The Social Gospel: An Ecumenical Tradition

By Gary Dorrein
Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics
Union Theological Seminary

The idea that Christianity has a regenerative social mission is as old as the biblical message of letting justice flow like a river, pouring yourself out for the poor and vulnerable, and attending to what Jesus called "the weightier matters of the law," justice and mercy. In this country, the great evangelical and liberal movements of the 18thand 19th centuries were rife with temperance, anti-slavery, anti-war, and other social causes. Throughout American history, many American churches have taken for granted that the church must be a steward of a good society.

But the Progressive era introduced something new to American Christianity. In the early 1880s, proponents of what came to be called "the social gospel" founded what came to be called "social ethics" and the first institutions of ecumenical social Christianity . . . Only with the social gospel movement did the church begin to say that it had a mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.

. . . The social gospel movement had many faults and limitations. Most of it was sentimental, moralistic, idealistic, and politically naive. It preached a gospel of cultural optimism and a Jesus of middle-class idealism. It spoke the language of triumphal missionary religion, sometimes baptized the Anglo-Saxon ideology of Manifest Destiny, and usually claimed that U.S. American imperialism was not imperialism because of its good intentions. The social gospel helped to build colleges and universities for African Americans, but only rarely did it demand justice for blacks; it supported suffrage for women, but that was the extent of its feminism. Most social gospel leaders vigorously opposed World War I until the U.S. intervened, whereupon they promptly ditched their opposition to war; after the war they overreacted by reducing the social gospel to pacifist idealism.

Yet for all its faults and limitations, the social gospel movement . . . was a 60-year movement and enduring perspective that paved the way for modern ecumenism, social Christianity, the Civil Rights movement, and the deep involvement of the ecumenical movement in the Civil Rights movement.

It had a tradition in the black churches led by Reverdy Ransom, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. It had anti-imperialist, socialist, feminist and theologically conservative advocates in addition to its liberal reformers. It created the ecumenical and social justice ministries that remain the heart of American Christianity. And it expounded a vision of economic democracy that is as relevant and necessary today as it was a century ago.

In 1908 approximately thirty-one Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations banded together to form the Federal Council of Churches. . . . The churches could not agree on doctrine; thus, there were many denominations. But the social gospel leaders of the Federal Council . . . contended that American Christians should be able to agree about social justice and do something for it. So the first thing they did was issue the Social Creed of the Churches of 1908, which advocated "equal rights and complete justice" for all human beings; the abolition of child labor; a "living wage as a minimum in every industry"; social security; an equitable distribution of income and wealth; the abatement of poverty; and eight other planks focused mostly on economic justice.

The Federal Council became a vehicle for the transmission of social gospel ideas into the churches and society; the Social Creed reverberated with the values of social and economic democracy; and the idea of economic democracy was intrinsic to the social gospel. To the social gospelers, democracy was indispensable in the political, social, and economic spheres, and for the same reasons: to provide equal opportunity, to safeguard the rights of citizens, and to prevent any group from attaining too much power. . . .

I treasure the social ethical witness and tradition of the ecumenical movement. It is the heart of my teaching, scholarship, and social activism. When I think of the National Council of Churches, the first thing I think of is its deep involvement in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That witness drew me into the church and the ordained ministry, in the 1970s. But how many young people today are attracted to the church by our clear, prophetic, visible, energetic social justice ministry

. . . Today our churches need to be spiritual strongholds of social justice conviction and zones of multi-racial diversity. . . . We need new forms of community that arise out of but transcend religious affiliation, culture and nation. All our religious traditions have propensities for dogmatism and prejudice that must be uprooted.

If those of us who are Caucasian fail to interrogate white supremacism and its privileges, we will resist any recognition of our own racism. If those of us who are male fail to interrogate our complicity in sexism, we will perpetuate it. If those of us who are Christian fail to repudiate anti-Semitism and Christian supercessionism, we will perpetuate the evils that come with them. If those of us who are heterosexual fail to stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians, we will have an oppressive church. If we sign up for militarism and empire, we will betray the way of Christ. We need a wider community of the divine good. The future belongs to God, and after all our work is done, it is God who will make something new in the world out of our struggles for justice and peace and the flourishing of life.

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York. These remarks were made before the annual General Assembly of the National Council of Churches and Church World Service in Denver, Nov, 11, 2008. Emphasis added by blogger. To read the entire address by Dr. Dorrien, PLEASE CLICK HERE.