Introduction

Abstract

Abstract We need to begin the story of the Social Gospel with the Gilded Age crisis of denominational authority. In the generation after the Civil War, the poor Americans who moved north and west to populate factory and mining towns had little association with well-resourced, denominational churches. Clergy affiliated with the largest Protestant denominations observed this demographic shift away from their tutelage as an assault on the future of Protestant clerical authority over the nation. The Social Gospel movement, that cross-denominational movement of clergy affiliated with the Federal Council of Churches, was a response to the very real possibility that the socialist and labor movements, which were growing in popularity among the ranks of the working classes, would inaugurate a secular, modern welfare state that made little room for churches.