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The Social Gospel--Part I Lecture 19The Social GospelThe Origins of the Social Gospel The rapid growth of American industry after the Civil War brought to a head a host of social problems that posed serious moral issues for the churches. As industry expanded in the wake of the industrial revolution, it consolidated into ever larger units. As corporations merged, wealth was slowly concentrated into the hands of fewer persons, such that by 1890 one percent of the families in America owned more than one half of the wealth of the nation. This concentrated wealth--by overshadowing the individual and corrupting government officials-- threatened to destroy the political equality that had been won earlier in the century. This industrial machine left individuals feeling insignificant and powerless. Labor tried unsuccessfully to create a counterbalance to concentrated capital. This led to bloody strikes in 1877, 1886, 1892, and 1894. While these strikes did little to alleviate the conditions of labor, they did serve to alert churches to the underlying moral aspects of the problems faced by working men and women. Unfortunately, Churches were deterred from giving moral leadership in the industrial crisis by laissez-faire economics which they were inclined to accept almost as readily as they were theological orthodoxy. Laissez-faire economics was the ghost of the doctrine of God's providence dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of eighteenth century scientific law. It taught that there is a good Creator who undergirded human relations with beneficent principles, and that if only man could avoid interfering with these principles everything would work out for the best. Thus, if the individual served his own enlightened self-interest it was supposed that he was serving the good of the whole. On its face, laissez faire seemed convincingly Christian, but in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, it eliminated the crucial doctrines of the Fall and human sin; doctrines which point to the necessity for regulation and restraint. Laissez Faire thus encouraged an unrealistic optimism and a lack of moral disciple which would have horrified classical Protestantism. The appeal of this idea was only intensified with the rise of Social Darwinism which argued for the survival of the fittest, giving an additional justification to allow the market to eliminate the weak. Protestant Evangelicals were singularly unprepared to deal with the moral problems of the new industrial order. Protestantism had largely accepted the compartmentalizing and secularizing of life which had been initiated by the Renaissance, and had been given special character in America by the notion of separation of church and state. The heritage of the frontier and revivalism made Protestants of the late nineteenth century individualistic to an unusual degree. At the very moment when a corporate approach to the emerging industrial problems was needed, Protestantism managed to lose its dynamism and ethical vitality, and in scholastic fashion thought of Christian truth as consisting of propositional statements that one comes by through an inward spiritual experience. American Catholics--like Protestant's--were also unprepared to give moral leadership in the face of the emerging industrial order. The Catholic Church held large blocks of property in other parts of world, and so the American hierarchy insisted on emphasizing property rights, despite the fact that Catholics in America were largely working class. They accepted laissez faire Capitalism despite a long Catholic tradition of fashioning an economic order that was subordinate to the influence and teachings of the Church. Closely related to the problems of industrialization was the rise of the cities. The strong flow of large numbers of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants caused Protestants to flee to the suburbs. Many of these new immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, and their appearance, folkways, and culture stood in sharp contrast to that of older Americans. Roman Catholic Churches focused their work on the inner city where new immigrants were likely to settle. Protestants, however, did not allow these new settlers to go uncontested. The Salvation Army was launched as an effort to reach these new city dwellers. The Salvation Army combined revivalistic preaching with physical relief. Methodists and Lutherans developed the institution of deaconesses to care for the needy, (roughly the Protestant version of a nun). Another development to deal with the pressing needs of these new citizens was the institutional church (a kind of YMCA) that sought to provide social, educational, and recreational services to its communities.Social Science and the Church The rise of social science offered valuable resources to both Protestants and Catholics as they sought to deal with the new problems that were emerging. The term sociology was first coined by Auguste Comte in 1837. But by 1880--just 43 years latter--it had become widely accepted as an academic discipline in a number of leading American institutions of higher learning. By 1900, it was being taught in both Protestant and Catholic seminaries in the hope it would give parish clergy the tools they would need to address the profound social changes that were taking place. Closely related to the increased attention given social science was a surge of interest in socialism in certain quarters of both American Protestantism and Catholicism. While its influence was limited, socialism called attention to the inter-relatedness of the new economic life. In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party was organized, and in 1898 the Social Democratic Party was born. The growing influence of socialist ideas on the Churches was striking during this period. In the 1880's American clergy unanimously opposed socialism. After 1890, however, many shapers of Protestant