Three vignettes underscore that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States, social gospels often fared best outside the walls of the institutional churches. They also reveal diverging interpretations of Christianity and the church that begin to explain the divergence between religious liberalism and social progressivism during this time.Footnote 17
First, the initial battle between labor and capital in Chicago erupted in the spring of 1867, when numerous employers vowed to circumvent a newly passed statewide eight-hour law. The bosses' recalcitrance provoked first a general strike and then a series of mob actions, as workers vented their frustrations in the streets. Those who looked to the churches for support were sorely disappointed. While Chicago's ministers had kind words for labor in the abstract, they would not tolerate an organized workforce. One Baptist minister's sermon on “Labor and Christianity,” delivered in the wake of the eight hour movement's collapse, perfectly illustrates this dynamic. A newspaper reported that the Reverend William Everts proclaimed, on the one hand, “if he had to choose between labor and capital, he dare not go against labor, for Christ himself would have gone with it”; and on the other, that “Trade Unions [were] productive of evil. From them had sprung murder, arson, and drunkenness, and all kinds of debauchery.”Footnote 18
The churches' double-speak did not sit well with many of the city's workers. The week after Everts's sermon a Scottish printer by the name of Andrew Cameron—who had been at the fore of the eight-hour campaign and was the founding editor of the Workingman's Advocate—responded directly and angrily that “in all reforms, in which labor and capital have been directly interested, the Church has thrown its influence in behalf of the money changers.”Footnote 19 Cameron's salvo reflected much wider working-class frustrations, not with Christianity itself but with churches compromised by wealth. As one woman put it in a letter to the Tribune, “At present the workingman is rather repelled than otherwise by the grand church, the grand people who are there, and the grand rent marked on the empty pew he finds his way into. Ministers would have a greater influence for good if they opened wide their doors, saying, ‘Come one, come all.’”Footnote 20
A second vignette reveals that theological liberalism and social progressivism were hardly the same thing. The Reverend David Swing was a pioneering liberal preacher and thinker, who presided at Chicago's illustrious Fourth Presbyterian Church until he was brought up on heresy charges in the mid-1870s. He prevailed in the ensuing trial but left the Presbyterian Church anyway when his opponents vowed to appeal the decision. Historian William Hutchinson argues in his now-classic work, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, “Swing and his heresy trial were of signal importance in announcing and augmenting the presence of modernist ideas within the evangelical churches.”Footnote 21
The Reverend David Swing was also, throughout his career, a ferocious opponent of organized labor. In the waning days of 1873 and amidst a major economic bust, thousands of struggling workingmen marched peacefully to Chicago's City Hall, where they petitioned the authorities for work or bread. The demonstration did not elicit a compassionate response from Swing. On the contrary, he harrumphed, “The conflict between classes in the cities of our country is not a conflict between labor and capital, but between successful and unsuccessful lives.”Footnote 22 Swing never wavered in such views. The final sermon of his life tackled the ethics of the 1894 Pullman Strike, which were not in his view especially complicated. He issued this withering rebuke of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union: “The strike was indeed perfectly destitute of common sense, but the chief disgrace of the hour lay in the willingness of free men to obey a central despot and join in such acts of wrong and violence as would have disgraced savages.”Footnote 23 When Swing died shortly thereafter, the editor of the Railway Times could not restrain a bit of smugness, writing, “There is something striking in the fact that the man who had all his life devoted his best energies to the defense of the rich, who had used the pulpit as a fortress for the monopoly lords, closed his useless career with a bitter attack upon organized labor. From labor's vantage, he went on, “The best that can honestly be said of [Swing] is that he was consistent to the last, and for this he may be admired to the same degree as the unwavering course of Mr. Pullman.”Footnote 24
Third and finally, the early twentieth century is often regarded as the heyday of Social Christianity. These were the years when denomination after denomination issued official statements declaring the gospel's relevance to social problems. The Methodist Church, which adopted its Social Creed in 1908, was at the vanguard of this burgeoning movement; and yet, throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Methodism's national publishing house was locked in a fierce battle with union printers. In the eyes of countless workers, this fight underscored the hypocrisy of the denomination's social teaching. An editorial in one labor journal insisted, “Sermon after sermon may be preached and speech after speech may be made to the effect that the church is the true friend of labor; but so long as its attitude in practice is one of hostility to labor, it stands condemned as a whited sepulcher that ‘outwardly appears righteous unto men, but within is full of hypocrisy and iniquity.’”Footnote 25
