The Social Gospel, the YMCA, and the Emergence of the Religious Left After World War I

Evans, Christopher

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_3

Christopher Evans⁶

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the impact of the Protestant Social Gospel movement on the development of the religious left in the United States, focusing upon the role of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Influenced by the writings of important social gospel leaders, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, collegiate YMCA youth explored how the Social Gospel’s emphasis upon the ethical teachings of Jesus could be applied to a range of social issues in the aftermath of World War I. During the interwar period, both radical and liberal activists with connections to the YMCA embraced shared commitments to economic justice, racial equality, and nonviolent direct action. This interwar activism laid a critical foundation for the religious left’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

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Notes

1.
Walter Rauschenbusch, The Social Principles of Jesus (New York: Association Press, 1916), 195.
2.
For a summation of significant scholarship on the historiography of the Social Gospel, see Ralph E. Luker, “Interpreting the Social Gospel: Reflections on Two Generations of Historiography,” in Perspectives on the Social Gospel, ed. Christopher H. Evans (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 1–13; and Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion: a History (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
3.
The earliest scholars of the Social Gospel, notably Charles Howard Hopkins, largely focused upon the Social Gospel’s origins within theological liberalism. However, scholarship has also noted the ways early-nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant engagement with issues such as abolitionism, temperance reform, and women’s rights served as a template for the subsequent development of the Social Gospel after the Civil War. See Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (New York: Abingdon, 1957); Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), and Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion.
4.
On the life and thought of Walter Rauschenbusch, see Paul Minus, Walter Rauschenbusch: American Reformer (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Gary Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), and Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming: a Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
5.
See, for example, William R. Hutchison (ed.), Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6.
Harry F. Ward and Richard Henry Edwards , Christianizing Community Life (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1917), 108.
7.
See, for example, Niebuhr , An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Meridian, 1956).
8.
For histories of the Social Gospel after World War I, see Paul Carter, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954); Robert Moats Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), and Donald Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). For alternative interpretations of the Social Gospel in the interwar period, see William McGuire King, “The Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism in American Methodism” (PhD diss. Harvard University, 1977), and Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion.
9.
See, for example, Murray B. Seidler, Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1967); Patricia Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Dan McKanan, “The Implicit Religion of Radicalism: Socialist Party Theology, 1900–1934,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (September 2010): 750–89; Leilah C. Danielson, American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the 20th Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
10.
Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 12.
11.
Rauschenbusch , Social Principles of Jesus, 10.
12.
Rauschenbusch , Social Principles of Jesus, 91.
13.
Eugene Lyman, “Social Progress and Religious Faith,” Harvard Theological Review 7 (April 1914): 149.
14.
See William McGuire King, “‘History as Revelation’ in the Theology of the Social Gospel,” Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 1 (1983): 109–29, and King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 49–77.
15.
See, for example, James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–6; Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune, 25–60; and Danielson, American Gandhi, 219–22.
16.
See Hutchison, Between the Times, and Jill K. Gill, Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).
17.
On the early history of the YMCA, see Sherwood Eddy , A Century of Youth: a History of the YMCA from 1844 to 1944 (New York: Association Press, 1944); Charles Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951); and Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Putney provides an especially helpful analysis on how late nineteenth-century understandings of masculinity impacted the YMCA’s missionary vision.
18.
Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America, 633.
19.
Ibid., 629. The early history of the YWCA reflects a parallel history to the YMCA, especially how the Student YWCA embraced social questions. See Anna V. Rice, A History of the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association (New York: The Woman’s Press, 1947).
20.
See Charles Howard Hopkins, John R. Mott: a Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979).
21.
Hopkins. History of the YMCA in North America, 397–98.
22.
See Donald K. Gorrell, The Age of Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988), and Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming.
23.
Rauschenbusch , Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 61.
24.
Rauschenbusch , Social Principles of Jesus, 103.
25.
See Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming, 181–84.
26.
Both McConnell and Ward were instrumental leaders in the Methodist Federation for Social Service, a denominational caucus founded in 1907 that drafted the first “social creed” adopted by a major Protestant denomination. See Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion, 119–27.
27.
Clarence Barbour, The Bible in the World Today (New York: Association Press, 1911), 55.
28.
Harry Emerson Fosdick , Manhood of the Master (New York: Association Press, 1918), 49.
29.
Edward Steiner, “A Religion of Democracy,” in A Man’s Religion, ed. Fred B. Smith (New York: Association Press, 1913), 244.
30.
For an excellent summation of this theme, see Michael G. Thompson, “Sherwood Eddy, the Missionary Enterprise, and the Rise of Christian Internationalism in 1920s America,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 1 (2015): 65–93.
31.
Sherwood Eddy , Eighty Adventurous Years: an Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1955), 118–19.
32.
Ward , Harkness, and Oxnam were Methodist leaders in the ecumenical movement and in different ways crucial to the development of the Social Gospel impulse after World War I. See David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Rosemary Skinner Keller, Georgia Harkness: For Such a Time as This (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), and Robert Moats Miller, G. Bromley Oxnam: Paladin of Liberal Protestantism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).
33.
Kirby Page , Jesus or Christianity: a Study in Contrasts (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929), 230–31.
34.
Quoted in Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 102.
35.
Sherwood Eddy , Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It? (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 68.
36.
Page , Jesus or Christianity, 248.
37.
Although a critical aspect of the Social Gospel movement was rooted within the industrial North in the late nineteenth century, scholars have drawn attention to how many white Social Gospel leaders before World War I engaged questions of race and racism that emerged from African American church leaders in both the South and North. See Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White and Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
38.
Eddy , Russia Today, 74.
39.
Quoted in Randal Maurice Jelks, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 79.
40.
On the history of African-American work in the YMCA, see Nina Mjagkij, Light into Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852–1946 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994).
41.
Robert Shaffer, “‘A Missionary from the East to Western Pagans’: Kagawa Toyohiko’s 1936 U.S. Tour,” Journal of World History 24 (September 2013): 582.
42.
Hopkins, History of the YMCA, 525.
43.
On the broader impact of motive in liberal Protestantism , see David A. Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History 98 (June 2011): 21–48.
44.
Ernest Fremont Tittle , “Can Democracy Be Made to Work?,” motive (February 1941): 9.
45.
On Highlander’s impact on Parks, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), and Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).
46.
Myles Horton , The Long Haul: an Autobiography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 26–27.
47.
See Jelks, Benjamin Elijah Mays, 74–79.
48.
Benjamin E. Mays , ed., A Gospel for the Social Awakening (New York: Association Press, 1950).
49.
Benjamin E. Mays , Born to Rebel (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 354.
50.
Martin Luther King , Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper, 1958), 91.
51.
See also Doug Rossinow, “‘The Break-Through to New Life’: Christianity and the Emergence of the New Left in Austin, Texas, 1956–1964,” American Quarterly 46 (September 1994): 309–40; and Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune, 28–31
52.
Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
53.
In addition to serving as the longtime pulpit of prominent activist clergy such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin, it was at Riverside Church in April 1967 that Martin Luther King , Jr. delivered one of his first major addresses condemning U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
54.
Sherwood Eddy , A Century With Youth, 125.

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Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Christopher Evans

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History Department, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Leilah Danielson
Department of History, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Marian Mollin
Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo, Norway
Doug Rossinow

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Evans, C. (2018). The Social Gospel, the YMCA, and the Emergence of the Religious Left After World War I. In: Danielson, L., Mollin, M., Rossinow, D. (eds) The Religious Left in Modern America. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_3
Published: 16 May 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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