Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) is synonymous with one of the most enduring legacies of Christian reform, the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel was a movement in American Christianity from approximately 1880 to 1920, represented by church leaders who applied Christian teachings to the social-economic problems of that era. Among the movement’s major figures were Washington Gladden, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio, Charles Sheldon, author of best-selling Christian fiction (and the man who popularized in his 1897 novel, In His Steps, the expression, “What Would Jesus Do?”), and Rauschenbusch.    

Born only a few months after the beginning of the Civil War, Rauschenbusch was raised by his German-immigrant parents, August (a fifth-generation Lutheran pastor who later became a Baptist) and Caroline, within a tradition of strict piety. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, he spent eleven years as pastor of an impoverished German-immigrant church in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City. The experience of living in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city served as Rauschenbusch’s single biggest influence. 

Reflecting on his ministry years later, he recalled the anguish he felt over the poverty in his church, and the pain he felt officiating at the funerals of little children who died from contagious diseases. “Oh, the children’s funerals! They gripped my heart—that was one of the things I always went away thinking about—why did the children have to die?”

By the early 1890s, Rauschenbusch became an advocate for municipal reform, including the building of public parks, and government legislation that would protect workers from exploitation in the nation’s growing “sweatshops.” He preached that Christians needed to do all in their power to work toward the improvement of social conditions on earth, noting “the best way to get the self ready for Heaven… is to get this world ready for God.” 

After years of poor health, including becoming almost totally deaf, Rauschenbusch turned to full-time teaching. From 1897 until his death in 1918, he served on the faculty of Rochester Theological Seminary, where he taught church history and wrote several influential books exploring the relationship between Christianity and contemporary social problems. Rauschenbusch’s 1907 work, Christianity and the Social Crisis, was one of the biggest selling non-fiction books on religion in the early 20th century, and had a major influence upon subsequent developments in American Christianity.

Rauschenbusch possessed a powerful Christian faith, rooted in prayer and spiritual discernment.  He never renounced the Christian piety that had long been part of his family heritage, and was never afraid to speak openly about his love for Jesus. Early in his career, he collaborated with Ira Sankey, the partner of Dwight L. Moody, in translating Sankey’s gospel hymns into German. While Rauschenbusch worried that Christian piety was no guarantee of a relevant ministry, social action alone was a poor substitute for a God-centered faith. During his lifetime, Rauschenbusch was accused by his critics of dismissing the key tenets of Christian belief, a criticism that continues to be leveled against him by some today. Yet even a cursory reading of his writings reveals the depth of his faith, and an awareness that the quest for justice was inseparable from a vibrant piety.

Rauschenbusch tended to approach theology from the angle of a working minister. He engaged theological issues not from a systematic perspective, but in terms of the practical usefulness of specific ideas. At his core, Rauschenbusch was an evangelical who embraced that which was most sacred from his Baptist-pietist heritage, and a liberal who was not afraid to relate Christian theology to the social-political context of his era.  His theological outlook built upon an earlier foundation of pre-Civil War Protestant evangelicalism that identified conversion and social reform as central components of Christianity. While acknowledging that faith in Christ’s imminent return had the potential to stir conviction in the short run, he doubted if such a faith alone could be sustained with great zeal over the long haul. “The question is, which will do more to make our lives spiritual and to release us from the tyranny of the world, the thought that we may at any moment enter into the presence of the Lord, or the thought that every moment we are in the presence of the Lord?

Central to Rauschenbusch’s theology were his teachings on the kingdom of God. His view of the kingdom was never rooted in anything approximating a theological utopia. At a time when many secular and religious leaders were engaging a host of social problems related to industrialization, urbanization, and drastic economic disparities between the rich and poor, Rauschenbusch had the foresight to see these problems as faith issues that needed to constantly prod the Christian’s conscience. For Rauschenbusch, the kingdom of God was always an ideal that faith communities struggled to obtain, but could never ultimately achieve within history. Writing at the end of Christianity and the Social Crisis, he asserted, “we know well that there is no perfection for man in this life; there is only growth toward perfection... At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming.”

Rauschenbusch would be the first to admit that he was no economist or political scientist. Yet his economic-political analysis defined issues that succeeding generations of church leaders would follow.  Rauschenbusch defined himself as a Christian socialist and, for better or worse, that label has followed him to this day. Yet Rauschenbusch was a liberal capitalist in sentiment and in practice. While he did call for extensive government control and regulation of industries that he believed were essential to the greater public welfare (such as railroads and public utilities), he believed in the right of economic competition and was highly critical of Marxist theorists who advocated for a government controlled, command economy.

