Christianizing the social order

Front matter

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Foreword

When '' Christianity and the Social Crisis " was pubKshed in 1907, 1 thought I had said all that God had given me to say on our social problems, and might henceforth with a clear conscience leave that Hne of work to those who carry less handicap than I do. So I went to Europe for a year and devoted myself to the historical studies which are my professional duty and my intellectual satisfaction.

But meanwhile the social awakening of our nation had set in like an equinoctial gale in March, and when I came home, I found myself caught in the tail of the storm. ''Christianity and the Social Crisis" had won popular approval far beyond my boldest hopes, and the friends of the book drew me, in spite of myself, into the public discussion of social questions. Naturally my mind worked on problems which had been raised in my book, but had not really been taken in hand there. I had urged a moral reorganization of social institutions, a christianizing of public morality. Men asked: ''What must we do? And what must we undo? What social ideal should guide us? What methods can we safely use in realizing it?'' The most varied audiences followed the discussion of these problems with an intensity of interest that was quite new to me. Without the spiritual cooperation and stimulus of others this book would never have been written.

In 1910 and 191 1 I had the honor of delivering the Earl Lectures at the Pacific Theological Seminary at Berkeley, Cal., and the Merrick Lectiu-es at Ohio Wesleyan University. The latter lectureship carried the obligation

vii

Vlll FOREWORD

of publishing the lectures in book form. I take this opportunity to express my obligation to the Faculties and Officers of both institutions for courtesies which I shall never forget, and for providing the incentive to work out my thought in written form. These two lecture courses created the nucleus of this book ; the form, however, and much of the contents are new.

The subject of the book needs no such apology as is implied in the foregoing statements. If there is any bigger or more pressing subject for the mind of a Christian man to handle, I do not know of it. The problem of christianizing the social order welds all the tasks of practical Christianity with the highest objects of statesmanship. That the actual results of our present social order are in acute contradiction to the Christian conceptions of justice and brotherhood is realized by every man who thinks at all. But where do the sources of our wrongs lie hidden? What has wrought such deadly results from a civilization that has such wonderful promises of good? How can we cease to produce evil in despite of our right intentions? How can the fundamental structure of society be conformed to the moral demands of the Christian spirit?

The First Part of the book describes the present social awakening in the organizations of religion. Outsiders misjudge the part which the churches are taking in the impending social transformation because they are ignorant of the quiet revolution that is going on in the spirit and aims of the American churches. Few, probably, even of those who are taking an active part in their social awakening, realize fully the far-reaching importance of this great historic movement.

Part Two seeks to show that the christianizing of the social order was the very aim with which Christianity set out. That aim has long been submerged and almost forgotten, but it has reemerged simultaneously with the rise

FOREWORD IX

of modern life, and now demands a reckoning with every religious intellect, offering us all a richer synthesis of truth and a more distinctively Christian type of religious experience.

Part Three subjects our present social order to a moral analysis in order to determine what is Christian in the structure of society, and what is not. This traverses some of the ground covered in my previous book, but from new angles. In spite of its critical character the net results of the analysis, to me at least, are immensely cheering.

Part Four follows up this muster by showing that the unregenerate elements of our social organization are not quietly waiting till we get ready to reform them, but are actively invading God's country and devastating the moral achievements built up by centuries of Christian teaching and sacrifice.

In Part Five I have tried to trace in advance those fundamental lines of moral evolution along which society must move in order to leave its inhumanities behind and to emerge in a social order that will institutionalize the Christian convictions of the worth of manhood and the solidarity of mankind.

Part Six, finally, suggests the methods of advance, the personal and social action by which our present conditions can be molded into a juster and happier community life in which the Christian spirit shall be more free to work its will.

If this book was to be written at all, it had to deal searchingly with the great collective sins of our age. Evangelism always seeks to create a fresh conviction of guilt as a basis for a higher righteousness, and this book is nothing if it is not a message of sin and salvation. But its purpose is not denunciation. It is wholly constructive. Of ^^ Christianity and the Social Crisis'' it has been said that it is a book without any hate in it. So far as I know my own soul that

X FOREWORD ^^

is true of this book, too. I have written it as a follower of Jesus Christ. My sole desire has been to summon the Christian passion for justice and the Christian powers of love and mercy to do their share in redeeming our social order from its inherent wrongs.

WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH.

Rochester Theological Seminary, October 4, 191 2.