Throughout the conflict the Reverend Harry Ward proved a staunch pro-labor advocate within institutional church circles, campaigning vigorously to see that the Methodist Book Concern accommodated the printers' demand for a closed shop. But he was continually rebuffed. In 1916, Ward tried a new strategy, writing the leaders of major national labor unions in order to solicit their “observations concerning the effect of our Book Concern controversy with the Allied Printing Trades on the attitude of organized labor toward the church in general, and our church in particular.” As he admitted, “Some of our laymen will not be impressed with this thing until we give them some evidence that it has meant a loss to the church.”Footnote 26 Ward received many such testimonies, but the lay leaders of his denomination—many of whom enjoyed strong ties to the business community—remained insufficiently impressed. They resoundingly voted down a resolution at that year's General Conference that called for the publishing house merely to show a preference for union printers. In the wake of the vote James Kline, the president of the national Blacksmiths Union and a Methodist layman himself, confided to Ward: “I want to say in the first place that I am pretty well discouraged. The General Conference was an eye-opener to me.”Footnote 27 In his response, Ward urged Kline not to give in to despair, saying, “You must not forget that the other crowd has been in control a long time, and we have been at this job only a little while.”Footnote 28 Patience would, indeed, be required: the dispute between the printers and the Book Concern was not resolved until 1932, when the latter finally agreed to unionize its operations. Briefly, what do these stories illumine about the much larger story of Social Christianity?
First of all, they underscore that this heterogeneous movement defies easy theological categorization. Social Christianity was never just an outgrowth of liberal protestantism. In fact, countless liberals like the Reverend Swing embraced innovative readings of the Bible even while preaching an unmistakably laissez faire gospel. Meanwhile, some theological conservatives, including the likes of the blacksmith James Kline, were forceful advocates for a more socially engaged church. Kline was known to send updates via telegram about the status of particular strikes he was overseeing to the beloved members of his Wesleyan Bible class meeting back in Chicago. The inclusion of Catholic actors, who don't appear in these particular anecdotes but do in my book, only further confounds any attempt to link social Christianity to a particular theological orientation.
Second, these stories suggest that Social Christianity arose on the margins of the institutional church. It flourished first and most often at the grassroots. While the earliest histories of the movement emphasized the primary roles played by white male ministers and theologians, more recent scholarship has uncovered the vital contributions of middle-class women and African Americans.Footnote 29 My work expands this cast of characters to include working women and men, and reinforces an emerging scholarly consensus that social gospels emerged out of the experiences of ordinary believers long before the social gospel—the one that gets mentioned in the textbooks—took root in middle-class church contexts. In Chicago, the latter was unquestionably a calculated accommodation of working-class religious activism. By the turn of the century workers' sharp criticisms were heightening the fears of church leaders—both protestant and Catholic—that they were losing their foothold amongst the people. This anxiety created an opening for more progressive voices, as the Reverend Ward clearly recognized.
Nevertheless, these stories suggest, third and finally, that at least when it comes to the institutional churches, there was no heyday of social Christianity. Social gospelers were always in the minority and, to varying degrees, embattled. This was in no small part due to the perennially strong cultural and economic ties between the American churches and corporate America—ties that did not materialize ex nihilo in the mid-twentieth century, with the advent of Christian-inflected businesses such as Wal-Mart; ties that are, in fact, as old as the corporation itself.Footnote 30 When a chorus of ordinary voices became loud enough in calling for a more progressive church, ecclesiastical leaders—eager to remain culturally relevant—sought to accommodate; but even then, their responses reflected an overriding desire to keep their elite patrons and benefactors happy. The middle-class social gospel was, in this and nearly every sense, a real but distinctly moderate accommodation of working-class religious dissent.