Rauschenbusch tended to derive the heart of his theology from the Old Testament prophets and the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). In this regard, his theology reflected the theological assumptions of many liberal church leaders of the late 19th century who attempted to show how Jesus’ teachings from the first century might be applied to conditions of contemporary society. Also, he incorporated disparate theological influences, ranging from Catholic mystics, Puritan and Anglican divines, Anabaptist martyrs, and 19th-century political thinkers. Christ’s teachings against wealth, his solidarity for the dispossessed, and his teachings on the radical reversal of values, where “the last would be first, and the first would be last,” represented the core of Rauschenbusch’s faith. It was this premise that made Martin Luther King, Jr. comment that Rauschenbusch reminded the church that Christianity needed to address both the spiritual needs of the individual and the material needs of society. “It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”

While there were later representatives of the Social Gospel movement that came precariously close to associating specific social-reform systems with the teachings of Jesus, this oversimplification certainly does not apply to Rauschenbusch. Despite the assertions of later critics of the Social Gospel, Rauschenbusch’s optimism was always counterbalanced with a clear sense of human sinfulness. While he did not rely on Augustinian views of original sin, he repeatedly emphasized the fact that humanity’s proclivity was toward sin. “Ethically man sags downward by nature,” he wrote in the early 1890s, “moral gravitation is downward. It is accelerated in us by years of sin and by the swirling rush of centuries of wrong which pushes us from behind.” 

Over two decades later, at a time when America had just entered World War I, Rauschenbusch repeated a point that he expressed many times in his career that realizing signs of the kingdom of God in earth came only through the human struggle for justice. As he noted in his last major book, A Theology for the Social Gospel in 1917, “The coming of the Kingdom of God will not be by peaceful development only, but by conflict with the Kingdom of Evil. We should estimate the power of sin too lightly if we forecast a smooth road.” Rauschenbusch’s beliefs on the collective nature of sin defined a larger tradition of Christian social ethics in the 20th century. A recovery of this tradition is essential for churches that seek to challenge a social complacency that uncritically accepts the sanctity of contemporary uses of political, military, and economic power that victimize the poor and the suffering.

Rauschenbusch never turned a blind eye to the sufferings caused by unjust economic practices, and believed that the church’s critique of these injustices was part and parcel of Christian discipleship. It could be argued that the problems that Rauschenbusch addressed in the early 20th century such as child labor, minimum wage legislation, and worker protection from unsafe working conditions, represent problems that have been “solved” through the ministrations of various 20th-century social reform efforts. Yet casting an eye to a landscape defined increasingly by the rhetoric of globalization, and its pleas for competitive markets, one recognizes that the causes Rauschenbusch fought for are still very much a part of our contemporary landscape. In looking at this unsettled landscape, we need church leaders who can reclaim Rauschenbusch’s emphasis that critiques current economic practices (whether from the “left” or “right’), through incisive theological worldviews.

Despite his love for the cultural and theological heritage of his German ancestral roots, Rauschenbusch was always clear that his political allegiances lay within the United States.  He loved the democratic history of America, and at times became carried away in his praise for the uniqueness of the American democratic experiment (and as a professor of church history, he tended to equate signs of the kingdom with those church movements that did the best job of promoting democratic precepts in their theology and ecclesiology). 

While never a pacifist, his later theology emphasized the tenets of nonviolence that characterized numerous social reform movements throughout the 20th century. Amidst the current tumult surrounding American military actions associated with the war on terrorism, we would do well to remember these words that Rauschenbusch wrote in his 1910 book, Prayers of the Social Awakening.

Grant to the rulers of nations faith in the possibility of peace through justice and grant to the common people a new and stern enthusiasm for the cause of peace. Bless our soldiers and sailors for their swift obedience and their willingness to answer to the call of duty, but inspire them none the less with a hatred of war, … May our young men still rejoice to die for their country with the valor of their fathers, but teach our age nobler methods of matching our strength and more effective ways of giving our life for the flag.  

The sentiment of this prayer is as true today as it was almost a hundred years ago. It is a reminder to us that social action by the church should never be divorced from a deeply-rooted personal faith.

Critics of Rauschenbusch noted the ease with which he formed friendships with politically conservative men of power (including a long-term friendship with the Rockefeller family). Yet the core of Rauschenbusch’s theology emphasized that the quest for justice was inseparable from personal relationships that were predicated on friendship, pastoral care, and mutual accountability.

In the spring of 1918, as Rauschenbusch lay dying of cancer, her wrote a poem, later named by his widow, Pauline, “the Little Gate to God.” This poem reflected Rauschenbusch’s belief that our lives are not judged as much by our earthly successes, as by our faithfulness to God--even when hope seems at an end.

In the castle of my soul Is a littler postern gate, whereat, when I enter, I am in the presence of God. In a moment, in the turning of a thought, I am where God is. This is a fact.

God is the substance of all revolutions; when I am in him, I am in the Kingdom of God And in the Fatherland of my Soul.

Is it strange that I love God? And when I come back through the gate, do you wonder that I carry memories with me, and my eyes are hot with unshed tears for what I see, and I feel like a stranger and a homeless man, where the poor are wasted for gain, where rivers run red, And where God’s sunlight is darkened by lies? 

Today, we find ourselves in a culture defined by the quest of Americans for economic and spiritual prosperity. Amidst the anxiety of our times, there is a great deal of spiritual substance within the heritage of Christian faith that Walter Rauschenbusch bestows upon us.  It is built upon a legacy of Christian social thought that is evangelical, inclusive of all God’s people, and not afraid to wrestle with the complex social and cultural ambiguities that define our particular era of religious history.


Christopher H. Evans is Sallie Knowles Crozer Professor of Church History and Director of United Methodist Studies. He regularly preaches and teaches in numerous Rochester area churches. His Recent books are The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch; The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture and The Social Gospel Today. He can be reached at www.crcds.edu/chevans.asp