The Social Gospel and the Reform Tradition in Canada, 1890–1928

Abstract

even though a sizable movement of reform was abroad in the land from the 1890s through the 1930s, a movement that was found in church and in secular society, and at municipal, provincial, and, progressively, federal levels. In the last chapter of his Progressive Party in Canada, Morton sees the decline of that party as a result in part of the waning of the impulse towards reform in society as a whole. Underlying and accompanying the movement towards reform through the political system had been the social gospel, a movement of which the most important function was to forge links between proposed reforms and the religious herira e of the nation, thus endowg ing reform with an authority it could not otherwise command. At the same time it attempted to create the religious and social attitudes thought necessary for life in a world reformed. But the world proved too intractable for the realization of the movement's high socioreligious hopes, and in the wake of the frustratin experiences of the g early 1920s, supporters of the social gospel, and other reform movements, took different paths; some withdrew from politics, some retreated to pragmatic politics, some transferred their enthusiasm to other causes (notably peace movements and personal religion), and others moved towards a new radicalism. The reform movement may be viewed from many standpoints, but only when it is looked at as a religious manifestation, a striving to embed ultimate human goals in the social, economic and political order, is its success and failure fully appreciated. The history of the social gospel in Canada is an account of that process. The social gospel rested on the premise that 'Christianity was a social