The Image of the Protestant Minister in the Christian Social Novel

1968 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334
Author(s):  
Grier Nicholl
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Urban America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Social Novel ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Novels

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 Conservative, steeped in outdated creeds, aloof from modern realities, and materialistic—these were some of the kinder descriptions of the much maligned Protestant clergyman which they find in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.

Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel, 1885–1917

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spiritual Conversion ◽  
Born Again ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis article seeks to draw attention to an often overlooked aspect of the social gospel. Rather than explaining social gospelers as theological liberals who took an interest in social problems, as many historians have done, this essay argues that they were possessed of a unique theology, one which welded evangelical ideas of conversion and experiential Christianity with liberal postmillennial hopes. Their devotion to combating social ills should be understood, therefore, not solely as a secular commitment to social justice or a nebulous allegiance to Christian charity but also as a theological obligation tied to evangelical conversion and a repudiation of social sin, a crime as offensive to God as murder or theft. The social gospelers modeled the ideal Christian society upon that of the biblical patriarchs, one in which no distinction between the secular and sacred existed and sanctification guided the Christian's actions in the economy as well as in personal morality. That society, that postmillennial Zion, would come again when all humanity experienced a spiritual conversion and were truly born again as Christians—a transformation not limited to individual salvation but which brought with it a new understanding of the nature of Christian life.

The Mission to China

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Social Christianity ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Relationship

American Protestantism determined to a large extent the nature of the mission errand to China, especially in the Chinese Protestant elite’s understanding of social Christianity. American Protestantism, however, suffered from certain weaknesses in its own understanding of the relationship between Christianity and society, and this weakness was most evident in the message of the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel aimed to reshape the modern industrial economy, so that it was more humane to workers and more beneficial to society. That message, though, was compromised in its transmission to China by its association with imperialism. Beyond this message of the Social Gospel, American missions were also the early benefactors of the main institutions—colleges and universities, the YMCA and the YWCA—through which the Protestant elite influenced the larger society.

Realism and Hope After Niebuhr

Worldview ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
John C. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Fourth Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Great Force

I have already lived in three different theological climates, during three periods marked by quite different hopes and expectations for the future of humanity. I am not sure whether or not we are entering a fourth period, but the pattern of both commitments and hopes is less clear than it seemed to be in the recent past.Before 1930 and back into the late nineteenth century there was the period of the Social Gospel, which was a great force in the churches and which reflected the secular expectations of progress that were general at the time. I was part of this movement myself and to a large extent shared its hopes, though I never believed that progress was inevitable or irreversible.

The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915

1941 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 945
Author(s):  
Charles A. Ellwood ◽  
Charles Howard Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Gospel ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism

The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915

1941 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 382
Author(s):  
Henry F. May ◽  
Charles Howard Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Gospel ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism

The Origin of Indiana's Dry Leader: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and Midwestern Dry Culture

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-98
Author(s):  
Jason S. Lantzer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Influences ◽  
State Level ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the dry crusade that brought Prohibition to the nation by tracing the early life and career of one of its chief state-level leaders. Born in Ohio and raised in Illinois, Edward S. Shumaker made a career for himself in Indiana, where he led the Indiana branch of the Anti Saloon League from the early 1900s until his death in 1929. His story demonstrates how religious and cultural influences merged in the American heartland into a moral reform movement that combined elements of traditional religion and politics with the Social Gospel and progressivism. As Shumaker saw it, the prohibition movement rested upon a fundamental argument about what it meant to be an American during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A powerful force in Shumaker's life as in the nation overall, the dry reform transformed Shumaker from a young man seemingly destined to hold a conventional Methodist pastorate into a political activist who helped make the nation dry.

Charles Oliver Brown at Dubuque: A Study in the Ideals of Midwestern Congregationalists in the Late Nineteenth Century

1984 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
Dewey D. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Most of the standard books on the social gospel mention Charles Oliver Brown's Talks on the Labor Troubles, published in 1886, the year of the Haymarket riot, as one of the early clerical statements on the problem of labor in America. Several of them also allude to Brown's controversy in San Francisco with George D. Herron in 1895. But these writers on the social gospel were unaware of Brown's importance, even though Henry F. May noted that a whole issue of The Kingdom, a paper issued by Herron's supporters, was devoted to the refutation of Brown's charges against Herron.

The Background for the Social Gospel in American Protestantism

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice C. Latta
Keyword(s):  
World Wide ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
The Great War

Although the social gospel has been described as “the first expression of American religious life which is truly born in America itself,” it was evoked upon the American scene by forces, world-wide in scope, which have everywhere brought about similar reactions in the field of religion. The full setting in of the industrial revolution in country after country of Western civilization created such problems for religion as to lead within a generation to a vigorous enunciation of a social ethic by alert religious leaders of the country. The decade of the 1770's in England saw the beginnings of what Lewis Mumford calls the “paleotechnic” phase of civilization and within a generation Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” were thundering against the iniquities of the slave trade. Despite the passions of the great war with France, the cold rigidities of the “dismal science,” and the distracting ecclesiastical convulsions of the Oxford Movement, the development of a social emphasis in religion went on to find expression in the charities of Peabody and Shaftesbury, and the positive teachings of Maurice and Kingsley.

A Social Gospel Experiment in Newspaper Reform: Charles M. Sheldon and the Topeka Daily Capital

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billie Barnes Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Social Gospel ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

One of the most interesting exponents of the social gospel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon of Topeka. Among his many social crusades during his years in the pulpit was his experimentation with the editing of a daily newspaper according to Christian principles.

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