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The Americanness of the Social Gospel; An Inquiry in Comparative History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

William R. Hutchison
Affiliation:
Mr. Hutchison is the Warren Professor of American Religious History in the Divinity School, Harvard University

Extract

In an essay of the early 1920s, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner offered alternative phrasings for the Protestant liberalism against which his generation was in revolt: one could speak of “the evolutionistic optimism of world-betterment,” or simply of “Christian Americanism.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1975

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References

1. Quoted in Hooft, W. A. Visser't, The Background of the Social Gospel in America (Haarlem: H. D. Tjcenk Willink & Zoon, 1928), p. 10.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 2.

3. Ibid., pp. 2–4.

4. Ibid., pp. 4–5 et passim.

5. Hopkins, Charles Howard, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (1940; paperback ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. ix, 3, 326327.Google Scholar

6. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). pp. 788789Google Scholar. Winthrop S. Hudson did set some of the facts in ordcr in an article that stresses British influence upon American religion throughout the nineteenth century. See Hudson, , “How American is Religion in America?” in Braucr, Jerald C., ed., Reinterpretation in American Church History (Chicago: University of Chcago Press, 1968), pp. 159167.Google Scholar

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15. In another article I have acknowledged that a similar experience of “loss of meaning” afflicted many American seminarians and young ministers, that in fact this, rather than loss of status or economic position, provided the setting in which scientific and other influences operated upon them. Hutchison, William R.. “Cultural Strain and Protestant Liberalism,” American Historical Review 76 (04 1971): 386411CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But the experience of English religionists appears to have been more severe and less readily relieved.

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18. This is discussed in Chapter 1 of Hutehison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, which is to be published by Harvard University Press in early 1976Google Scholar. Chapters 2 through 6 of the same book enlarge upon the points made about American liberal thought in the balance of this section.

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25. Ibid., p. 361.

26. Vidler, Alec R., Witness to the Light: F. D. Maurice's Message for To-day (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), pp. 4657.Google Scholar

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34. Westcott, Brooke Foss, Social Aspects of Christianity, 2d. ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888), pp. 150151Google Scholar. See also ibid., pp. 95–96, and Westcott, , Socialism: A Paper Read at the Church Congress, Hull (London: Guild of St. Matthew, 1890), pp. 67, 8.Google Scholar

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36. Campbell was less a threat to American than to English Congregationalist conservatives; and his American visits came before and after, rather than during, his most controvcrsial period.

37. Jones, Peter d' A., The Chrittian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 421, 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For reviews of Campbell's work and reports on his American tours, see Congregationalist, 9 February, 13 and 27 April, 1907; 4, 18, 25 November and undated Christmas issue, 1911. See also Grant, , Free Churchmanship, pp. 132142, 206.Google Scholar

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40. Hopkins, , Rise, p. 151Google Scholar. Hopkins' footnote at this point acknowledges that he has made “no systematic study of the influence of English social-gospel thought upon American social Christianity,” yet reiterates, again with no show of support for the assertion, that “in all cases … such foreign stimuli crystallized indigenous strivings.” Ibid., n. 8.

41. May, Henry F., Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949; Torchbook, ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 185.Google Scholar

42. Hopkins, , Rise, p. 318.Google Scholar

43. Among Protestant religious groups claiming more than fifty thousand members in the religious census of 1926, I would consider the northern branches of the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian denominations as committed officially to the Social Gospel; also the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Friends and Unitarians. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1926, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 1: 15, 8291.Google Scholar

44. Bell, G.K.A., ed., The Stockholm Conference 1925: The Official Report of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work Held in Stockholm, 19–30 August, 1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 2125.Google Scholar

45. Ahlstrom, , Religious History, p. 804.Google Scholar

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47. Winthrop Hudson remarks that, despite the obvious attractiveness of Fremantle for the purpose of such investigatiorts, there may be more to be said for comparing American figures with such nonconformists as Principal Fairbairn. Letter to the author, 18 October 1974.