The image of the American Protestant minister in the American novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, according to many scholars, predominantly a negative one. Conservative, steeped in outdated creeds, aloof from modern realities, and materialistic—these were some of the kinder descriptions of the much maligned Protestant clergyman which they find in the American novel of this period. But my own study of over one hundred Christian social novels, which reflect the rise of the social gospel in American Protestantism, leads me to urge a reassessment of this traditional view of the literary image of the Protestant minister. As propaganda for the emerging social gospel, the Christian social novel portrays not only the stereotyped picture of the clergyman, but more prominently a new kind of minister—physically rugged, intelligent, deeply religious, compassionate and above all a man concerned with the application of the gospel to economic and social problems. He was, in sum, an idealized image of the kind of heroic minister needed to take the gospel out of the sanctuary and into the slums and factories of modern urban America.

Thirty-five years ago Lewis Vander Velde criticized his fellow historians for not having written more on the American churches. He charged that lay historians, “whose point of view is detached and objective,” had left the study of organized religion in the United States to “clergymen whose primary interest is religious” American historians recognized “the importance of the Church in colonial times,” but they had “too frequently assumed that its influence as a force in public affairs disappeared with the American Revolution”—even though the nation's recent experience with Prohibition ought to have taught them otherwise:

Writers in an age when the Church is on the defensive fail to realize that the transformation which has put it in this position is much more a product of the last seventy years [i.e., 1862–1932] than of the previous seventy [i.e, presumably, 1792–1862]. In the time of our grandfathers, the Church was still a strong factor in the life of the nation; an institution led by intellectual giants, attended regularly by a large portion of the people, it exerted an important influence upon American life. … In 1860 politics and the Church still offered the greatest professional opportunities, and … in consequence the best minds were to be found there.

Since 1945 German historians, searching for answers to the question of the responsibility of the political parties for the failure of the Weimar Republic, have studied afresh the organization and political activity of parties in Germany. Their work concentrates on the history of parties after 1870, when they became centralized, mass organizations, and treats in a cursory manner the earlier stages in the formation of parties.1 In so far as recent and earlier historical studies delve into the period before 1870, they trace the origins of parties in Prussia to the Revolution of 1848. The relation of these parties to the partisan groupings that were formed in the territorial church during the Vormärz is overlooked.