Social Gospel

Background

In the late nineteenth century, the United States underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization. Immigrant workers poured into the major cities, and problems such as long working hours, child labor, and slums grew more severe. The wealth generated by industry flowed mainly to a small number of business owners. In this setting, some ministers and scholars came to believe that the church should not confine itself to individual conversion and personal morality. They argued that the teachings of Jesus and the ideals of the Kingdom of God should also be applied to social institutions. This current of thought, which emerged among American Protestant ministers around the 1880s, became the Social Gospel movement.

Development

• Early leaders: Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist minister, served as pastor of First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, from 1882 to 1914. He led the movement through his writing and lecturing. Using the phrase "social salvation," Gladden emphasized that religion must transform not only individuals but also social institutions. The minister Josiah Strong and the economist Richard T. Ely are also counted among the movement's leading figures.
• Walter Rauschenbusch: A Baptist minister born in 1861 into a German immigrant family, Rauschenbusch served for more than a decade as pastor of a German Baptist church in Hell's Kitchen, a slum in Manhattan, New York, where he witnessed urban poverty firsthand. In 1897 he became a professor at Rochester Theological Seminary. After publishing Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), he became known as the movement's foremost spokesman. He went on to publish Christianizing the Social Order (1912) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Rauschenbusch understood sin above all as selfishness and explained that selfishness manifests itself in social injustices such as poverty, oppression, and war. He criticized the abuses of capitalism and supported labor unions and cooperatives, but he never joined the Socialist Party. He maintained that the Social Gospel did not replace the gospel of individual salvation but rather extended the scope of salvation to society as a whole.
• The 1908 Social Creed: In 1908 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church adopted a "Social Creed," a statement summarizing the church's aims with respect to society that included reform goals such as the abolition of child labor and the protection of workers' rights. That same year, a number of denominations jointly founded the Federal Council of Churches. In December the council adopted "The Social Creed of the Churches," which called for a living wage, the protection of workers from dangerous working conditions, provision for the elderly and for workers injured in industrial accidents, and the alleviation of poverty. Leaders of the movement also supported legislation such as the eight-hour workday, the abolition of child labor, and the regulation of monopolies.

Outcomes and Influence

The optimism that human civilization would continue to progress collapsed in the course of World War I, and the movement gradually declined. Rauschenbusch lost popularity because of his opposition to American entry into the war, and he died in 1918. The tradition of the Social Creed, however, endured. The United Methodist Church still includes the Social Creed in its Book of Discipline, the denomination's book of church law. The National Council of Churches (NCC), successor to the Federal Council of Churches, issued "A Social Creed for the 21st Century" in 2007. The experience of addressing social problems together across denominational lines also fed into one strand of the ecumenical movement. Some have observed that Rauschenbusch's writings were what first awakened Martin Luther King Jr. to faith-based social engagement.

Assessment

Those who view the Social Gospel favorably hold that it was the first to articulate systematically the conviction that the church must respond to structural injustice. They also credit it with contributing to labor and welfare reform and regard it as a root of present-day Christian movements that treat social justice as an important part of faith.

The movement has also drawn considerable criticism. Many of its leaders stood within the tradition of liberal theology. Conservative evangelicals and Reformed critics charge that the Social Gospel weakened the doctrines of original sin, the atoning work of Christ, and personal conversion. It has also been criticized for equating the Kingdom of God with social reform achieved through human effort. This conflict is understood to have been bound up with the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy in the United States in the early twentieth century. Theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr are also known to have criticized the Social Gospel for underestimating human sin and collective selfishness and for being overly optimistic.

In the Korean church, "Social Gospel" is used as a historical term, but it is also frequently used as a term of criticism for theologies that place social engagement ahead of individual salvation. Those who emphasize the church's social responsibility, on the other hand, sometimes regard the Social Gospel as the starting point for the conviction that individual salvation and social justice must be held together.