The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History by Christopher H. Evans (review)

Few subjects in American religious history invite interdisciplinary inquiries and readerships as much as does the Social Gospel. In the formal sense, it could be confined to a narrative of liberal American Protestantism c. 1900–1920. But, in the telling of Evans, its story begins a century earlier and, associated with new names, continues its reach into the present. Readers who have interests in the ethics of social reform, liberal theology and its opposition, African-American and feminist studies, rhetorical analyses of popular preaching, straight-out sociology, and the larger American historical contexts of movements and emphases like the Social Gospel will find reason to read this book with care.

Evans does readers a favor by offering a terse explication of the issues surrounding the Social Gospel, which includes words like liberalism, progressive, political, economic, structures, institutions, and more, all crammed into nine lines (2–3). He unpacks those concepts and realities in clear prose and provides satisfying narrative. But even before outlining these topics, which are familiar to those who know the Social Gospel, he shakes things up with a reference to Ralph Reed, a leader and activist of the Christian Right in the 1990s, who, concurring with Martin Luther King, an explicit heir of the Social Gospel, contended that “religion had an implicit mission to change the social fabric of modern life.” To many people, Reed came across as anti-Social; he was certainly illiberal. Evans does not claim Reed as a strange bedfellow in the Social Gospel, but he shows how wide and deep was the reach of its transformative influence in America.

By revisiting the central themes that the movement addressed, Evans draws in, without contortion or distortion, heirs of, and analogs or kin to, Social Gospelers. For example, Francis Willard, in founding the Women’s Christian Temperance movement, was not a crabby legalist but a positive reformer. Scholars of feminism will find in the book many other necessarily brief but still provocative treatments of women reformers who had been overlooked in the earliest histories of the Social Gospel. Similarly, readers will meet major, if at first overlooked, African-American expressions of it, typified by Christian socialist Reverdy Ransom.

Pioneers and leaders did not have to be Protestant to exemplify the interests of the Social Gospel. The rise of the Protestant versions of Social Christianity in the early industrial period was matched by Roman Catholic ones—from the work of Pope Leo XIII onward. Furthermore, without trying to convert Jews like Rabbi Stephen Wise by terminological exaggeration, Evans shows how numbers of rabbis were on parallel tracks alongside their activist compatriots in the formal Social Gospel. Many leaders in the later Civil Rights Movement(s), like King, acknowledged and demonstrated the influence of the Social Gospel.

The Social Gospel exemplars in these and similar forms were often optimists, as progressives tended to be, but they also lived to see the demise of many projects, the failure of experiments, and the many frustrations to which idealists are heir. Hence, Evans writes about the “twilight” of the Social Gospel, placing figurative tombstones on its grave as he regards the decline and apparent disappearance of institutions, structures, and dreams. Yet the book is more inspiration than depression for latter-day progressives and their successors, who will continue to reflect influences of the classic Social Gospel.

Readers who learn about declines, demises, and stories of hopes denied may wonder in many cases whether the effort was worth the pain. If Evans were to write a Volume II, he could give more attention to the people who benefited from these federations, councils, movements, and agitations. It could do better justice to the laborers, sufferers under segregation, and beneficiaries of the companionship and welfare offered under the auspices of the Social Gospel. Without this movement and its leaders, the story of American religion in the periods covered in this book would have to focus only on...