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To many, Theodore Roosevelt was an exemplar of manliness and “muscular Christianity” and an exceptional public servant who led a crusade for social justice. To others, the sage of Oyster Bay was a jingoist, a nativist, a hot-tempered, unpredictable manic, and an egomaniac who put his own interests above America’s good. Roosevelt highly valued biblical morality and considered it vital to personal and public life, including politics. He downplayed doctrine and theological differences and strongly stressed the importance of good works and character. Many contemporaries called him a preacher of righteousness, and he labeled the presidency a bully pulpit, which he used to trumpet the importance of social justice, civility, and virtue. Three religious issues caused considerable controversy during Roosevelt’s tenure in office: his attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from some coins, the “Dear Maria” affair, and concerns about William Howard Taft’s Unitarianism during the 1908 presidential campaign. Christianity, especially the version espoused by turn-of-the-century Social Gospelers, played a significant role in shaping his philosophy of government. Roosevelt’s role in mediating the 1902 anthracite coal strike, “taking” Panama to build an isthmus canal, and promoting conservation illustrate how his religious commitments helped shape his policies.

Beginning in the late 1870s, liberal Protestants including Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, Theodore Munger, Newman Smyth, and Charles Briggs endeavoured to construct a form of Christian orthodoxy that could make its peace with evolution and historical criticism while expressing the religious and moral experience of modern Christians. The final chapter traces the impact of antislavery, the Civil War, and emancipation on the New Theology of the postwar decades, including the liberal Protestant acceptance of evolution and historical criticism and the early development of the Social Gospel. This chapter also traces the dual postwar trajectory of abolitionist theology in both “free religion” and budding fundamentalism.

Reinhold Niebuhr's ‘Christian realism’ was in significant part a rejection of the pacifism and optimism of the Social Gospel movement in the United States. Even though Niebuhr had initially been sympathetic to the movement, he came to dismiss its belief that the realization of the kingdom of God, proclaimed by Jesus, could be expected in the foreseeable future. He thought the movement's great confidence in human progress was naiïve, and that its belief in education's power to foster a law of love (and thus to eradicate the sin of selfishness from individuals and institutions) lacked a proper understanding of original sin. Recognizing the force of Niebuhr's criticisms of the Social Gospel movement, this chapter sets out to ask whether Niebuhr's thought is as effective a riposte to another and much more recent strand of thought in Christian ethics: the ecclesially centered ethics of Radical Orthodoxy. Measuring Radical Orthodoxy's thought against Niebuhr's is given added interest by the fact that Radical Orthodox thinkers themselves — and especially John Milbank — have explicitly and critically engaged Niebuhr, and have described what they see as the ‘poverty’ of his idea of Christian realism for contemporary ethics.

As the nation became more prosperous and powerful and more Americans enjoyed a higher standard of living, many concluded that the best features of this world were “writ large” in heaven and that achieving earthly dreams was as important there as worshipping God. Numerous authors depicted heaven as a place of energetic and productive endeavor and service where residents fully utilized their talents. Proponents of the Social Gospel exhorted Christians to concentrate on improving conditions on earth rather than preparing for heaven and their own salvation. To them, social justice and the good life were not chiefly ideals to be realized in the afterlife, but goals to be achieved on earth. Stressing God's love and mercy, many theological liberals claimed people would have a postdeath probationary period to respond to the gospel. Evangelicals countered that individuals must accept Jesus as their savior and Lord on earth to go to heaven.

By the early twentieth century, Francis was a familiar figure throughout mainline Protestantism and American culture. This chapter begins by surveying the breadth and variety of American appropriations of Francis at that time, with special attention to his meanings as a model of true Christianity. The chapter next discusses the importance of Francis for Progressive-era Protestant social reformers and the Social Gospel, focusing on Walter Rauschenbusch, Rufus M. Jones, and Vida Scudder. The third section introduces ideas of place and pilgrimage, drawing on scholarship in anthropology and religious studies. Many Protestants, then and later, insisted that no one could understand Francis fully without visiting Assisi, a surprising claim in light of Protestant tradition. Finally, the chapter outlines Roman Catholic critiques of Protestant interpretations.

This chapter examines three popular novels: Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888), Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897), and Winston Churchill's Inside of the Cup (1913). Sometimes called the “Third Great Awakening,” the Social Gospel was a response by liberal Protestants to the problems caused by industrialization, massive immigration, and urbanization. All three novels discussed in this chapter were self-consciously about print culture, making clear that founding the kingdom of God here on earth depended on making appropriate use of books and literacy. The chapter looks at historical examples of how the novels inspired readers to take social action. It suggests that the novels illustrate how the right kind of reading and writing invariably moves readers to work for social justice, while the wrong kinds are either strictly academic or blatantly commercial.

