Seductive Social Gospel

America remains religious, but it might have been otherwise. In the late nineteenth century, Americans whose fathers and grandfathers had been earnest Congregationalists or Presbyterians were beginning to fall away. They were uninterested in Calvinism’s fine doctrinal distinctions and resentful of the Calvinist emphasis on total depravity and the high decrees of divine election.

This alienation from classical Reformed theology and practice could easily have led to the secularization of America one hundred years ago. But Protestantism reinvented itself. Horace Bushnell wrote books that shifted the focus of faith away from doctrine and toward sentiments and feelings. Against the traditional forms of Calvinism that interpreted Christ’s saving death in terms of the debt of sin and its payment—which is to say, the doctrine of penal substitution—he argued that Christ’s example of selfless love provides a decisive moral influence that causes in us a renewal and transformation.

The Social Gospel movement seems very different, focusing on “the social question” rather than sentiments and feelings. But like liberal Protestant theology more generally, it became so influential in the early twentieth century because it directed attention away from traditional doctrine. A concern for justice replaced theologies of justification.

Walter Rauschenbusch, the most prominent spokesman for the Social Gospel, provided in his programmatic book Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) the most explicit rationale for this shift. Nineteenth-century historical critics had sifted through the Bible, separating out what they designated the most ancient and therefore authentic witness from later accretions and distortions. Rauschenbusch used this scholarship to make his case for a social gospel.

He argued that the early prophets—Amos in particular—reflected the original genius of Israelite religion, which was concerned with ethical conduct and social justice, preaching a “primitive democracy.” However, already in Old Testament times, this original message was corrupted by Jewish preoccupations with ritual and purity. Ezekiel shifts away from ethics and to an “ecclesiastical attitude” preoccupied with “ceremonial correctness.”

The historical Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, Rauschenbusch argued, which meant the ethical action and social justice emphasized by the earliest prophets. However, corruption intruded again. The Jewish writers of the New Testament introduced the “ecclesiastical attitude” and other distortions that led to what Rauschenbusch calls “ascetic Christianity,” a religious attitude that thinks in terms of heaven, divine intervention, and personal salvation rather than social justice.

Rauschenbusch’s story of the true meaning of Christianity is archetypically Protestant: The original purity of faith was lost and obscured by later corruptions, only to be discovered anew in our age. The distinct twist—which is what made the Social Gospel so effective in preserving the influence of mainline Protestantism—was that Rauschenbusch implicated older forms of Protestantism in this history of corruption. Thus, Protestants who insist on confessional standards reflect an “ecclesiastical attitude” concerned about mere “ceremonial correctness.”

The effect of this critique was to reassure those whose faith was wavering. As Rauschenbusch writes in a characteristic passage, “We are today in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation.” Now “we need a combination between faith in Jesus in the need and the possibility of the kingdom of God, and the modern comprehension of the organic development of human society.” The troubling inheritance of traditional Protestantism—sin, damnation, grace, election, and even particular matters of personal morality—has been found irrelevant, if not corrupting. “For the first time in religious history,” Rauschenbusch writes, “we have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.”

This is heady stuff, made all the more intoxicating by the fact that, according to the logic of the Social Gospel, America and other “advanced nations” are the proper recipients of all this religious energy. Here “Christianity is being converted to Christ.” Here technology and science have advanced. Therefore, Western civilization or “the Christian world”—which Rauschenbusch and his readers consistently saw in racial and ethnic terms—has a social mission. America in particular is to be a light unto the nations.

Christianity and the Social Crisis was a surprise best seller, and in retrospect one can see why. The mentality that Rauschenbusch deployed to seduce his readers—the turn away from troubling debates about doctrine, the shift from personal salvation to social reform, and the reassurance that progressive disdain for traditional religion was in fact a sign of a more authentic and scientific faith—provided a way to remain Christian while setting aside whatever seems incompatible with modern life.

For a long time I resented this strategy, but now I’ve become more sympathetic. I still think that Rauschenbusch’s approach, which was a rhetorically brilliant version of modern Protestant theology, debases Christian truths. But it succeeded in throwing a vaguely Christian sacred canopy over the progressive project that reshaped American society in the twentieth century, delaying the triumph of a secular mentality.

Well into the twentieth century, American liberalism was Christian, or at least many significant and powerful liberals were. The dominant establishment was the Protestant establishment, something made possible in part by figures such as Rauschenbusch. It was a vague and diminished Christianity, but it helped America avoid the ideological brutality of secular modernity, especially the perversions of fascism and communism that so damaged secular Europe.

And it provides us with an opportunity today. Because the Protestant establishment endured well into the twentieth century, American secularism is different from the secularism one finds in Europe. It is young, uncertain, and weak. There are elements of religiosity in the new upper class that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart. That’s one reason why folks like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins fight so vigorously against faith. They sense, perhaps, what St. Ignatius knew. Only a handful of men of genuine piety and personal integrity would be needed to enflame a place like Harvard.