What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

PERSONAL FAITH AND SOCIAL ACTION: PARTNERS OR ADVERSARIES?

Which should take priority for Christians, proclaiming a social gospel or preaching personal salvation? Evangelizing individuals to make decisions for Christ or advocating for social justice? Furthering an activistic political agenda or deepening one’s devotional life?

Most thoughtful Christians would be quick to repudiate such a bifurcation of priorities, believing that it represents a false dichotomy—a dichotomy that runs counter to Jesus’ demand to love both God and neighbor. Nonetheless, many religious historians have concluded that precisely such a division has developed in American church life--a kind of “two-party system” existing within each of the mainline denominations (the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., the Episcopal Church, etc.). While these divisions have certain similarities to the political battles and “culture wars” going on throughout our society, it is important that we avoid making too facile a comparison between the ecclesiastical “parties” and particular political parties.

The two religious factions have tended to emphasize either the public engagement of Christianity in the social order or the personal implications of the Christian faith for individual souls. In addition, each faction has been linked with a certain type of theological expression—the more individually oriented faction with “conservative” or “evangelical” theology and the more socially oriented faction with “liberal,” “modernist,” or various liberationist theologies. Both factions have been known to demonize their opponents by caricaturing the others’ positions and by raising the specter of a “vast right- (or left-) wing conspiracy.”

In some respects, the concept of a public/private split in Christianity echoes an ancient division within the church. Some early movements, such as Gnosticism and Manicheanism, were notorious for the separation that they made between the temporal and the “spiritual.” Orthodox Christianity, too, had a dualistic streak, especially as articulated by church fathers like Clement of Alexandria, who appropriated then-current neoplatonic distinctions between spirit and matter. Later, medieval monastics struggled with how to find an appropriate balance between the “active” life and the “contemplative” life. During the Reformation period, Lutherans arrived at a paradoxical understanding of Christian existence known as the “two kingdoms”—the material realm of sinful human institutions juxtaposed with the spiritual realm of God’s divine rule.

But while the tension between faith and action has been longstanding in the Christian church, never has the polarization been so pronounced as during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—the historical era known as the “modern” period. How did the church arrive at this extremely divided situation? At least part of the answer to that question can be found by analyzing the religious impact of two very important influences that helped to reshape Western culture.

 The first major influence on modern culture came from philosophers in the late-seventeenth century who reacted to decades of religious warfare and to the dogmatic exclusivism that followed the Reformation by formulating an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers issued a summons to build a society based on the inherent equality of all persons. Human beings, they declared, were basically good, and were equipped with limitless potential if left to reason for themselves. According to this optimistic view of human nature, if educated (“enlightened”) people would slough off the bonds of “artificial,” humanly constructed restraints, then a “natural” state of interpersonal benevolence would prevail.

Perhaps most important for our purposes was the Enlightenment understanding of the individual self. Building partly on the Reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers and in opposition to the divine right of kings and other arbitrary authorities, Enlightenment thinkers posited the natural rights of all people. According to their design for society, each person was visualized as an independently functioning unit. Individuals were regarded as autonomous and self-determining, and each had the means to chart his or her own course of action. This understanding of personal autonomy had both positive and negative aspects.

For example, the Enlightenment stress on human autonomy provided an intellectual basis for the formation of Western values such as independence and liberty. The principle of the equality of all persons is the root of cherished American concepts such as self-determination, democratic freedom, and the sovereignty of the individual. Enlightenment thought was thus the chief source for our modern emphasis on equal rights, an emphasis that has been the inspiration for a variety of social reform movements from abolitionism to women’s suffrage to labor reform to civil rights.

 More negatively, the Enlightenment stress on the self-determination of each person had the tendency to encourage an unrestrained individualism within Western culture. Enlightenment thinkers were inclined to believe that society was a concession to human vulnerability, a contract to restrict liberty which was entered into by individuals for practical reasons—in order to obtain the benefits of social cooperation and to maintain social order. Society was considered to be a necessary evil, to be carefully monitored so as not to inhibit personal freedom.

