For much of American history, Protestant evangelicals profoundly shaped civil society, and with it, politics. Take a huge period -- say from the 1730s to the early 1900s -- and you see the strong link between religious currents and political fallout.
From the Great Awakening that sparked revolutionary consciousness in the colonies, to revivals that propelled democratization of culture and politics in the new nation, to evangelism that fueled crusades against slavery, drink, and the subjugation of women, to the spirit-filled zeal that spawned urban missions and agrarian reformers alike, evangelicalism often provided an egalitarian political response to society's challenges.
Yet by the 1920s evangelicals had so disengaged from societal concern that the phenomenon has been dubbed "The Great Reversal." This disengagement explains why modern scholars so often equate Orthodox Protestantism with detached, other-worldly conservatism.
Many evangelicals in the past, however, combined a quest to save souls with a zeal to transform society. And that transforming zeal could take, and did take, radical forms. Charles Finney, the father of modern evangelism, espoused an egalitarian Christianity that propelled enormous forces for social reform, including the earthquake against slavery. Theodore Weld, another abolitionist firebrand, renounced the sexist laws of his day and turned his Oberlin College into the first co-educational and racially integrated institution in the world. Influential pentecostal preacher Phoebe Palmer published a 400 page defense of the right of women to preach. And Wheaton College founder Jonathan Blanchard envisioned "schools for prophets," who would "learn how to correct the follies and errors of the nation." To revivalist Christians nations, not just individuals, were subject to God's judgment.
Without an appreciation for this dimension, we vastly underestimate the evangelical contribution to American political development.
Now to underscore the significance of the Great Reversal, I shall focus on one aspect of late 19th and early 20th Century evangelical concern: its response to economic inequality. Of course, enormous complexities and contradictions abound in the Protestant response to emergent industrial capitalism. The Gospel of Wealth, for example, was embraced by many Protestant leaders, some of whom were frankly bought off by big business contributors to their churches.
But the same egalitarian impulse that chafed at restrictions on citizenship or that despised slavery, ultimately viewed with alarm the emergence of urban squalor and rural poverty amidst fabulous wealth of the Gilded Age.
To understand where this egalitarian impulse manifested itself, we are able to draw upon new scholarship that clarifies the dynamic nature of church membership in American civil society. Only by knowing something of the patterns of church growth and decline can we appreciate how different sectors of Protestant civil society might shape Americans' perceptions of economic inequality. Extremely helpful here is Finke and Stark's landmark study, The Churching of America, 1776-1990. By comparing market shares of the faithful over time, they come to an exquisite conclusion: The mainline is always in decline. In other words, they find a repeating cycle in American history: Upstart churches begin with fire and sacrifice, providing certitude, meaning, challenge, and comfort, especially to more marginal members of society. Once they become established, however, they often lose that sect-like tension with the world; their ministers become better educated, their affluent members comfortable. The church then loses its vitality, and its market share erodes as religious upstarts move into the spiritual breach.
By examining evidence of economic concern among Protestant evangelicals, we find that the egalitarian impulse was most vigorous, as it has been in the past, among the upstart churches, whose leaders and parishioners were more likely to emerge from, or rub shoulders with, the economically marginalized. Shorn of ecclesiastical hierarchies and open to untutored clergy, upstart churches -- such as those born of the Holiness movement -- uniquely attracted the peripheral, the less educated, the left out. Thus Finke and Stark help us understand how critics of the robber barons could be orthodox religionists, enlisted by revivals in the rural backwaters and urban slums, while some theologically liberal congregations, which tended to be affluent homes of emergent capitalist class, might embrace social darwinist economics.
Let's examine more closely the evangelical contribution to economic concern. On the rural front several million citizens flocked to the populist platform. I need not elaborate here, as Professor Sanders will chart the significance of the agrarian movement. But who were these farmers and their leaders? Most were evangelical Protestants, often fervently sectarian in their faith. The pentecostal Church of God, for example, arose contemporaraeously with the Farmers' Alliance and People's Party. Many of its ministers, in fact, were subsistence farmers. The Church attracted both rural whites and blacks with a characteristic sectarian blend: a rigorous moral code and an egalitarian message of the equality of all before God.
Because it focused on building a "cooperative brotherhood," the Holiness movement provided a spiritual critique of social darwinism, rapacious competition, and "monopoly capitalism" that "absorbed the community." Revivalist Protestant culture, indeed, equipped populists with potent biblical rhetoric and vibrant sources of solidarity, in a manner akin to the black church in our own day. The power of religious culture should not be underestimated. Far more than many historians acknowledge, Franklin Roosevelt echoed the cadences of revivalists and populists as he pledged to "drive the money changers from the temple of democracy."
In the urban milieu, too, it was often the most sectarian Christians who strove to practice the biblical injunction to "preach good news to the poor." Indeed, "holiness minded evangelicals" took the lead in work with the poor. They operated a vast array of social service organizations, rescue missions, homes for unwed mothers, job programs, industrial institutes, orphanages, relief efforts, and settlement houses. Evangelists preached and ministered among the skid rows and red light districts, striking in their close contact with the most marginalized of society.
