Social Gospel

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426 SLAVERY

RELATED ENTRIES

Abolitionism; African-American Manhood; Artisan; Breadwinner Role; Civil War; Douglass, Frederick; Emancipation; Fatherhood; Lincoln, Abraham; Patriarchy; Race; Religion and Spirituality; Republicanism; Slave Narratives; Southern Manhood; Violence; War; Work; Working-Class Manhood

-Brett Rushforth

SOCIAL GOSPEL

The Social Gospel movement, led largely by male ministers, emerged in American Protestant churches in the 1 880s. The movement sought to redefine the spiritual and socioeco nomic dimensions of manhood and the gospel of Christ in a secularizing, urbanizing, and i ndustrializing culture. Believing that these developments generated social prob lems that prevented individual and social salvation, and threatened Christian manliness and the role of Protestant Christianity in society, Social Gospelers articulated an ideal of manhood that confronted these challenges while remain ing grounded in morality and spiritual commitment. They rejected older ideals of entrepreneurial, self-made manhood in favor of a model of Christian manhood that emphasized service, self-sacrifice, and teamwork.

The men at the core of the Social Gospel movement sought new meanings for manhood and Christianity on the basis of their own upbringing, religious experience, and social environment. Often influenced by their parents' examples, Social Gospelers attempted to integrate their fathers' discipline and work ethic with their mothers' model of sentimentality and self-sacrifice into a new male identity. The Massachusetts minister Charles McFarland, for example, grounded his iden tity in the memory of his father's rigorous biblical instruction, in his reverence for his father's physical labor and loss of life in erecting a monument to the Plymouth Pilgrims, in his experi ence of working to support his mother and himself after his father's death, and in his strong bond with his mother (whose wedding band he wore into his thirties).

In addition to their upbringing, Social Gospelers such as Washington Gladden, a minister in Columbus, Ohio, and Walter Rauschenbusch, whose first ministerial assignment was in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, were heavily influenced by the labor unrest of the 1 870s and 1 880s and by the misery caused by urbanization and industrialization. Such experiences convinced them that a progressive, manly, social Christianity must be committed to social justice. This conviction was apparent in the titles of Gladden's Applied

Christianity ( 1 886), Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis ( 1 907) and Christianizing the Social Order ( 1 9 1 2), and the best-selling author and minister Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps ( 1 896), which by 1 933 had sold twenty-three mil lion copies ( more than any other Social Gospel work).

Despite their parents' influence, Social Gospelers were led by their own experiences to reject their parents' stern, individ ualistic faith, which linked poverty and misfortune to sinful ness. The social ethos of i ndividual responsibility and self-control their parents had (often literally) preached no longer seemed adequate to secure economic success, spiritual fulfillment, or manhood. They instead articulated an ideal of Christian manhood grounded in social usefulness and com munal spiritual experience.

By the 1 880s an institutional infrastructure committed to social salvation and the promotion of a social ideal of Christian manliness began to emerge. In 1 877 the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) formed a railroad department, followed by an industrial department in 1 903, which sought to minister to working men in urban industries. In 1 893, the Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong and the labor economist Richard T. Ely founded the American Institute of Christian Sociology. In 1905, thirty-three religious organizations and churches formed the Federal Council of Churches of Christ to promote the applica tion of Christianity to social issues.

Social Gospelers' commitment to manly effort and mater nal sacrifice led them to engage in and masculinize-as a form of paternal nurture-several activities traditionally associated with women. They opposed alcohol, prostitution, and gam bling as detrimental to men's moral integrity and familial responsibility; they operated soup kitchens, settlement houses, bathing facilities, gymnasiums, and social clubs; they distrib uted used clothing in an attempt to nurture and uplift the urban poor; they provided industrial training to help impov erished men become breadwinners; and they evangelized working men through lunchtime meetings that portrayed Christianity as a manly commitment.

Similarly, Social Gospelers redefined the figure of Jesus Christ. During the mid-nineteenth century, Jesus had been represented as feminine, sentimental, tender, and nurturing. Social Gospelers, by contrast, combined his caring and nur turing qualities with a new emphasis on his manliness and assertiveness. A carpenter by training, Jesus became a noble craftsman, a reformer, and a "man's man" in such books as Thomas DeWit Tallmadge's From Manger to Throne ( 1 890), Gladden's Tools and the Man ( 1 893), Bouck White's The Call of the Carpenter ( 1 9 1 3 ) , and Harry Emerson Fosdick's The Manhood of the Master ( 19 13). Social Gospelers remade Jesus

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in the image of the masculine ideal toward which they them selves aspired.

The Social Gospel movement stood in a complex rela tion to such related contemporary phenomena as muscular Christianity and the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), both of which shared Social Gospelers' interest in masculinizing Christianity. But whereas muscular Christians prioritized individual salvation and the achievement of spir itual manliness through physical exercise, Social Gospelers prioritized social salvation. Similarly, some Social Gospelers, such as the politician, settlement-house worker, and women's rights advocate R aymond Robins; the labor reformer Charles Stelzle, and the settlement-house worker Graham Taylor, sought to take advantage of the MRFM's momentum to promote their own vision of a Progressive social and masculine Christianity, while rejecting the move ment's sometimes antifemale slant.

During the early twentieth century, the message of the Social Gospel movement changed as notions of Christian manliness adapted to an increasingly materialistic and busi ness-minded ethos in American culture. In particular, the Social Gospel's emphasis on community, teamwork, and service as bases of a manly social Christianity began to incor porate notions of efficiency and businesslike promotion. Whereas Social Gospelers of the 1 9 1 0s identified Jesus' man liness with the artisansal ruggedness of the craftsman, by the

1 920s they defined it in terms of Jesus' personality-his abil ity to win over, convince, organize, and lead people in the manner of a corporate executive. Rufus Jones presented Christ in this way in his Life of Christ ( 1 926), much as the advertising executive Bruce Barton had in his highly popular The Man Nobody Knows ( 1 924). This new emphasis on per sonality over morality in the Social Gospel message repre sented a significant change through which the movement contributed to new ideas about Christian manliness; yet it also remained consistent with the movement's original goal of redefining Christian manhood to handle the challenges of an urban, industrial, and secularizing society.

During the 1920s the new cultural emphasis on business and personality overshadowed the Social Gospel message of social justice, and the movement's influence declined. By the 1930s, moreover, the movement was eclipsed as the federal government was prompted by the onset of the Great Depression to turn to policies of paternalistic social nurture.

The "cult of personality" to which the Social Gospel movement contributed grew in strength through the mid-twentieth century, peaking in strength with the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking for

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Young People ( 1952). Ironically, the Social Gospelers' emphasis on communal experience, service, and teamwork, which was intended to preserve Christian manhood against the increas ing secularization and commercialization of u.S. culture, implicitly helped to further a shift toward a manliness that increasingly reflected secular trends rather than following spiritual dictates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtis, Susan. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 99 1 .

Fishburn, Janet Forsythe. The Fatherhood of God and the Victorian Family: The Social Gospel in America. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996.

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harper & Row, 1949.

SONS OF LIBERTY

The Sons o f Liberty was organized i n 1765 to protest Britain's passage of the Stamp Act, which was enacted to raise revenue through colonial taxation. A secret intercolonial organization