The second important influence on modern religious culture was the Industrial Revolution, which developed in Britain in the eighteenth century and in the United States nearly a century later. (The Industrial Revolution in Britain was the social context for John Wesley’s ministry.) This industrial growth was undergirded by the concept of laissez-faire capitalism, an economic policy advocated by Adam Smith. Smith taught that the “invisible hand” of Providence should be allowed to regulate the market without any interference of human regulations. The economy, Smith believed, was a natural system which functioned best when left to itself.

Industrial capitalism demands a concentrated labor supply and is dependent on the differentiation of labor into component parts. This specialization of tasks results in economic efficiency, but it also separates people from knowledge about one another’s work (and, consequently, about the world in which they work). In addition, an industrial economy draws the means of production away from the home. As urbanization developed throughout the nineteenth century, social classes became much more clearly defined. Classes were insulated from one another demographically; consumers were removed physically and economically from the persons who produced their goods.

The social construction that developed under industrial capitalism divided the day-to-day existence of middle-class people into highly differentiated “spheres”: home (domestic life) in contrast to work (business life); the sacred realm in contrast to the secular realm; private morality in contrast to public politics; and religious piety and principled virtue in contrast to economic expediency and business compromise. A specialization of roles developed in conjunction with the differentiation of labor associated with the growth of a market economy. The common nineteenth century view was that there were particularly appropriate areas of influence for the various segments within society. To be more specific, religious practice and socio-political action had definite, prescribed boundaries—boundaries which were not to be crossed. Thus, the division of material and spiritual reality into segmented spheres was a product of a broader cultural understanding of the period.

Because of the prevalence of the Enlightenment emphasis on privatistic self-determination and because of the general acceptance of the market economy concept of differentiated “spheres,” Protestantism had become, according to an 1847 observation of Henry James Sr., “the citadel and shield of individualism.” An environment was created in which churches were expected to pronounce on issues of personal faith and morality, but have nothing to do with broad social policy, especially if it had political ramifications. In the United States, this religious/political compartmentalization was exacerbated by the legal separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment. While the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment has had broad popular support throughout American history, it has also had the potential to be misinterpreted as a Constitutional exclusion of religious and moral influence from civil matters.

The division between the spiritual life and socio-political action became particularly acute with the development of the nineteenth century notion of the “spirituality of the church,” a theory proposed by Presbyterian theologian J.H. Thornwell. Thornwell’s rejection of religious “intermeddling” with the “natural order” of society paralleled Adam Smith’s rejection of human manipulation with the natural order of the economy. The church, Thornwell argued “is not a moral institute of universal good, whose business it is to wage war upon every form of human ill....The problems, which the anomalies of our fallen state are continually forcing on philanthropy, the Church has no right directly to solve. She must leave them to the Providence of God.” Specifically, regarding the slavery issue, Thornwell insisted that the church “has no right to interfere directly with the civil relations of society. Whether slavery shall be perpetuated or not...these are questions not for the Church but for the State, not for Ministers but statesmen. Christian[s] may discuss them as citizens and patriots, but not as members of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Another theological factor that encouraged the separation of personal faith from social reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the popularity of premillennialism, an eschatological doctrine that emphasized the imminent coming of Christ and the destruction of the world as we know it. Premillennialists were pessimistic about the role of Christians in transforming society. Because of pervasive evil in the world, premillennialists believed that God’s final judgment was near. The thoroughgoing corruption of the present society meant that believers were to have nothing to do with social restructuring. Christians were urged to turn away from overly exclusive concerns with the world and to concentrate on the eternal spiritual condition of their neighbors.

Not all American Protestants agreed with the premillennialists’ rejection of the world or with Thornwell’s strict limitation on what he considered to be the proper sphere of activity for Christians. Charles Finney and many other nineteenth century evangelical revivalists, for example, believed that the church should advocate forcefully for social and political change regarding such issues as alcohol abuse, slavery, the oppression of Native Americans, and the demand for equal rights for women. The integration of personal piety, evangelism, and social concern was also evident in the ministry of W. Rauschenbusch and other early champions of the social gospel movement.

