Social Gospel(s) in the American West? Five Possible Themes

For most people interested in American history, the term “social gospel” probably denotes an informal American religious movement that began sometime around the publication of Washington Gladden’sWorking People and Their Employers (1876) and faded in importance sometime after Walter Rauschenbusch’s A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). It involved a decreased focus on individual other-worldly salvation and an increased emphasis on applying Christ’s teachings (especially in regards to fairness and justice) to fix temporal inequalities produced by the new industrial economic and political order.

That basic definition seems to remain the standard introductory description, although a number of questions have (let me apologize in advance for using this word) problematized social gospel historiography since the 1940s. To list just a few issues, historians still debate how radical social gospelers really were, how much continuity existed between social gospel reform and antebellum social reform, and what sort of theology imbued the movement (was it liberal? evangelical? a theology of its own? all of the above?). Then there’s the problem of the word “social gospel” itself. Before the 1900s, what we now call the social gospel was often described with terms like practical Christianity, applied Christianity, or social Christianity.

As historians have debated and discussed who gets to be included as a social gospeler, they have created an impressive collection of strange bedfellows. While some social gospel boundaries are firm — for example, excluding the social reform efforts of the Salvation Army, the Church of the Nazarene, and other holiness movement groups — the tendency among historians has been to broaden the scope of the social gospel. If only I had the power, I would invite all the individuals who have been labeled as social gospelers to a dinner party just to listen to their awkward conversations and see their shocked faces when I informed them that they were all part of the same reform movement (Thomas Dixon? Please meet Reverdy Ransom).

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