Social Gospel Movement

What Schlesinger and others have seen as an increasingly radical critique of industrial capitalism was, rather, a growing conservative awareness that industrial capitalism has been the radical force in American society, generating social change of unforeseen consequence, heedlessly disruptive of human community. Apart from this general sense of what the social gospel was, it is difficult to demonstrate that there was a cohesive "social gospel movement." Those who imagine otherwise can do so only by taking a part of it as equivalent to the whole, and the part they make primary has never been one that includes race relations.

Conceiving the origin and nature of the social gospel as an extension of antebellum home missions and social reform movements offers a new approach to the social gospel and race relations. Given its basis in a conservative apprehension of social values, the social gospel's generally conservative biases in race relations come as no surprise. But to say that the social gospel prophets were largely conservative in their social views is not to say that they were indifferent to race relations. Rather, just as it moved toward its own fulfillment at the end of the nineteenth century, the social gospel movement's conservative racial strategies were in crisis because its three surviving traditions in racial reform were in sharp decline.

First, the social gospel prophets could no longer rely heavily upon the home missions movement. It had played a crucial role in establishing missionary institutions in black communities throughout the South and had powerful support from the social gospel prophets in doing so. But that effort was severely handicapped by the financial crisis of the 1890s and lost its initiative to a new, more secular "benevolent empire" in education after 1900.

The origins of the social gospel lie in the hub of antebellum religious reform, the home missions movement; and the freedmen's aid societies were the primary vehicle for late nineteenth-century religious interest in race relations. But a second tradition in racial reform, African colonization and missions, had challenged the priorities and vision of home missions since the second decade of the nineteenth century. In 1889, a Baltimore resident wrote to the American Colonization Society: "I believe the redemption of Africa, through the aid and efforts of the educated descendants of the African slaves of the United States , will prove the most efficient means to settle the race question in the United States ." His simple creed uncomfortably juxtaposed the dual rationale for the second tradition in nineteenth-century social Christianity's quest for salvation in race relations: colonization was good for Africa; emigration was good for America .

If white social gospel prophets betrayed an astigmatism in race relations, it was in the Brownsville affair. The Outlook consistently supported Roosevelt . Despite the plea of the respected black Presbyterian, Francis J. Grimke, that none of the soldiers had been proved guilty and although it hoped that they would be proved innocent, the Independent reluctantly supported their dismissal. Niagara Movement clergymen threatened to punish the Republicans in the election of 1908, but the Independent and the Outlook urged black voters not to abandon the Republican party. The Niagara Movement included "some of the ablest and best" black people in the country, said the Independent, but their advice to boycott the Republicans was like cutting off a leg to cure a corn.