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A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History)

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"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 with it. Bound up in a dramatic cultural transformation as the older Protestant- informed Victorian order gave way to a modern, secular American society after World War I, the Social Gospel moved more in parallel rather than in apposition with these trends. By the 1920s, Curtis concluded, the adherents to the Social Gospel's ideas and actions made it easier for Protestant Americans to embrace a secular culture in which Protestantism was not prominently featured. They contributed to an American culture that validated abundance, consumption, and self-realization. Social Gospelers, reformers though they were, created not a critique of modern capitalism, but rather a consuming faith in the material abundance it promised (p. 278).

The Social Gospelers, therefore, not only accomplished positive social ends on a broad front but also established an intellectual rationalization for modernity that allowed contentment with the world. Curtis demonstrates this thesis through a series of biographical portraits of fifteen Americans involved in a variety of Social Gospel activities. In subtle ways these individuals came to embrace modernity and the secular social system that emerged in the 1920s.

There is much to praise and little to criticize in "A Consuming Faith." Susan Curtis argues her case well, and offers a convincing thesis explaining certain aspects of the paradigm shift that took place in American society between the 1890s and the 1920s. The most important caution I would offer, of course, relates to how far the intellectual leaders of any group reflected the opinions of the rank and file. Howard Zinn's warning is appropriate in this instance: "There is an underside to every Age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. We learn...about the thinking of an age from its intellectual elite" (Howard Zinn, "The Politics of History" (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 102). Can a series of fifteen elites accurately define the ideological origins and development of such an amorphous movement as the Social Gospel? That question may be unanswerable, certainly it would require some very detailed and imaginative historical research to arrive at a satisfactory answer. Having raised this question, I should add that this is not a major flaw of A Consuminq Faith. I would suggest, however, that readers bear the question in mind when considering the book.

"A Consuming Faith" is an important discussion of a significant reform effort that helped shape modern American society. It is one of several refreshing books to appear recently on the development of American religion. It should be of use to anyone interested in the development of American religion and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a sophisticated analysis of several historical trends focused through the lens of the Social Gospel, it is at once religious, social, and intellectual history and probably some other types of history yet unnamed. Those seeking staid history with emphasis on the minutiae of organizations and denominations will be disappointed. Those readers pondering broader vistas, however, will be rewarded by considering Curtis' work.