Social Gospel

The Social Gospel movement, led largely by male ministers, emerged in American Protestant churches in the 1880s. The movement sought to redefine the spiritual and socioeconomic dimensions of manhood and the gospel of Christ in a secularizing, urbanizing, and industrializing culture. Believing that these developments generated social problems 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 remaining 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 identity 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 experience 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 1870s and 1880s 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 (1886), Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and the best-selling author and minister Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps (1896), which by 1933 had sold twenty-three million 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, individualistic faith, which linked poverty and misfortune to sinfulness. The social ethos of individual 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 communal spiritual experience.

By the 1880s an institutional infrastructure committed to social salvation and the promotion of a social ideal of Christian manliness began to emerge. In 1877 the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) formed a railroad department, followed by an industrial department in 1903, which sought to minister to working men in urban industries. In 1893, 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 application of Christianity to social issues.

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