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VII - “God's Bible at the Devil's Girdle”: Religious Diversity and Urban Secularization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2009

Kevin J. Christiano
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

Walter Rauschenbusch, the individual most responsible for the formulation of a theological rationale for the Social Gospel movement of the early 1900s (see Ahlstrom, 1975b: 268–270), was, at the turn of the century, ending more than a decade as a German Baptist pastor in New York City. In the pastoral role, Rauschenbusch was perhaps typical of clergymen of his time in his beliefs about the impact of city life on organized religion. Departing New York in 1897, en route to a seminary post, he confessed in the pages of the fledgling American Journal of Sociology that

I am sure that there is no great city in which modern industrialism has set up its smoking and flaring altars of Mammon in which religion is not struggling for its life like a flower among the cobble stones of the street. The larger our cities grow, the less hold does religion seem to have over the multitude of men and the general life.

[Rauschenbusch, 1897: 29–30]

Church responses to the spread of urbanism in the turn-of-the-century period were not identical, as illustrations in Chapter 1 demonstrated. What all had in common, however, was the conviction that America's religious status quo could not withstand the fury of what one writer called Christianity's Storm Centre (Stelzle, 1907)–the modern city.

By the time the federal government had determined –after the 1920 Census–that the majority of its citizens resided in places it classified as “urban,” social scientists had belatedly joined churchmen in identifying urbanization as a cause of secularity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Religious Diversity and Social Change
American Cities, 1890–1906
, pp. 118 - 133
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

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