Women and the Social Gospel Novel

SUSAN H. LINDLEY

American Social Gospel and the role of women in American religion
recently have emerged as significant concerns for American religious histori-
ans, after a period of relative neglect. In 1976 Ronald C. White, Jr. and C.
Howard Hopkins called for a fresh, more inclusive look at the Social Gospel,
pointing to women as among the "neglected reforms and reformers" in Social
Gospel study. ¹ Scholarship on women and religion has exploded in the last
decade, focusing not only on important individuals and traditional religious
images of women, but also on women's own ideas and activities. This article is
presented with the hope that it not only may add to the study of the history of
women in American religion, but also may contribute to a new understanding
of the Social Gospel movement.

There is considerable scholarly debate on the exact nature and duration of
the Social Gospel movement. For the purpose of this paper, I have considered
the Social Gospel movement to extend from the 1870s through World War I,
although, of course, it had roots before and continuities after this period. The
concern of the Social Gospelers was to relate the Christian message to the
needs of their age, especially the problems of the emerging labor movement
and structures of American economic and political systems. Theologically, the
Social Gospel was allied closely to nineteenth-century liberalism. However, it
did not exclude evangelical roots, evident in such an unquestioned leader as
Rauschenbusch, and its proponents spanned a theological spectrum from
mild conservatism to Christian socialism. ² Distinctive theological insights of
the Social Gospel, such as the conviction that the social nature of sin and
salvation is at least as important to understand as individual sin, reform, and
salvation, are clearest in the most articulate and theologically trained leaders

Ms. Lindley is associate professor of religion in Saint Olaf College, Northfield,
Minnesota.

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