Fleshing Out the Kingdom of God: A Synthetic Look at Anglo-American Social Christianity

The historiography of the Social Gospel movement has come a long way since America emerged from its isolationist shell during World War I. When, in 1928, the Dutch ecumenist Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft published his groundbreaking work on the Background of the Social Gospel in America, he lamented that for far-too-many Europeans American religion’s reputation was still wedded to an increasingly negative stereotype of its allegedly characteristic liberal activism. In no mood for anything that smacked of Pollyanaish moral optimism, and already convinced that at least until recently American religion had proved largely derivative, many postwar Europeans had determined somewhat smugly that “to decide for or against” America’s contribution to religious thought meant now simply “to choose for or against” the American Social Gospel (p. 3).

Today, the idea that the Social Gospel movement has contributed this country’s only truly novel religious thought seems even in Europe to have proved deservedly short-lived. However, the notion that the Social Gospel was a uniquely American religious phenomenon has had to die a much longer, harder death. Americans themselves seemed to take to the presumption of Social Gospel ownership, as evidenced by the widespread popularity of the work of Charles Howard Hopkins. In fact, in his classic work The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (1940), Hopkins went as far as any postwar-era European in claiming a “uniquely American” (p. vii) character for the movement. For him, “the social gospel was an indigenous American movement deriving its dynamics and its ideology from the [American] social context in which it grew” (p. 326). As late as 1975, moreover, in a benchmark essay on this question, William Hutchison remarked that this thesis had still “never been seriously challenged.” ¹

Fortunately for our conception of the comprehensiveness of the Social Gospel, Hopkins’s “uniquely American” thesis has since been largely abandoned. And, as if in answer to Hutchison’s call for more comparative history on the movement, Paul T. Phillips has now come forward with a book remarkable in its scope. Addressing Social Christianity in the “North Atlantic Triangle” from its emergence as a public force in the 1880s, Phillips furthers our understanding of the transatlantic nature of the movement and the links between its leaders in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. As a teacher at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and a specialist in the history of Victorian England, Phillips is well placed to offer the kind of historical synthesis that he has, a sort of capstone on the last generation of Social Gospel studies. He has resisted the incorporation of important Social Gospel scholarship on developments in locations such as Australia, Germany, and France. But this has enabled him to achieve a level of coherence in his narrative that would have been impossible without some sort of geographical delimitation (even as it stands, the narrative suffers at times from a lack of centripetal force). By “limiting the study to the North Atlantic Triangle,” explains Phillips, one can highlight “the way in which ideas and movements functioned in the English-speaking world” (p. xxi).

If Phillips has a central thesis, it is that “Social Christians were not moved primarily by secular fashions of social thought” (p. xxv). A set of distinctly religious beliefs lay at the foundation of their work and remained exceptionally important throughout their entire history. Based on the writings of theologians such as F. D. Maurice (especially The Kingdom of Christ, 1838), Frederick W. Robertson, and Horace Bushnell, these beliefs were symbolized in the doctrines of the kingdom of God and the incarnation. Social Christians sought to realize the reign of God upon the earth and knew that, to do so, they had to put flesh on this otherwise inaccessible religious ideal. Not surprisingly, their model for the incarnation of godly principles was Jesus...