Social Gospel Movement

Formative Influences

The essentially educational character of Christianity as a social movement and as an ideology predates the social gospel movement. For example, Henry VIII's command to have an English-language Bible translation placed in every church in England represents a form of popular education. British historian Richard Johnson also identifies two strands of adult education rooted in Christianity: the philanthropic educators for whom religion was a source for “ordering” society and individuals, and radical educators for whom Jesus Christ represented a morality of cooperation among equals working against inequality and injustice. Reading the Bible and writing from dictation or copies was a central focus of the Quakers' development of the adult school movement; the first study of “adult education” in 1816 is attributed to Quaker Thomas Pole. Thomas Paine's influential educational documents of the American Revolution, espousing universal rights and condemning slavery, are traced to Anglo-American adult education to the very old English theological precept of equality in the sight of God.

The Progressive era of the 19th century accompanied the shift in adult education to an explicitly social gospel agenda that sought to address the problems of the poor and working classes associated with industrialization and urbanization—and in North America, the influx of immigrants from Europe. Another view was that the social gospel was primarily a religious and intellectual movement. The social gospel influenced the adult education initiative of Frontier College, which Alfred Fitzpatrick, an erstwhile Presbyterian preacher, inaugurated in 1899 to bring literacy and citizenship education to the laboring immigrant men of the remote logging, rail, and mining camps of Canada. A postcolonial perspective on the adult education projects of Anglo-Christianizing, Canadianizing, and Americanizing (e.g., literacy, labor, and temperance) reveals a concern for human welfare entangled with a fear of politically suspect outsiders, and a belief in Anglo-Protestant superiority that called for the assimilation of foreigners and indigenous populations.

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