Christianity’s Conscience and the Social Gospel 505worshippers, the pastors tended to become even
more conservative. No more strident defender of
reactionary ideas existed than the pastor of Brooklyn’s
fashionable Plymouth Congregational Church, Henry
Ward Beecher. Beecher, a younger brother of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
attributed poverty to the improvidence of laborers
who, he claimed, squandered their wages on liquor
and tobacco. “No man in this land suffers from
poverty,” he said, “unless it be more than his
fault—unless it be his sin.” The best check on labor
unrest was a plentiful supply of cheap immigrant
labor, he told President Hayes. Unions were “the
worst form of despotism and tyranny in the history
of Christendom.”
An increasing proportion of the residents of the
blighted districts were Catholics, and the Roman
church devoted much effort to distributing alms,
maintaining homes for orphans and old people, and
other forms of social welfare. But church leaders
seemed unconcerned with the social causes of the
blight; they were deeply committed to the idea that
sin and vice were personal, while poverty was an act of
God. They deplored the rising tide of crime, disease,
and destitution among their coreligionists, yet they
failed to see the connection between these evils and
the squalor of the slums. “Intemperance is the great
evil we have to overcome,” wrote the president of the
leading Catholic charitable organization, the Society
of St. Vincent de Paul. “It is the source of the misery
for at least three-fourths of the families we are called
upon to visit and relieve.”
The conservatism of most Protestant and Catholic
clergymen did not prevent some earnest preachers
from working directly to improve the lot of the city
poor. Some followed the path blazed by Dwight L.
Moody, a lay evangelist who became famous through-
out America and Great Britain in the 1870s. A gargan-
tuan figure weighing nearly 300 pounds, Moody
conducted a vigorous campaign to persuade the
denizens of the slums to cast aside their sinful ways.
He went among them full of enthusiasm and God’s
love and made an impact no less powerful than that of
George Whitefield during the Great Awakening of the
eighteenth century or Charles Grandison Finney in
the first part of the nineteenth. The evangelists
founded mission schools in the slums and tried to pro-
vide spiritual and recreational facilities for the unfortu-
nate. They were prominent in the establishment of
American branches of the YMCA (1851) and the
Salvation Army (1880).
However, many evangelists paid little heed to
the causes of urban poverty and vice, believing that
faith in God would enable the poor to transcend the
material difficulties of life. For a number of
Dwight L. Moody, a lay preacher, saw the church he had built
destroyed by the Chicago fire of 1871. But the fire also intensified his
faith. His conversational manner appealed to working people, and
his adherence to the literal word of the Bible provided them with an
anchor in a sea of change.Protestant clergymen who had become familiar with
the slums, a different approach seemed called for.
Slum conditions caused the sins and crimes of the
cities; the wretched human beings who committed
them could not be blamed, these ministers argued.
They began to preach a Social Gospelthat focused
on improving living conditions rather than on sav-
ing souls. If people were to lead pure lives, they
must have enough to eat, decent homes, and oppor-
tunities to develop their talents. Social Gospelers
advocated civil service reform, child labor legisla-
tion, regulation of big corporations, and heavy taxes
on incomes and inheritances.
The most influential preacher of the Social
Gospel was probably Washington Gladden. At first,
Gladden, who was raised on a Massachusetts farm,
had opposed all government interference in social and