Part I The Social Awakening Of The Churches

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Awakening of the Nation . . . . i

II. The Response of the Churches .... 7

III. Social Conservatism and the Church ... 30

Part II The Revolutionary Destiny Of Christianity

I. Wanted : A Faith for a Task .

II. The Social Christianity of Jesus .

III. The Eclipse of the Social Ideal

IV. The Rebirth of the Social Hope .

V. A Religion* FOR Social Redemption

VI. Social Christianity and Personal Religion

Part III "our Semi-christian Social Order' 40 48 69

83 96

I. What do we mean by "Christianizing the Social

Order" ? 123

II. The Christianized Sections of our Social Order . 128

III. Our Present Economic Order 156

IV. The Law of Tooth and Nail 169

V. The Last Intrenchment of Autocracy . . .180

VI. The Reign of the Middleman 202

\TI. Under the Law of Profit 222

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CONTENTS

Part IV The Invasion Of God's Country

CHAPTER

I. The Moral Values of Capitalism .

II. Profit versus Life

III. Commercialism and Beauty ....

IV. The Institutions of Love and their Dangers V. Private Interests against the Common Good

VI. The Tragedy of Dives . . . .

VII. The Case of Christianity against Capitalism

PAGE

242 252 262 272 291 311

Part V The Direction Of Progress

I. The Channul Buoys

II. Justice

III. Property and a Job as Means of Grace

IV. Economic Democracy .....

V. The Economic Basis for Fraternity

VI. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus VII. '' The Powers of the Coming Age "

Part VI 1 The Methods Of Advance

I. The Pace of Advance 406

11. The Conservation of Life . . . » .412

HI. The Socializing of Property 419

IV. Community Life and Public Spirit . . . . 430

V. The Rise of the Working Class .... 448

VI. The Revival of Religion and the Conversion

OF THE Strong 45^

CHRISTIANIZINCx THE SOCIAL

ORDER

Part I The Social Awakening Of The

CHURCHES

THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION

For the last ten years our nation has been under conviction of sin. We had long been Hving a double Hfe, but without reaUzing it. Our business methods and the principles of our rehgion and of our democracy have always been at strife, but not until our sin had matured and brought forth wholesale death did we understand our own obHquity.

Most of us were eager to get the better of our fellows by seizing some advantage which the rest could not get. Our vast continent offered unrivaled chances for this great American game. But of late we have begun to reaHze that some have played the game according to the accepted rules, but with unexpected effectiveness. The natural resources of the country are passing into the control of a minority. An ever increasing number of people are henceforth to Kve in a land owned by an ever decreasing number. The means of trafi&c are the arteries of the social body; every freight car is a blood corpuscle charged with life.

We have allowed private persons to put their thumb where they can constrict the life blood of the nation at will. The common people have financed the industry of the country with their savings, but the control of industry has passed out of their hands almost completely. The profits of our common work are absorbed by a limited group ; the mass of the people are permanently reduced to wage-earning positions. The cost of living has been raised by unseen hands until several milHons of our nation are unable to earn even the bare minimum which social science declares necessary for health and decency, and all families living on a fixed income have felt a mysterious and suffocating pressure.

All this was the necessary outcome of our economic system, but it was a sore surprise to most of us when the process began to culminate and we saw the end of our own doings.

When the people in anger turned to the means of selfdefense provided by our political democracy, they found the weapons on which they relied in the hands of their opponents and leveled against themselves. The will of the people expressed through the ballot was often directly frustrated by election frauds and bribery. Even when the votes were properly registered and counted, they were as ineffectual as a blow on the surface of a pond. They merely served to give legal sanction to the manipulations of a political oKgarchy whose will was the real force in shaping our affairs. When the popular will did succeed in framing a party platform, the men elected to carry it out balked like Balaam's ass, because some mysterious presence (not angehc) blocked the way, and the people had no means of compelHng their servants to obey them, or even of punishing the guilty with any precision. The most august and powerful body in the nation, the Senate of the United States, had become a fortification of predatory interests,

THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION 3

and great States were shamed for long years by the contemptible men who were supposed to be their ambassadors at Washington. The federal courts, holding the final veto power over all laws passed in the land, were filled with men satisfactory to poHticians and big business.^ All courts had become so tangled in their own antiquated methods of procedure, and were still so permeated with conceptions inherited from the age of despotism, that the institutions of justice are to-day the chief props of social maladjustment.

The history of American politics in recent years has been a history of the reconquest of poHtical Hberty. Our nation has been in the position of a city that wakes up to find an insurrectionary minority in military control, with barricades erected at all strategic points. For a decade the people have been storming these barricades and seeking to overthrow the unconstitutional powers which had become our de facto government. The States are now barring out sinister financial influences by compelling the publication of election expenses and limiting their amount. They are trying to weaken the political oHgarchies by direct nomination. They hope to cleanse and rejuvenate the Senate by direct election. They are sweeping and ventilating the worst corners of our common home, the cities, by uniform accounting and commission government. They are turning our so-called representative government into self-government by the initiative, referendum, and recall.

