Casey Nelson Blake: New Century, Same Crisis on Walter Rauschenbusch & the Social Gospel

Rauschenbusch’s book revived the proud tradition of the American jeremiad to confront readers with the unsettling, indeed shocking gospel of Jesus and his early followers. A middle-class church grown lazy and comfortable, indifferent to social evil as it called upon individual sinners to repent, stood condemned by the very creed it professed to uphold. Even as he underscored that “Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type”-that Jesus’ greatest lesson for his followers was “how to live a religious life”-Rauschenbusch believed Jesus’ teachings were a desperately needed corrective to modern complacency. “Jesus was not a child of this world,” he wrote. “He nourished within his soul the ideal of a common life so radically different from the present that it involved a reversal of values, a revolutionary displacement of existing relations.”

In confronting the social crisis of his time, Rauschenbusch once again called for this revolutionary displacement. Eleven years of ministering to an immigrant church in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood left him grimly aware of the toll that exploitation, unemployment, unsanitary housing, and alcoholism took on working-class people. Godless capitalism was an abomination, in his view, manifesting itself everywhere from the miseries of the sweatshop and tenement to the atrocities Western powers inflicted on Africans. He denounced “fictions of capitalism” that seem unchanged a century later: “that the poor are poor through their own fault…that the immigrants are the cause of corruption in our city politics…that we cannot compete with foreign countries unless our working class will descend to the wages paid abroad.” Although he wasn’t a Marxist, he could pose the alternatives facing the church in terms as stark as those of any socialist militant: “If we serve mammon, we cannot serve the Christ.”

Rauschenbusch’s socialism, like that of his contemporary Eugene Debs, was less orthodox than it might initially appear. His critique of industrial capitalism was indebted to the radicalism of populist thinkers like Henry George, who defended an economy of small producers against land speculation and monopolies. For Rauschenbusch, as for Debs and George, the collapse of that economy endangered the rough egalitarianism and sturdy character traits necessary to democratic citizenship. What especially appalled Rauschenbusch about corporate capitalism was its degradation of work and denial of a common moral identity. “Man is treated as a thing to produce more things,” he complained, while a consumer ethic substituted envy and resentment for solidarity and fellow feeling. “The ostentation of the overfull purses of the predatory rich lures all society into the worship of false gods.”

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