“What Would Jesus Do?”: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel

Abstract

This essay makes the historical case for an unrecognized genre of fiction–the homiletic novel. Drawing on traditional Protestant interpretive practices, Social Gospel authors fused forms of spiritual identification rooted in Protestant homiletic exercises (catechisms, interactive allegories, conversion dramas) with practical Christianity's emerging ethic of social intervention, attaching older modes of readerly identification to new sites of literary culture. Homiletic novels democratized pastoral guidance and legitimized fiction as a repository of ethical experience. Through interactive fictions offering virtual models of spiritual agency in the material world, evangelicals prepared for real forays into urban poverty to intervene in human suffering. The homiletic novel became the most popular literary form of the Progressive Era and continues to flourish in the present–day American political, cultural, and religious environment. In tracing its rise and pervasive influence, this study revises conventional histories of literary genre by suggesting an alternative origin for American literary realism. (GSJ)