All this is nothing less than a poUtical revolution. It is a second war of independence. It goes on all over the country with a curious unanimity of impulse which proves that it is not the artificial product of party agitation, but an awakening of the better self of the nation.

When the people began to regain political power, they

1 See William Allen White, " The Old Order Changeth," Chapter VIII, and Appendix, pp. 255-262.

used it to get at the facts. A series of legislative investigations furnished X-ray photographs of our national inwardness and threw them on a screen big enough for all to see. The magazines lectured us on the scientific material furnished. We saw the bribed voters of respectable counties in the Middle West startled by sudden publicity, as a lot of cockroaches in a dirty kitchen scamper away when the Hght is turned on. We saw the legislators of great States crowding around the jack-pot as hungry as pasture cattle for the pail of salt. We saw a great corporation compelled to pay back huge sums stolen from the government. We followed private wires running from land frauds in the West way up into the dome of our government edifice at Washington. We saw the most imposing institutions of banking and insurance caught in crookedness that had grown almost venerable and beautiful with age, Hke the patina that gathers on ancient bronze.

The insurance investigation in which Charles E. Hughes gained national fame in 1905 was the beginning of enhghtenment for great numbers. Subsequent inquiries were less epoch-making because they merely corroborated and expanded popular information. The sense of national sin and dishonor has become a settled conviction. Only the report of the Chicago Vice Commission has been able to wring a new groan of shame and desperation from the whole nation.

It has been a terrible process of national education. If in 1890 a prophet, personally conducted and introduced by an archangel, had predicted accurately one half of the facts which are now common knowledge, pubhc opinion would have dismissed him with incredulity.

It is proof of the moral soundness of our people that when they did understand, there was a revulsion of feeling. The standards of collective morahty rose almost with a snap. Some men died broken-hearted when they found

THE AWAKENING OF THE NATION 5

themselves fixed by the stern gaze of this new moral feeling. Others are to-day looking in this new Hght at the fortunes they gathered by the old methods, and are wishing that their hands were emptier.

Sin is the greatest preacher of repentance. Give it time, and it will cool our lust in shame. When God wants to halt a proud man who is going wrong, he lets him go the full length and find out the latter end for himself. That is what he has done with our nation in its headlong ride on the road of covetousness. Mammonism stands convicted by its own works. It was time for us to turn.

We are turning.

The other day I was walking along the seashore. A broad stretch of sand and slimy stones was between me and the water. Dead things lay about, stranded, limp, and gray. It was ebb tide.

When I returned after a few hours, a magic change had taken place. Over the stagnant flats the waves were rolling briskly and eagerly, as if they were young. The gulls were dipping and screaming. Gray ripples far out showed where fish were schooling. All the world smelled and felt differently. The tide was coming in.

The same sense of a great change comes over any one who watches the life of this nation with an eye for the stirring of God in the souls of men. There is a new shame and anger for oppression and meanness ; a new love and pity for the young and frail whose slender shoulders bear our common weight; a new faith in human brotherhood; a new hope of a better day that is even now in sight. We are inventing new phrases to name this new thing. We talk of the "social feeling" or "the new social consciousness." We are passing through a moral adolescence. When the spirit of manhood comes over a boy, his tastes change. The old doings of his gang lose interest. A new sense of duty, a new openness to ideal calls, a new capacity of self-sacrifice surprise those who used to know him. So in our conventions and clubs, our chambers of commerce and our legislatures, there is a new note, a stiffening of will, an impatience for cowardice, an enthusiastic turning toward real democracy. The old leaders are stumbling off the stage bewildered. There is a new type of leaders, and they and the people seem to understand one another as if by magic. Were you ever converted to God? Do you remember the change in your attitude to all the world ? Is not this new life which is running through our people the same great change on a national scale ? This is religious energy, rising from the depth of that infinite spiritual life in which we all live and move and have our being. This is God.

The American churches are part of the American nation. They are not a foreign clerical organization grafted on our national life, but an essential part of it from the beginning, a great plastic force which has molded our public opinions and our institutions from the foundation up. They are organizations of the people, by the people, and for the people. When a great spiritual movement like the social awakening shakes our nation to the depths, we may be sure tliat the churches will respond to it and have an active part in it. And so we find it.

Outside of the churches the social awakening is remarkable for the religious spirit which it creates in men who thought they were done with religion. They are getting a faith once more. They show all the evidences of religion, — love, tenderness, longings mysterious to themselves, a glad willingness to sacrifice time and money for the salvation of their fellows. What is this but religion ?

On the other hand, with the people in the churches, who have long been consciously religious, the new thing is the social application of their religious life. The old current of their religion is pouring into a broader channel of social purpose, and running with a swift flow toward the achievement of pubUc justice and love. Feehngs and enthusiasms, doctrinal ideas and moral purposes, which to a former generation would have seemed to have but a slender connection with religion, are now felt to be an essential part of the spiritual Ufe and, in fact, the great business of religion.

All this is big with meaning and hope. It has come over the churches so swiftly that even their leaders hardly realize the extent of this social awakening and the significance of the movement of which they are part. Many outsiders still talk as if they had heard nothing about it. If we are to discuss the christianizing of the social order, we must know the spiritual forces which are rallying and volunteering for the task.

Every great movement begins in the hearts of a few. ^^The soul is still oracular." Amid the din of the market some listen to the voice within. They are usually the young men whom the world has not yet dulled and debased ; the able men whose large minds look beyond immediate need and profit ; the natural idealists predestined by heredity for noble ends ; and the religious hearts in whom the inner light has created an intuitive comprehension of present wrong and future righteousness. The best are those in whom these qualities combine.

These prophetic minds condense the unconscious longings of the mass of men in concrete experience and thought. They become centers of new light and energy. They awaken and lead the rest because they utter clearly what others feel dimly.

Social Christianity has had a brilliant succession of prophets in the older nations of Europe. Our own country has lagged a generation behind. The modern social problem is the problem of capitahstic industriahsm and becomes acute only when a country becomes industrialized. ' We have been an agricultural nation until recently, and where industry did develop, the people still had the vastness of our land to ease the pressure of population and keep up the standard of living. Yet some foresaw what was coming. Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips, fighting for the emancipation of an enslaved race, foresaw a wider industrial conflict still to come.

I want to pay the tribute of honor to three men who were pioneers of Christian social thought in America twenty-five years ago : Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and Richard T. Ely. These men had matured their thought when the rest of us were young men, and they had a spirit in them which kindled and compelled us.

But all whose recollection runs back of 1900 will remember that as a time of lonesomeness. We were few, and we shouted in the wilderness. It was always a happy svrprise when we found a new man who had seen the Hght. We used to form a kind of flying wedge to support a man who was preparing to attack a ministers' conference with the social Gospel. Our older friends remonstrated with us for wrecking our career. We ourselves saw the lions' den plainly before us, and only wondered how the beasts would act this time. In 1892 Terence V. Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, then the most powerful organization of labor in the country, said, ^' You can count on the ends of your fingers all of the clergymen who take any interest in the labor problem." Mr. W. D. P. BKss, editor of the brave Christian Sociahst paper, the Dawn, repHed by enumerating sixty-two ministers of his own acquaintance who were not only interested, but deeply interested, in the cause of labor. (I count it one of my chief titles to mercy in the day of judgment that I was on that roll of the elect.) This was a triumphant reply to Mr. Powderly's assertion, but even Mr. Bhss, who probably had a wider personal contact with the Christian social movement at that time than any other man, knew only sixty-two names in the whole country, and padded the Hst by adding sixty other ministers who were members of the American Economic Association and therefore ^'presumably interested" in social problems.

It is the contrast with those early days which makes the present situation in the churches so amazing. The able lO CHRISTIANIZING THE SOCIAL ORDER

ministers who were not already physically or mentally old by 1900, and who were not rendered impervious by doctrinal rubber-coating of some kind, have been permeated by the social interest almost in a body. With the young men the social interest has become a serious rival of the old ministerial calling. Some turn to the settlements or to Y.M.C.A. work because it seems to offer more opportunities for social usefulness than the pastorate of a church. When students in the seminaries are free to choose their own topics for Commencement addresses, a very large proportion of them give evidence that the social enthusiasm has affected them. The addresses often come closer to being real confessions of their faith than the creeds to which they may subscribe at their ordination. The imprudences of some social preachers are at least proof that the heroic spirit is being evoked in the ministry. Their unnecessary vehemence is often the psychological form which fear takes in a sensitive soul that nerves itself for a shock of assault. Very many ministers in recent years have entered into living sympathy with the old prophets who felt ^Hhe word of Jehovah" burning within them.

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the spread of the social interest in the ministry is the fact that the old men and the timid men are faUing in line.