Socially engaged Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began as an evangelical enterprise, but along the way some of its adherents—especially those caught up in the biblical criticism and religious pluralism of the period—became disillusioned with orthodox Protestantism. While Rauschenbusch and other early social gospellers were able to keep individual piety and social witness in a creative tension, not all of their successors were so adept. Some later social gospel theologians, such as S. Mathews, moved beyond the evangelical roots of Protestantism and espoused theological “modernism.” Modernists abandoned much of the traditional Christian doctrinal core while still supporting the social agenda of the Protestant churches. For Mathews, Jesus was not a personal savior, but a guide and symbol for religious altruism. Among modernists, it became convenient to stress social ministry and to neglect evangelism and individual spirituality, which seemed to them to be uncritically tied to an outmoded theological system. Christ’s work of personal salvation from sin, modernists frankly admitted, was “left out” of their version of religion. 

In response to this threat against evangelism and traditional theology, some conservative Protestant leaders at the turn of the twentieth century began to emphasize the need for increased attention to the Bible and the “fundamental” doctrines of the faith. Though both the social gospellers and the conservatives could rightly claim that they had roots in the evangelicalism of the previous century, by 1920 they did not want to claim any common heritage. The possibility that one could hold both a revivalistic gospel and a social gospel came to be increasingly difficult. The polarization between the social gospellers and those who came to be called “fundamentalists” became more and more acute. The evangelist Billy Sunday, for instance, gloried in his popular image as a fighting fundamentalist who had no time for social ministry. “We’ve had enough of this godless social service nonsense,” Sunday declared when asked about his support for religious activities other than evangelism. Evangelicals who had been engaged in social action gradually pulled back from their commitments. By the 1920s, Protestants of an evangelistic and pietistic bent were almost all leaning toward conservative fundamentalism and a rejection of any transformation of social structures. 

At the same time, liberalism had little tolerance for evangelical theology and its emphasis on an affective conversionist faith. In 1919, for example, the liberal magazine, Christian Century, wrote disparagingly about “the embarrassment and evils of...revivalism [and] traditional theology.” By the 1920s, those Protestants who were firmly committed to social change were increasingly found to have a modernist theological position. The modernists considered traditional evangelism to be irrelevant and out-of-date, and they were suspicious of any public articulation of piety. 

 The polarization was sharp and the suspicions were deep. Conservatives thought that a stress on social action took away from the primary evangelistic mission of the church—leading people to personal faith in Christ. Meanwhile, liberals thought that a stress on individual salvation and affective piety took away from the primary transformative mission of the church—bringing God’s justice to an oppressive society. Beginning before the Civil War, and completed by the 1920s, an evangelistic stress on personal conversion was almost invariably linked with conservative obscurantism, while the social gospel was linked with “liberalism,” “modernism,” and, increasingly, with outright secularism. The “two-party system” of American Protestantism had become firmly demarcated and entrenched in the religious psyche—and it is much the same today. 

Nevertheless, from the age of John Wesley to the present, there has been an unbroken chain of persons who have belied the division between evangelistic vital piety and social transformation—people such as Charles Finney, Frances Willard, Mary McLeod Bethune, Toyohiko Kagawa, E. Stanley Jones, Howard Thurman, Clarence Jordan, Orlando Costas, and many others—all of whom have insisted that both a fervent faith and social action are necessary for a true commitment to the gospel. Contrary to the compartmentalization in much of Western society, they did not separate their lives into distinct sacred and secular spheres; rather, their social justice advocacy and religious devotion were conceived of in a comprehensive way. They experienced a growing, vibrant relationship with Christ and they interpreted that experience with an activistic theology. In spite of cultural pressures to polarize their spirituality, they maintained a holistic vision, and thus they offer to us outstanding examples of Christian integration. 

For further information on the “two-party system” and to learn more about persons who have demonstrated a holistic faith, see D.W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (reprint ed.; Hendrickson, 1989); J.M. Schmidt, Souls or the Social Order: The Two-Party System in American Protestantism (Carlson, 1991); R.S. Keller, Spirituality and Social Responsibility: The Vocational Vision of Women in the United Methodist Church (Abingdon, 1993); and D.M. Strong, They Walked in the Spirit: Personal Faith and Social Action in America (Westminster/John Knox, 1997). 
 

By Douglas M. Strong, John Wesley Fellow, now Professor of Church History and Historical Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary.