Protestantism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Religion in America

The Gilded Age

• Protestantism loses much self-confidence

• Rise of agnosticism

– Effect of war and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

– Robert G. Ingersoll, Union veteran, popular speaker & writer

– Heyday of Free Thinkers

Rise of Liberal Protestantism

• Congregational Rev. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 1847

• Antebellum reform movements: Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers

– Sabbatarianism

– Temperance

– Abolitionism

– Women’s rights

• Acceptance of modern science and Bible criticism

• Immanent and loving God

• Focus on the Christian life

– De-emphasis on sin & hell

– Attack social causes of sin

• Postmillennialism: Kingdom Theology

Rising cities & industrial capitalism

The question of the labor movement

• Railroad strike of 1877

– Police, militias, and army fire on workers, who respond with violence

– 100 die and $100 million in damage

• Labor violence for next 25 years

– 1880-1900: 6.6 million workers in 23,000 strikes

• Huge wave of immigrants, mostly non-Protestants

– Poles, Italians, Russian Jews, Eastern Europeans, Canadians

• Class war? Socialism? Communism?

Christian Response

• Millionaires and working classes

– Andrew Carnegie and the “Gospel of Wealth”

• Evangelizing the working class

– The Y.M.C.A. & Salvation Army

– Businessmen fund Dwight Moody

– From salesman to evangelist

– Singer Ira Sankey

– Simple Bible message

– Moody Bible Institute & Northfield Seminary

Congregationalists:
godly community

• Landscape architecture and the City Beautiful movement

• From commons to parks

– New York City’s Central Park, 1858

– Yosemite, 1864

– Yellowstone National Park, 1872

• Conservation, forestry, sustainable agriculture

• Katharine Lee Bates

– “America the Beautiful,” 1893

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

The Social Gospel

• Congregational Rev. Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity, 1887

• Congregational Rev. Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps, 1896

• Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 1907

Living the Social Gospel

• The settlement house movement

– Jane Addams & Hull House, Chicago, 1889

• Ministering to the lower classes

– Missions and aid to immigrants and workers

Progressive Presbyterians:
restrain greed, ensure fairness

• Grover Cleveland & Benjamin Harrison, 1885-1897

• Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909

– Progressive Party, 1912

– “Confession of Faith”

– “Onward, Christian Soldiers”

– “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.”

• Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921

• Regulated business and banking

• Protected labor

• Set up the National Parks and National Forests systems

• Promoted conservation