It is always a splendid victory of the spirit over the body when an old man compels his brain to overcome the physiological inertia of age and receive new ideas and convictions. In doing so, he comes out of the shelter of a system of thought which he has built in a long life and which hitherto seemed complete and sufficient, and takes his staff in hand once more to go in quest of the Holy Grail of truth. When a man of ripe years, whose religious horizon was formerly bounded by routine church work, soul-saving, and the premillennial hope, now opens his heart to the social hope of the new age, we may well feel the deepest reverence

THE RESPONSE OF THE CHURCHES II

for such spiritual energy. But we may also be sure that these old men would not see visions unless a new pentecostal spirit had been poured out on all the disciples.

And when the time-serving brother, who has so long been discreetly silent on social questions, wrapped in the furlined consciousness of being that highest type of the Christian apostle, a '^safe man," grew thunderous on child labor and meat prices, we felt that our labors had not been in vain in the Lord, and were willing in love to suppress the surprised query of John the Baptist under similar circumstances : ^^And who taught you to flee from the wrath to come?"

The social interest in the Church has now run beyond the stage of the soKtary pioneer. It has been admitted within the organizations of the Church. Formerly some determined spirit would force his ideas on a ministers' conference and be treated with good-humored condescension as a rider of hobbies. To-day the concerted study of social problems has become a common thing in ministerial clubs and conferences. Adult Bible classes and study groups turn by preference to books on the social teachings of Jesus. A valuable Hterature is being created to supply the need for cheap teaching material.^ Men's clubs, social unions, Chautauquas, and church conventions have created an active demand for competent speakers on topics of social Christianity. But the most astonishing change is in the temper of church audiences. Formerly speakers compelled the people to take their medicine whether they Hked it

^ " The Gospel of the Kingdom," edited by Josiah Strong, pubKshed by the American Institute of Social Service (Bible House, New York City), was begun in 1909, has a circulation of 6000 copies, and is used by about 500 classes and 12,000 students. The material has also been printed in the Homiletic Review. "Studies in American Social Conditions," a series of compact pamphlets, with an excellent classified bibliography in each, are published for the same purpose by Rev. R. H. Edwards. (Can be ordered at University bookstore, Madison, Wis.)

or not, and became adepts in sugar-coating their pills. To-day speakers have to be on their guard lest they be swept along by their hearers. Utterances that would have seemed shockingly radical ten years ago are now applauded.

Under the pressure of the social awakening the churches are officially seeking to get in touch with organized labor. In 1904 Rev. Charles Stelzle first attempted an exchange of delegates between the Ministerial Association and the Central Labor Council of Minneapolis. The idea was indorsed by the Presbyterian General Assembly and the American Federation of Labor. Probably about one hundred and fifty ministers of various denominations are now attending the meetings of union labor with more or less regularity. They have the right to the floor, are often called on, and in some cases have won marked popularity and influence.^ In this way they come into sympathetic contact with the great industrial working class, whose aims and moral quahties have hitherto been like an unexplored continent on the map of the churches. Under the advice of the Federal Councilof the Churches of America thousands of churches have set aside the Sunday before Labor Day as Labor Sunday; in 1910 the American Federation of Labor cordially indorsed this idea and advised its members to attend such services in a body. Some day we may see the ministers march in the Labor Day parade with the other workers, to assert their solidarity with the great fellowship of productive labor.

In the last five years nearly all the great denominations have discussed the social situation and the duty of the Church at their national conventions. This in itself is a notable proof of the spread of the social awakening. Some of the national bodies meet only once in three or four years,

1 Information about the exchange of "fraternal delegates'' can be obtained from the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

and every hour of the time is jealously claimed by the estabUshed denominational interests. If the social questions are given the right of way, there must be a strong public opinion demanding it. The meetings devoted to these discussions have repeatedly stood out above all the rest by their size and enthusiasm, and the barometric pressure felt by all. The GeAeral Assembly of the Presbyterian Church has had a noble history of more than a hundred years, but it never saw a greater meeting than that at Kansas City in 1908, when 12,000 people met to consider the relation of the Church and Labor.

Since 1908 the denominations have begun to adopt formal declarations defining their attitude to the social problems. Of course resolutions are often cheap bluster at an absent foe. But resolutions condemning the actions of its own wealthy and powerful supporters are not Kkely to come to a vote in any convention unless the moral conviction behind them is mature and irresistible. The masters of church assembhes are usually more than willing to let sleeping dogs lie without prodding them. The resolutions of recent years may settle nothing, but they indicate a great deal.