In 1893 Booker T. Washington took a train ride of more than two thousand miles round trip from Boston for a sixty-minute visit to Atlanta. His sole purpose was to give a five-minute address at the convention of the International Christian Workers Association, which had provided his first chance to speak before a predominantly white audience in the South. While the significance of this event is relatively well known (in that this remarkable dedication of the black educator led directly toward his opportunity two years later to gain international attention for his cause in his famous “Atlanta Exposition Address”), an incidental aspect of the story points to a characteristic of the American evangelical heritage that has been largely forgotten.

The organization to which Washington spoke, the International Christian Workers Association, was a gathering of men who in the next generation would be known as “fundamentalists.” Its president was Reuben A. Torrey, later a founder and the dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), an editor of The Fundamentals, and an organizer of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. The board of directors included as well such evangelical leaders as A. J. Gordon, founder of the schools that now bear his name, and James E. Gray, who later was for many years the president of Moody Bible Institute and a prominent spokesman for the fundamentalist cause.

In the late decades of the nineteenth century, these men, together with their associates in the influential Christian Workers Association, were promoting a wide variety of evangelistic and humanitarian programs directed largely toward the poor and the outcasts throughout American society, especially in the cities. Evangelism was their chief concern, but integral aspects of their direct work with the needy were clubs, excursions, and farms for the children of the urban poor, rescue-mission programs of food and shelter, work by nurses in hospitals, visiting tenements and prisons, distributing ice in the summer and wood in the winter, work with blacks and Indians, medical missions, and many other sacrificial acts of Christian mercy. Aaron Abell, a reliable historian of the Christian response to the problems of the city, describes the Christian Workers Association and the “humanitarian endeavors” of these thousands of “active devotees of social Christianity” as the most important of the Protestant social-service programs of this era.

American evangelicals today have much to gain by recovering and understanding more of their nineteenth-century heritage of social concern; it can help them not only to set the record straight on a little emphasized aspect of their heritage but also to understand themselves. In recent years many evangelicals, reflecting a variety of social philosophies, have been urging that charitable response to social problems should be more prominent in our preaching and practice. Critics of evangelicals, on the other hand, have been saying for many years that the “other-worldly” concerns in our evangelism preclude much social compassion. By pointing to our heritage of nineteenth-century revivalism intimately related to vast efforts for social betterment, we can show the fallacy of our critics’ claims and at the same time find precedents for urging increased social concerns not as a startling departure but as a recovery and renewal of our own tradition. We can learn as well of the various emphases our predecessors successfully used to urge the application of the Gospel to men’s earthly needs.

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Varieties Of Social Concern

Revivalism was the leading theme in nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and the revival provided much of the impetus for social concern. Strong moral strains rang out the messages of the popular evangelists. They graphically depicted the enormity of men’s sins, urged repentance and dependence on God’s grace, and demanded lives dedicated to moral purity. Individual sin and individual righteousness were dominant themes, but individuals, the revivalists proclaimed, were implicated in the sins of the groups and the nation to which they belonged, and converted individuals must apply the Gospel of justice and love to all relationships in society.

In response, many converted persons banded together in “voluntary societies” to proclaim and apply God’s Word throughout the nation and the world. During the first half of the century hundreds of these societies sprang up, promoting missions, charity, and reform. Together, they rivaled the federal government in total expenditures—the “benevolent empire,” they were sometimes called. In the realm of social reform, the leadership of revivalists and their converts in the anti-slavery and temperance crusades was the most conspicuous illustration of how preaching the Gospel and applying it to the sources of degradation in society went hand in hand.

Together with the overall moral impact of the revivals, and the Scripture, prayer, and piety behind every benevolent enterprise, a number of distinct traditions and emphases shaped the general evangelical passion for love and justice among men. One major influence was the expectation of the imminent coming of Christ’s kingdom. According to the very popular “postmillennial” teaching of the day, the kingdom age would be introduced by a millennium of spiritual blessings and the spread of righteousness culminating in Christ’s personal return. Nations, evangelists often urged, must turn toward righteousness and purge themselves of all sins and exploitations so they could receive the blessings of the spiritual age. Fervor for such a national moral mission was frequently intensified by a second distinct teaching, the “perfectionist” doctrine found widely among Methodists and among the followers of the great evangelist Charles G. Finney. Together these postmillennial and perfectionist emphases—both of which flourished especially in the middle decades of the century—strongly encouraged works of charity and augmented zeal for a sanctified society following God’s law. (The best work on these emphases is that of the evangelical historian Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, Harper Torchbooks, 1965 [1957].)

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Other emphases in evangelical social concern, popularized by revivalists, grew out of their tradition of scholarship. Far from being anti-intellectual, as is sometimes supposed, evangelicals dominated nineteenth-century American college education, and accordingly much of the century’s academic analysis in areas now known as economics, sociology, or political science was provided by evangelical “moral philosophers.” In these areas the long academic tradition of New England Puritanism was still widely influential through most of the century. Accordingly evangelicals still talked about God’s covenant with the American people, a Puritan tradition stressing that God would bless or curse a people collectively according to whether they kept his laws.

A related theme, particularly popular in nineteenth-century analysis, was the more general concept of “the moral government of God”; it was believed that God’s universal sovereignty made it necessary to conform all aspects of society to God’s moral law. A significant implication of this was that evangelical social service was not confined to individual acts of charity, as is often claimed. Rather, social and moral legislation, as the anti-slavery and temperance movements again exemplify, were major interests of many nineteenth-century revivalists.

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There were, to be sure, strongly individualistic emphases as well in the teachings of evangelical moral philosophers. These were especially prominent in their economic theory, which did much to shape responses to social questions. Laissez-faire capitalism and the individual’s opportunity to work his way to success were standard teachings. While, as has often been noted, this emphasis on free enterprise and individual success certainly reflected the prevailing economic “liberalism” of the day, it is significant to note as well that the evangelical theorists always went beyond the secular doctrine in placing their strongest stress on the necessity of true charity. “Disinterested benevolence” was the term they most often used to characterize this basic Christian obligation. Francis Wayland, for instance, the Baptist president of Brown University, author of the most popular nineteenth-century American texts on moral philosophy and economics, and an unrelenting champion of free enterprise, was typical of evangelicals when in connection with the obligation of benevolence he affirmed: “All that we possess is God’s, and we are under obligation to use it all as he wills. His will is that we consider every talent as a trust and that we seek our happiness from the use of it, not in self-gratification, but in ministering to the happiness of others.”

All these evangelical emphases—the moral force of revivalism, expectation of an imminent millennium, “perfectionism,” the covenant, “the moral government of God,” confidence in free enterprise and the individual, and “disinterested benevolence”—did not represent disagreements as much as variations on a common theme, that sacrificial service to fellow men must be integrated with evangelism. Today, perhaps few, if any, evangelicals would agree with every one of these emphases; and reevaluation of specific means and rationales for applying the Gospel to changing social needs is always appropriate. Yet any such criticisms of our predecessors’ specific social teachings should not blind us to their example: they were dedicated to serving God by ministering to all the spiritual and material needs of others. We should be reminded as well that each expression of this dedication was built upon a serious effort to understand and apply the teachings of Scripture, especially those summarized in the command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Fundamentalist Background

The vitality of evangelicals’ commitment to ministering to every sort of human need is evident in their response to the changing social conditions in America after the Civil War. In an era often noted for its complacency, evangelicals by contrast were searching for new fields of service. Since the frontiers of America were now in the rapidly expanding cities, the revivalists, who had a tradition of moving with the frontiers, now turned their strongest efforts toward urban problems. Compassion for lost souls was the primary motive for evangelical volunteers to live and work in the slums of the overcrowded cities. While most middle-class Americans of this period seemed to prefer to ignore the almost overwhelming needs of the urban poor or to blame them on immigrants, Christian workers were there serving the poor with both the good news of salvation and programs for meeting immediate material needs. (I am grateful to Dr. Norris Magnuson for the use, prior to publication, of his manuscript “Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Welfare Work, 1865–1920,” which provides valuable documentation and insights on this subject.)

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The connections, noted at the outset of this account, between these aspects of social service and later fundamentalism have rarely been emphasized. One reason is that many historians have assumed that evangelical “other-worldly” concerns for “soul saving” were necessarily antithetical to concern to improve human conditions in this world. Accordingly they often suggest that modern social Christianity could not begin until liberal theology—a kind of desupernaturalized post-millennialism—had paved the way for the “social gospel,” after about 1890. A related assumption is that since the forerunners of fundamentalism frequently were pre-millennialists, they necessarily lacked real incentive to improve current social conditions, because they saw little hope for society before Christ’s personal return. Yet the fact is that if we look at the men who during the 1870s and 1880s were leaders in urban social service, we find that many of them were the very premillennialists who were also laying the groundwork for much of later fundamentalism.

