Abstract
Between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War the Protestant churches in England and North America came to share a pronounced and active concern for social problems. Until recently, ‘Social Christianity’, or the religion of the Institutional Church, the Mission Hall, the Settlement House, and the American Social Gospel movement, has largely been explained by historians as an outgrowth of Christian humanitarianism evoked in the Protestant churches by the pressing social needs of a modern age.* Whether a direct Christian response to immediate urban and industrial problems,1 or the expression of a reform spirit rooted in the tradition of evangelical revivalism,2 or as part of an all-embracing religious mission to Christianise and Protestantise the fledgling North American nations,3 the prevailing historical view of social Christianity has been one of church extension, conditioned by the late-nineteenth-century concentration of urban and industrial life, and influenced by a debate over the ‘Social Question’, which drew widespread public attention in England and North America by the turn of the century.
Charlie, I am being driven on by some inevitable force to a kind of rationalistic unitarianism. I have struggled against the current — am struggling — but see no other end at present. I cannot believe against my will.
(J.S. Woodsworth 1902)
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Notes
Charles H. Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven, Conn., 1940); Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949); Paul Carter, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel (Ithaca, 1956); R.M. Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues (Chapel Hill, NC, 1958); Stephen Mayor, The Churches and the Labour Movement (London, 1947); K.S. Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963); Jeffery Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society (Oxford, 1982). For a different view, close to my own, see Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators (Toronto, 1988).
Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (New York, 1957); Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941 (Berkeley, Calif., 1960); Richard Allen, The Social Gospel in Canada (Ottawa, 1975).
Richard Allen, The Social Passion (Toronto, 1971); Robert T. Handy, A Christian America (Oxford, 1971); George N. Emery, ‘Methodism on the Canadian Prairies, 1896–1914’ (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1970).
Josiah Strong, The New Era (New York, 1893) 240.
Kenneth McNaught, A Prophet in Politics (Toronto, 1959) 35.
Marilyn Barber, ‘An Introduction’, to J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates (Toronto, 1972) vii; emphasis mine. A re-issue of the original edition of 1904.
Bruce Hutchinson, The Unknown Country (Toronto, 1943) 92.
Grace MacInnis, J. S. Woodsworth: A Man to Remember (Toronto, 1953) 37–8, 49, 59, 113; McNaught, A Prophet in Politics, 36, 57.
ibid.; J.W. Sparling, ‘A Trinity of Testimony’, Canadian Methodist Quarterly, 2, no. 3 (July 1890) 300.
UCA File on A. Stewart. See also Richard Allan, ‘Children of Prophecy: Wesley College Students in an Age of Reform’, Red River Valley Historian, 6 (Summer 1974) 15–20; A.G. Bedford, The University of Winnipeg (Toronto, 1976) 22–70.
Vox Wesleyana, 7, no. 4 (January 1903) 69.
ibid., 7, no. 5 (February 1903) 90.
Nathanael Burwash, Wesley’s Doctrinal Standards (Toronto, 1891) 71.
Nathanael Burwash, History of Victoria College (Toronto, 1927) 530; Albert Carman, ‘The Church of God and the Education of the People’, Acta Victoriana (1898–9) 10.
As Woodsworth’s own ‘New Evangel’ promoted the entrance of the churches into the realm of social service. The outward-looking liberal theology known as the ‘New Evangelicalism’, which swept the larger Protestant denominations in both England and North America during the 1870s and 1880s, contributed to the rise of the social gospel. The church must ‘go outside of its elegant sanctuaries, leave its padlocked pews, forsake its gentility and fastidiousness, and go forth to meet mankind’ (Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel, 45). See Mark D. Johnson, The Dissolution of Dissent, 1850–1918’ (New York, 1987) ch. 1.
R.M. Irwin, John Fletcher McLaughlin: Scholar Pilgrim (Toronto, n.d.) 47.
J.S. Woodsworth, Following the Gleam (Ottawa, 1926) 5–8.
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© 1990 Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman
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Johnson, M.D. (1990). The Crisis of Faith and Social Christianity: The Ethical Pilgrimage of James Shaver Woodsworth. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_12
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