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: mainly Congregationalists & Presbyterians

– 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

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

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

• Progressives regulated business and banking, protected labor, set up the National Parks and National Forests systems, promoted conservation