This chapter demonstrates how this social democratic undercurrent otherwise flowed to King through the history of his hometown, Atlanta, and through his education in the Social Gospel doctrine. The agitation of the radical Left in Atlanta when King was growing up not only exposed intraracial class tensions but saw an unprecedented attempt to unite the unemployed and to put the realities of economic injustice and poverty to the fore

Capitalism in the United States is unthinkable apart from the myth of White Supremacy, for capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen people. Further, white Americans imagined that capitalism was God-ordained, grounded in “Nature and Nature’s God,” and heralded a golden age of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Following the Civil War, the myth of the Chosen Nation morphed into the myth that God blessed the righteous with wealth and the wicked with poverty—the central assumption of the Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie appealed to all these myths in his 1889 essay, “Wealth,” in the North American Review. Likewise, many American industrialists invoked these myths to justify their goal: the economic conquest of the world. Government and industry, however, typically excluded blacks from this engine of economic prosperity, thereby contributing to realities already in place—systemic racism and white privilege. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire capitalism and the myths that sustained it came under withering assault from labor, the Social Gospel movement, and black social critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Langston Hughes, especially since the wealth of the Gilded Age contrasted with unprecedented numbers of lynchings of America’s blacks.

The chapter summarizes common theologies and theological perspectives from the Black Church tradition such as Liberation theology and Social Gospel with special emphasis on the influence of Prosperity theology in these spaces. This information provides the context for a study of the theologies of contemporary large Black churches. Frame analysis is used to examine over fifty pastoral sermons for the sixteen profiled large Black churches and sermons from fifteen additional Black megachurch pastors. In addition to broad, thematic-driven imperatives to proselytize and serve, efforts of the black megachurches were informed by three additional theological categories identified as holistic, Social Gospel/Liberation theology, and Prosperity theology. Central to the chapter is an analysis of whether and how Black megachurch pastors espouse Prosperity theology.

Within the Episcopal Church—unlike some other denominations—there was considerable room for argument on matters of social and economic issues as well as those of “churchmanship.” During this era, many Episcopalians, both clergy and laity, remained attached to the laissez-faire economics that had dominated American thought during much of the nineteenth century. Others, however, grew highly critical of this economic system in the American social and political context. Many Episcopal parishes became pioneers in the institutional church movement, devising a whole new mixture of physical plant and programming that could provide a wide variety of services to poorer parishioners. Although many of their ideas and practices were shared with other denominations and secular agencies, Episcopalian “Social Gospellers” often differed from their counterparts in their association with the thought and experience of the Church of England, with which American Anglicans maintained a lively relationship during this era.

This chapter focuses on the ministry of Archibald J. Carey Sr. in Chicago, where he arrived in 1898 familiar with politics and power players in both church and state. It looks at Carey’s leadership and influence among African Americans in the city, as well as his rivalry with a rising class of professional black politicians, rival ministers, female leaders, and others. The chapter also examines Carey’s public theology and how he blended it with Social Gospel, self-help, and civil rights agitation. Furthermore, it considers Carey’s rise as one of Chicago’s best-known pastors, how he was drawn into city politics, and how the Quinn Chapel, Bethel, and Institutional Churches all grew substantially under his stewardship.

In the late nineteenth century, American religion faced two kinds of challenges—the kind Darwinism posed to the idea of a morally coherent universe, and the kind that the industrial revolution posed to the idea that the free market is inherently just. In the face of these challenges, evangelicals proved to be nimble defenders of their civil religion, offering up ready answers. These answers, however, bifurcated into two distinct schools of thought—two opposing civil religions. Social class formed the line of division: While the working class rallied around a communitarian ideal known as the Social Gospel, articulated most famously by Walter Rauschenbusch, bourgeois Protestants like Henry Ward Beecher and Newman Smyth adopted a free market theology, drawing favorably upon evolutionary biology to present the market as the quintessence of freedom and as a divine engine of moral progress

This chapter considers whether religion has a place in the American workplace. It is often argued that the presence of religion in the office and other work areas creates conflict and division and that employers and employees would be far better off if it were barred from the work environs. While religion in the workplace may be disruptive and divisive, the question is whether it should it be prohibited. This chapter provides a historical background on the presence of religion in the American workplace, with particular emphasis on forces that have introduced religion to the workplace such as the Social Gospel Movement and the Faith at Work Movement. It also examines the conflict caused by the introduction of religion to the workplace, especially the one involving Christians who are motivated by their religious beliefs to spread the faith among their fellow workers.