A striking example is Stephen H. Tyng, Jr., a prominent Episcopal clergyman in New York City whose church hosted the first major American “Bible and Prophecy Conference” of premillennialists in 1878. In that same year Tyng’s church was granted a substantial endowment by some New York philanthropists to continue its notable “support of undenominational, evangelistic, and humanitarian work among the poor in New York City.” Without recognizing Tyng’s premillennial ties, some historians have even placed him among the forerunners of the “social gospel.”

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Other men closely tied to the prophecy movement were prominent innovators in bringing Christ’s work to the cities. A. J. Gordon and Arthur T. Pierson, for instance, were among the pioneers in developing urban “institutional churches” that provided a wide variety of socially helpful services to their communities. Dwight L. Moody began his evangelistic efforts among the poor in Chicago and never lost interest in such work; he inspired many of his associates to carry it on. Moody Bible Institute was founded in 1886 as an innovative attempt to provide a “training school for Christian workers” oriented to the surrounding urban needs. Associates of Moody, such as Reuben A. Torrey, who founded the Christian Workers Association the same year, showed similar concerns. Evangelism was their overriding motive, but practical humanitarian compassion was surely there as well. B. H. Warner, a Washington, D. C., banker, remarked to the Christian Workers Convention in 1892:

Religion is a practical thing when it walks down into the lowest dives of our land and takes those who have been buried in sin and wickedness, and lifts them up, cleanses them and sets them to work to uplift the rest of humanity.… Is not religion a practical thing that can induce people from all walks of life to consecrate their services to the bettering of mankind?

Or as Booker T. Washington said in an address to the same convention that would lead to his first invitation to Atlanta the next year, “My friends, my heart has been drawn to this convention mostly, if I understand its object correctly, because it seeks not only to save the soul but the body as well.”

A Forgotten Heritage?

Although twentieth-century American evangelicals have been as renowned as their predecessors for evangelistic zeal, they have seldom been recognized in the way their nineteenth-century forebears were for leadership in charitable programs to meet social needs. The historical explanation for this change is, at least in large part, fairly evident. Early in the twentieth century liberal theology allied itself rather firmly with a social program labeled “the social gospel.” In many cases liberal theology virtually became solely a social philosophy. In response, many evangelicals emphasized that no “gospel” was the Gospel if it was not based on the biblical fundamentals of God’s work of redemption. These “fundamentalists” thus decisively rejected liberal theology; and liberal theology became so closely tied to a social philosophy that fundamentalists understandably rejected that entire social program as well.

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One result was that during the era of the modernist controversy, evangelistic-minded Protestants seemed no longer to be responding to social questions as positively as their predecessors had. Some important charitable works, such as medical missions and rescue missions, did indeed continue to flourish, as did many individual acts of charity. Furthermore, evangelicals could point to many lives, delivered by the Gospel from many of the worst effects of sin, as significant contributions to relieving misery in society. Yet when the term “social gospel” necessarily became anathema because of its associations with liberal theology, evangelical leadership in a broad area of collective working against injustice and for widespread concern for all men’s needs seemed to have diminished.

Many evangelicals today are reevaluating these aspects of their immediate twentieth-century heritage, and perhaps that heritage may be better understood when seen in its apparent contrasts to earlier precedents. Tradition, of course, is not a sufficient guide in our discussions of how we should apply the Gospel. God’s Word must be the test, and in that light deficiencies can be found in any era. These were many blind spots in nineteenth-century evangelical social thought, as there are, no doubt, in our own. Yet a historical perspective can assure us at least that we can undertake a variety of approaches to social application of the Gospel without necessarily diminishing our zeal for the purity of God’s Word proclaimed in evangelism.

Frank and constructive discussion of some important differences on social questions among evangelicals today is therefore very much in order. But discussion itself, of course, is not a sufficient response. Whatever our differences concerning specific programs, we can be united in our commitment to a truly evangelical witness in renewed and sacrificial efforts to serve Christ and our fellow men.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

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