social thought adopted their ideas from Socialism, while a small minority became avowed socialists. In 1889, the Society of Christian Socialists under the leadership of W.D.P. Bliss was organized although it never had a widespread following.The Kingdom of God As these socialist ideals infiltrated the thinking of mainline denominations, Protestants began to expressed them in theological terms that were closely related to the theological changes that were taking place. Over against the individualism which was becoming more and more ineffective in the new order, exponents of Social Christianity offered a social doctrine of the Kingdom of God. They did not expect isolated individuals to change society, but thought of the Church with its transforming power as a society or a community of the ethically earnest. The Kingdom of God was no longer seen as some other-worldly pie in the sky by and by, but as being this worldly and ethical. Indeed, in some quarters, the concept of the Kingdom of God was accepted as a replacement for the institutional church. In these quarters, the tendency was not to see the Kingdom of God as a Divine catastrophe (The apocalyptic vision of Christ's return to render judgement upon human society, and impose his rule), but as a human endeavor; a society that grows up in the midst of the disciples of Christ. They pointed out that Jesus taught a great deal about the Kingdom of God, but had very little to say about the Church. Indeed, some were bold enough to suggest that the Church had replaced the original emphasis of the gospel (the Kingdom of God) with a domesticated gospel that focused on meeting its (the Church's) own needs. The idea of the Kingdom of God was preferred to that of the Church for two reasons. In American Christianity, individualism had so weakened the idea of the church that it did not have much substance left. The Kingdom of God provided a way for Christians and non-Christians to have a common basis for ethical action in a way the Church could not do. The Kingdom of God was said to be made up of the ethically interested, rather than being a community of the redeemed (the Church). One of the most promient proponents for this new conception of the kingdom of God was Walter Rauschenbusch. Still other aspects of the new theology contributed to its social involvement. God's immanence broke down the barriers between sacred and secular, and prepared a way for the application of Christian principles to the society as a whole. Philosophical idealism encouraged this emphasis as well. God is not outside the social process, but within it. These ideas combined with the theory of evolution to create an optimistic attitude toward social problems and toward history as a whole. God is now in the process of working out his purposes in society, it was believed, and this created a demand for immediate social renewal. The historic Jesus came to be seen as a moral exemplar who had worked for social justice, and the transformation of social institutions, not as the Christ of faith.The Social Gospel The term Social Gospel came to be applied to this way of thinking just before the turn of the century, and was used generally by 1910. Washington Gladden and Josiah Strong were two of its stronger proponents. They urged that the rights of Labor be respected, and that industrial peace be made between Labor and Capital. Proponents of the Social Gospel warned of dire social changes if some steps not taken to alleviate the ills of poverty, overwork, and underpayment. They preached on behalf of just wages, and profit sharing while they denounced the concentration of wealth, unrestrained competition and laissez faire Capitalism. The Social Gospel was not a revolutionary attack on capitalism from the outside, but reforming effort from within. It showed a timely awareness that society is more than the aggregate of individuals composing it, and recognized that Christianity has deep ethical obligations to society. The Social Gospel sought to state these obligations in terms of the theology of the day. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel was gaining entrance into many seminaries, and soon after the turn of the century had received official recognition from the leading denominations. In fact, the Social Gospel was the primary factor in creating the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, the forerunner to the National Council of Churches. Roman Catholic leaders began to deal with the problems of the new American Industrial society in a constructive way in the 1880's. Before the Civil War, Catholics, as an oppressed minority, did not share the prevailing optimism concerning progress and man's perfectibility. They remained aloof from humanitarian crusades. Instead, they created their own institutions: schools, orphanages, homes, and hospitals. By the 1880's, James Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop John Ireland were convinced that the Church should involve itself more directly in American Life out of a growing concern for Catholic working men. They were deeply concerned that working men be given a living wage which they defined as money enough to support himself and his family. Henry George--who advocated a single tax on land--stimulated the social thinking of some Catholics in the 1880's. Father Edward McGlynn--moved by extreme unemployment in his parish--supported George for mayor of New York. For this, he was suspended and excommunicated for involvement in politics, although he was latter restored to the priesthood. It was not until Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) that the church began to develop a new attitude toward the whole issue of labor. Private property remained inviolable, socialism was condemned, and great emphasis was laid on private charity. But labor associations were sanctioned, and government regulation of business was endorsed. These steps marked an important change.End of Part I    |
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