omission does not detract from the book. In fact, emphasizing the reality that “Churchianity” was also about institutional property and wealth would have only strengthened Drake’s argument.

Overall, readers will not be surprised to learn that the Social Gospel movement was not as radical as other social and political movements of the early twentieth century. The Gospel of Church, however, emphasizes that the Social Gospel movement was not as radical as it could have been. The social democratic labor movement had a robust vision for American Christianity that attracted many working-class people who rarely went to established churches. But they lost the ideological and political battle. The FCC and white Protestant ministers chose to protect white supremacy, patriarchy, and their institutional power, rather than lift the voices of wage-earning people. As twenty-first-century Americans continue to debate religion’s place in society, Drake reminds us of a path not taken – one where working-class Americans fought for a Christianity that prioritized a radical form of social and economic equality.