Notable here is the Church of the Nazarene, whose founder "felt called in the 1890s into ministry to the poor of inner-city Los Angeles." That vision inspired missionaries across the country who saw their "field of labor" in the "neglected quarters of the cities." Also conspicuous was the work of the Salvation Army, which offered food, shelter, clothing, legal aid, and day care centers to allow mothers to work. Rescue missions for prostitutes, such as the Crittendon homes, provided "fallen women" with jobs and other support.
To these revivalists, in short, preaching the Good News to the poor was the sign of the true Church. Moreover, this close contact with the poor led many to agitate against structures that created such appalling conditions. A Salvation Army leader called for fundamental justice because, "To right the social wrong by charity is like bailing the oceans with a thimble. We must adjust our social machinery so that the producers of wealth become the owners of wealth." In turn, the Salvation Army's organ, War Cry, "asserted that the chief social evil in America was the unequal and unjust distribution of wealth." Charles Blachard also admonished Christians to fight injustices, such as "unequal taxation, benefits to favored railroads, delays in justice in the courts, justice denied to poor because of excessive legal expenses, pardons for corrupt officials while poor immigrants served out jail terms."
Circa 1910, the theologically conservative Christian Herald, endorsed labor unions, child labor laws, and better treatment of immigrants and blacks. We even see Christian muckraking, such as T.W. Steed's If Christ Came to Chicago, which caused a major shakeup there in the 1890s.
A vivid example of this blend of revivalist Christianity and progressive economic concern, of course, was three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. He fought for child labor reform, women's suffrage, the graduated income tax, government aid to farmers, public ownership of railroads, federal development of water resources, government guarantee of bank deposits, and laws to prevent profiteering. Like an old testament prophet, he chastised the forces of money and power arrayed against the common people. Note how he denounced a supreme court decision striking down child labor laws as, "a victory for capitalism whose greed coins the blood of little children into larger dividends."
Yet Bryan was also a traditional Christian who joined fundamentalist organizations, railed against liberal theology, and fought with all his might against the teaching of evolution. To him these were complementary positions. With Darwinism and biblical criticism dangerously chipping away at the foundations of traditional moral codes, Bryan saw no check on plutocracy, privilege, materialism, and a coarsening of life.
In short, from the antebellum era through the early progressive age, revivalist Protestantism expressed a reformist, often egalitarian economic impulse. Yet by the mid 1920s evangelicals had dramatically retreated from social concern and increasingly adopted antagonistic views toward unions and other progressive impulses. Why the Great Reversal?
A number of factors are offered. But the crucial explanation centers on a dramatic theological shift in the evangelical world -- a shift away from post-millennial optimism that Christians would transform society, to pre-millennial resignation that the world was hopeless until Christ's return.
Deeply fatalistic about the world, pre-millennial doctrine weakened economic concern. After all, why polish brass on a sinking ship? Or, as one preacher put it more delicately in 1914: "In the return of our Lord...is the only solution of the political and commercial problems that now vex us."
This pessimistic shift, in turn, arose out of intellectual crisis. Briefly put, Darwin's teaching about the origin of life, scientific attacks on biblical authority, and other secularizing forces, combined to shake the foundations of faith. Modernity itself seemed to undermine Christian belief, to narrow the zone of the sacred. Evangelical energies were thus siphoned into the defense of the transcendent against this new menace.
There is a final piece to the puzzle, however. When some of the most well placed and educated Protestants embraced Darwin and modern theology -- in a sense joining the enemy -- a bitter division erupted with those who still clung to fundamentals of the faith. And anything associated with liberal theology became suspect, including the Social Gospel movement. Social gospelers attacked economic privilege and called for social transformation; nothing new there. But as theological liberals, they evinced little Orthodox concern for the salvation of souls. Thus as attacks on theological liberalism intensified, the social gospel became tied with modernist heresies. Progressive economic concern among evangelicals was, thus, stigmatized.
And now for a coda to our story. Revivalist Christians, as we know, have re-engaged in spectacular fashion in our own day. But the economic concern is muted. There are charitable agencies, to be sure, and a few efforts reminiscent of the 19th Century, such as Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship. And we even occasionally hear distant echoes of the egalitarian impulse, such as when Pat Robertson shocked the Wall Street crowd with his plan for a year of Jubilee -- when debt would be forgiven and economic burdens lifted. But more often we hear an uncritical defense of the free market or some version of the prosperity gospel.
Animated, instead, by a sense of moral and cultural crisis, evangelicals now address what they see as the catastrophic collapse of the family, the fraying of the social fabric, and the marginalizing of people of faith. Economic inequality ranks low in such calculations, or is seen as a consequence of cultural collapse.
Now, this understanding of the cultural and moral underpinnings of economic advancement may be a genuine contribution to the debate about our economic challenges. But what modern evangelicals fail to appreciate enough, I think, is that global capitalism itself is a great engine of the secularism, materialism, and hedonism they decry. So unless deeper linkages can be forged between economic tides and cultural concerns, we will not see revivalist Protestants contributing much in fashioning responses to inequality in the global age.-- End -- Michael Pugliese