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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 1.2 (2001) 217-231



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For God and the People: The Spirituality of Rauschenbusch--and DuBois--A Century Later

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

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One of the cherished books on the shelves in my study is the beautifully printed collection of prayers by Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, For God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910). It was given to me during seminary thirty years ago by Ethel Lucas, an old friend of my wife's family and well into her nineties, when we visited her home in the Berkeley Hills looking out at San Francisco Bay. She knew I was interested in American religious history. I must have mentioned my admiration for the Rochester Theological Seminary professor whose spiritual reformation (he called it his "second conversion") occurred between 1886 and 1897 as he pastored a small German Baptist church in the poverty-stricken Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.

The book was from the library of her father, who had been a Congregational minister trained in the late-1870s and early-1880s at Oberlin. As a seminarian in the turbulent years of 1970-1972 I found in Rauschenbusch a bit of the inspiration of which Martin Luther King, Jr. had testified. King recalled that when "I entered theological seminary [in 1948] . . . I was immediately influenced by the social gospel. In the early fifties I read Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis [1907], a book which left an indelible imprint on my thinking." By the late-sixties and seventies, of course, we were reading Rauschenbusch and King together. Since seminary I have employed Rauschenbusch's prayers academically (as source material for a paper in graduate school and for discussion in courses I have taught on American Religion), liturgically ("For All True Lovers" still works at a wedding), and devotionally (in personal prayer). I have borrowed words from the very end of the book, "The Author's Prayer," after finishing projects of my own: "O Thou who art the light of my soul, I thank Thee for the incomparable joy of listening to thy voice within, and I know that no word of thine shall return void, however brokenly uttered. . . . Pardon the frailty of thy servant, and look upon him only as he sinks his life in Jesus, his Master and Saviour. Amen." The warmhearted piety evident in For God and the People surprises those who think of the social reform movement of the Progressive Era only in terms of its activism. 1 [End Page 217]

The connection with King brings to mind another classic from the first decade of the twentieth century, W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). My college professor of American intellectual history pronounced the judgment that no one in the United States should consider him- or herself an educated person without having read this book. Although I have quoted this wise teacher every year for more than a decade to seminary students, few say they have ever heard of the book and only one subsequently came back to report getting and reading it. Like Rauschenbusch, DuBois engaged in trenchant criticism of American society from a socialist perspective. And both understood economic and social problems in essentially religious terms. DuBois's analysis of life in America from Emancipation to the dawn of the new century is a portrayal of "the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive." His narrative of journeys through the Jim Crow South reads like a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress. If the book were a movie its sound track would be spirituals, the "Sorrow Songs," and DuBois actually prints several bars of music at the top of each chapter to provide "a haunting echo" of the "old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men." From DuBois we learned, almost a hundred years before Ken Burns's Jazz, that "the Negro folk-song--the rhythmic cry of the slave...

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