The Social Gospeler

Half a century ago, a 46-year-old Baptist minister from Rochester, N.Y. stepped off a ship in New York City after a year's study abroad and found that he was famous. The book he had sent to the publishers before he left was taking turn-of-the-century America by the head and heart; Christianity and the Social Crisis lit the Protestant beacon that came to be known as the Social Gospel. Last week a round table at the University of Chicago's Federated Theological Faculty honored Author Walter Rauschenbusch with a discussion of his impact and influence on U.S. Protestantism.

Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, once called Rauschenbusch "the greatest single personal influence on the life and thought of the U.S. church in the last 50 years." Rauschenbusch in turn was influenced by the jostling, exploiting, every-man-for-himself America of his time. With six generations of ministers behind him (his parents came to the U.S. from Germany),

Walter Rauschenbusch labored from 1886 to 1897 among the poor of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen--reading Tolstoy, Mazzini, Marx, and supporting the reform movement of Single-Taxer Henry George.

Corporate Salvation. The pietistic, motto-wielding Christianity of his day was inadequate to the inhumanity he saw around him in a world of slums, child labor and union-busting. It is all very well, he wrote, for a man "to lean back on the Eternal and to draw from the silent reservoirs. But what we get there is for use. Personal sanctification must serve the Kingdom of God."

And the Kingdom of God was to him a corporate enterprise of salvation--something that could be brought a lot closer by wise legislation and the use of social pressure to protect the oppressed workingman and limit the power of his boss, to drive out the corrupt politician and put the vast natural resources of the New World into the public domain. Clergymen and laymen took up the cry 'for this challenging new way of interpreting ,the New Testament. Behind Rauschenbusch a new generation of militant ministers, such as Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick, the late Methodist Bishop Francis J. McConnell and a young Midwesterner named Reinhold Niebuhr, were ready to step out of their pulpits and into the machine shops and marketplaces.

Too Social? Walter Rauschenbusch died of cancer in 1918 at the age of 56, broken in spirit by World War 1, rejected by many Americans because of his German background and his attempts to keep the U.S. from fighting. Later his Social Gospel became so powerful that it took U.S. Protestantism to opposite extremes: churches sometimes seemed to be turning into sanctified civic-betterment societies.

Today the churchman's complaint is no longer that the bodies of the workers are being sweated, but more likely that their souls are being stifled in too much benevolent prosperity. Where Rauschenbusch preached the need for social organization, his successors deplore Organization Man. It is not so much that the Social Gospel is dead, but that it has been assimilated. The light Rauschenbusch lit half a century ago still burns in the activist, cause-conscious heart of U.S. Protestantism.

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