This chapter deals with the involvement of religious groups in politics. The topic bears a close relation to the previous chapter; what religious groups should do politically depends partly on what should count as good reasons for officials and citizens to make up their minds. Of special relevance are conclusions that citizens are properly influenced by religious and other comprehensive views and that legislators properly take such judgments of citizens into account. The chapter seeks to answer the questions surrounding religion and politics.

This chapter focuses on the career of Harold Bell Wright, a Social Gospel novelist who achieved immense popularity but is almost entirely absent from American literary history. Wright's That Printer of Udell's (1903), The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), The Calling of Dan Matthews (1909), The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), and The Eyes of the World (1914) outsold almost every other novel published before World War I. However, this chapter suggests that Wright's evangelical fervor and commercialism, combined with his contempt for modernism, left him and his readers outside of mainstream American literary culture. It examines the role of mail-order distribution, advertising, and film tie-ins in reaching a large, nonliterary audience and how Wright's novels succeeded not as aesthetic objects, but as popular melodramas for white, Protestant, predominantly rural and small-town readers.

This chapter describes the development of a progressive Social Gospel at the American mission, the growth of the Syrian Evangelical Church, and the proliferation of a variety of European and American missions later in the century. The intensification and proliferation of missionary work at this time created a pluralism in which a secularized ethnic discourse emerged. Among others the Chaldeans (Uniate Catholics), Anglicans, and the Russian Orthodox focused their efforts on Urmia. The pressing demands upon the Syrians from different missions at times led to a back-and-forth maneuvering by the patriarch, whereas in 1897 there was a failed attempt at mass conversion to Orthodoxy for what seem to be primarily political purposes. The earliest explicit nationalism appeared at this time. In defense of the patriarch and the Old Church Syrian men primarily with an American educational background and often evangelical church membership began to organize within the community, eventually creating the nationalist newspaper, The Star, in 1906.

American Protestantism determined to a large extent the nature of the mission errand to China, especially in the Chinese Protestant elite’s understanding of social Christianity. American Protestantism, however, suffered from certain weaknesses in its own understanding of the relationship between Christianity and society, and this weakness was most evident in the message of the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel aimed to reshape the modern industrial economy, so that it was more humane to workers and more beneficial to society. That message, though, was compromised in its transmission to China by its association with imperialism. Beyond this message of the Social Gospel, American missions were also the early benefactors of the main institutions—colleges and universities, the YMCA and the YWCA—through which the Protestant elite influenced the larger society.

The Episcopal church had no firm policy on how the riches of the wealthy elite should be spent philanthropically, but it during the Gilded Age it was entering a period of considerable and often heated debate as to what form charitable giving might best take and who was responsible for the plight of the poor. The Social Gospel movement, in which Episcopalians participated actively, was one major theological and institutional response to these questions. Another philanthropic issue of the day was the provision of cultural institutions like museums and libraries. Episcopalians were not unique among American Christians in discovering the religious potential of the material world. Wealthy Episcopalians donated or made available to the public their private collections of art, or funded public cultural institutions. The culture of urban America was manifestly enriched by their benevolences under the aegis of a church that had room for both the prophetic judgments of the Social Gospel and the sensual opulence of the Gospel of Art.

This chapter examines the so-called “deeply conservative” ideology of Southern Baptists. It evaluates this ideology by analyzing 2000 elections in the Southern states in the U.S. from 1945 to 2000. The findings indicate that even during the era of Southern progressivism, the Social Gospel made relatively few inroads among Southern Baptist ministers and while the civil rights movement influenced the Established Church in the South it did not resonate with the bulk of white clergy and laity.

This chapter discusses the Progressivism of President Barack Obama. Obama's progressivism is broadly based. First, he aspired to the ideals of the Social Gospel and invoked the idea of a shared national purpose, a common good that transcended the particular interests of the separate classes, ethnic groups, and regions that have shaped American political struggles. Second, he resurrected the Progressives' emphasis on political and economic reforms. Third, Obama inherited the Progressives' pragmatism, their uneasiness with dogma, their commitment to achieving moderate, incremental progress through trial and error, and their confidence in the application of the scientific method to politics. The obstacles to Obama's progressivism run deep as well. He has had to wrestle with four stubborn features of American culture that have hamstrung reformers since the nation's founding: persistent localism; distrust of the federal government; a deep ambivalence about engaging in world affairs; and a racism that appears nearly as entrenched in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.