A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture

"A Consuming Faith" is an important study of the ideology of the Social Gospel movement present among American Christians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Curtis argues that the Social Gospel provided a necessary linkage between the Protestant-Victorian construct of society of the nineteenth century and the more secular consumer culture that emerged following World War I. Most Social Gospel reformers of the 1890s shared middle-class origins and a concern for the underside of America civilization. They have been portrayed, usually accurately, as a generation of Christian reformers who gave up their middle-class comforts to enter a world of squalor and hopelessness to help others. They ministered in ways that were fundamental to an urban underclass.Curtis confesses in her preface that she was skeptical of the "do-gooder" image of those involved in the Social Gospel movement. Not surprisingly, therefore, she found good reason for skepticism. "For these American Protestants, responsible for acts of courage and kindness in the name of social justice," she wrote, "were also men and women bedeviled by private anxieties that impelled them into the arena of reform" (p. xi). Carrying farther the well-established theories of status anxiety developed for progressive reformers of the same era by George D. Mowry and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Curtis argued that they not only honestly wanted to accomplish good in the world but also desired to find meaning in a world undergoing rapid and sustained change in response to forces collectively identified as modernity. According to Curtis a range of motivations propelled the Social Gospelers and their activities; some overt and others subconscious, some lofty and others more base. The Social Gospel, Curtis suggested, emerged in response to the dislocations of the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century, including large-scale immigration and rapid and sustained urbanization. In its early expression the Social Gospel brought to the fore a sustained critique of industrial capitalist society and helped to displace the traditional American Christian concern for afterlife and eternity with an emphasis on the welfare of humanity in the here and now. For Social Gospelers the Kingdom of God was very much of this world and not the next. It was something of a utopian vision that represented a spiritual condition where righteousness and justness are partners with goodwill and charity. The result would be what Washington Gladden, one of the reformers profiled here, defined as "social salvation." To accomplish it Social Gospel advocates organized cooperative ventures, undertook political activism, and engaged in a variety of reform efforts with specific goals. The heart of Curtis' interesting and convincing thesis is that some of the elements of the Social Gospel's ideology, as well as its members' desires, sought a place not in opposition to industrialism and modern society but in concert