Washington Gladden and the Christian Nation

This article deals with a question about the United States presented by minister and social reformer Washington Gladden: "The question is sometimes raised whether this is a Christian nation."¹ Of course the answer would depend on what is meant by being a Christian nation. Gladden (1836-1918) is considered to be one of the foundational figures of what came to be known as the Social Gospel movement in the United States. Gladden raises our central question in many ways: "Is this a Christian nation? Does it possess a Christian character? Is its life a Christian life?² This is a topic to which he often returns in his many books, and we will discuss his definitions and recommendations in some detail. We will also include references to some of his contemporaries and to later thinkers. One may ask about the relevance of this material in today's world. As the social and religious reality in the United States becomes increasingly complex, many return to the thoughts of the founding fathers for clarifications. But their ideas, heavily influenced by the European enlightenment, were more philosophic than practical. The Social Gospel was the watershed of Christian social thought in the United States, and those interested in the political implications of Christianity for a democratic country should benefit from this analysis.

There are countries where a particular religion is established as the official faith in its constitution. This meaning is clearly disavowed by Gladden: "While we have no desire to see the establishment of any form of religion by law in this land, most of us would be willing to see the nation in its purposes and policies and ruling aims becoming essentially Christian."³ Can even this limited identity be generally acceptable or practical in the United States today?

The social gospel

Although the term Social Gospel can have a broad scope, a common usage is in reference to a Protestant movement in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and this is our usage in this article. The movement had its roots among Christian groups that had worked for the abolition of slavery, and was influenced by social thinkers from England and Germany. Along with Gladden, other key members of this group that we will discuss were Richard Ely (1854-1943), and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918).

The Social Gospel was not an organized movement with designated leaders or the sponsorship of specific churches. It arose spontaneously from thinkers with different denominational backgrounds. Although it was primarily a Protestant development, there was some positive interaction with the social teachings of the Catholic Church, embodied in the papal social encyclicals. The primary concern of the movement was a dissatisfaction with traditional Christian "charity" or almsgiving, seeking instead real socioeconomic reforms that would improve the actual conditions of the poor and the underprivileged. The influence of this line of thinking declined after World War I. The realities of the war tended to dampen the somewhat idealistic and humanistic themes of the movement, and American Protestantism entered then an era of neoorthodoxy, returning to a traditional emphasis on personal spiritual salvation. In recent decades, some Social Gospel concerns have been rekindled as a result of economic problems and of the civil rights movement.⁴

Washington Gladden

Washington Gladden was born in 1836 in Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania. His father, who was a school teacher, died when Washington was six, and the boy spent much of his childhood living with his uncle in a farm in Owego, New York.⁵ On feeling a call to the ministry in 1855, Gladden began his preparation at the Owego Academy.⁶ After finishing his education at Williams College,⁷ Gladden was ordained as a minister in 1860 and started his career working in a Congregational church in Brooklyn.⁸ He had assignments at several churches until becoming the pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, where he would serve for thirty-two years.⁹

While Gladden was serving at Springfield, Massachusetts (1875-1882), there was a great deal of tension there between labor and capital, due to a long...