After 1932 the social gospel was propagated with renewed vigour. It received much greater emphasis, as an expression of the Federal Council's philosophy, than at any time previously. Yet it remains unclear why the social gospel was so popular among the leadership of the Council in the early 1930s. The general Christian public had no great enthusiasm for the social dictum of Walter Rauschenbusch. It was more concerned about the propagation of the gospel in its historic evangelical context.

One cause of the resurgence of the social gospel was unquestionably the impact of the depression on the morale of the people. The Council was reacting to the adverse conditions of the economic depression plaguing the nation. But this does not sufficiently explain why the Council perceived it as its foremost task in evangelism from 1934 on. Other reasons undoubtedly contributed to this new emphasis on proclaiming the social gospel. A new commitment to the concept of the kingdom of God on earth needed to be generated among the people at large and from the constituencies of the member churches, a commitment that had been notably absent for some time. Unless the Council succeeded in mobilising a grassroots movement of socially conscious Christians it would never realise the goals set out in the Social Creed. Thus the new emphasis on propagating the principles of the Social Creed was again designed to attain the kingdom of God on earth rather than to reach lost souls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

During the 1930s the Federal Council Bulletin urged its audience to propagate the social gospel. It exhorted its readers to reject any notion that there was a basic conflict between the preaching of the gospel as such and the need to make known the Social Creed of the FCC. The Federal Council knew that unless it could secure a deep dedication to the ethical principles of the Gospel, and a deep commitment to the Jesus who was presented as the living embodiment of these ethical ideals, there would be no motivating power for Christians to struggle for the realisation of the kingdom of God in the national life. Without adhering to basic Scriptural concepts, therefore, the Council's social appeals were couched in biblical terminology. Although mentioning the sin problem frequently, it was usually in the context of sins against society rather than sin against God. Regeneration was masterfully redefined as a new social awareness. The substitutionary atonement of Christ upon the cross was deemed insignificant and was rarely if ever mentioned. The Reformation dictum, that humankind can find peace with God only by being justified by faith, was simply ignored as without relevance. The residue of evangelical concepts which could be found in their gospel messages were mostly based on Arminian theology. Some Council members favoured a semi-Pelagian or Pelagian approach in evangelism.

In 1935 Samuel McCrea Cavert defined the role of the FCC in propagating the social gospel:

The first and basic task of the Church is to help men gain and hold a sense of the spiritual meaning of life ... If the Church fails here it fails everywhere and becomes a broken cistern from which thirsty men can draw no water. The second great task of the Church is to hold before men the Christian ideal of life and to train them for Christian living. The idea that by some external magic we can secure a Christian society without training the individual Christian motives is a subtle illusion. We cannot permanently solve a single problem without changing the human heart.

McCrea Cavert recognises clearly that the hearts of men must undergo a basic transformation before the society, in which they live, can be changed. The >spiritual meaning of life' mentioned above refers to a transcendental quality of life which rises above the mundane and purely material interests of daily existence. Yet the author did not attribute any significance to the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, conversion, and sanctification.

Against this background of a socially motivated gospel ministry, the FCC entered upon its self-conferred task with a new determination under the direction of Dr William Hiram Foulkes, who succeeded Dr Charles Goodell as secretary for evangelism early in 1933, and then under William S. Abernathy, who took office in January 1935.

In 1934 the Council began to use a new, more aggressive, strategy to evangelise the American public, as it became increasingly clear that the previous approach was failing to reach many segments of society. Accordingly, in 1935, a national preaching mission was announced for the autumn of that year. The membership of the preaching mission was drawn almost exclusively from Northern church circles and, of these, largely from the Northern Baptist Convention and Northern Methodist churches. Some of the most famous preachers in the country offered their services in propagating the social gospel: Albert Beaven, former President of the FCC and president of the Rochester-Colgate Divinity School; Lynn Harold Hough, Dean of Drew Seminary; Bishop Ivan Lee Holt of St. Louis; Paul Scherer; George A. Buttrick; and E. Stanley Jones. Most of them shared a common theological outlook. They were the recognised paragons of liberal theology. Despite the predominance of these preachers, some evangelicals were also named as participants of the mission. They included the Methodist Bishop Arthur Moore of Atlanta and Pastor George W. Truitt of the First Baptist Church of Dallas.

The national preaching mission was well underway in 1936. The Council reported that missions had been held in twenty-eight cities and that the total attendance for the meetings was about twenty million with some twenty-three thousand ministers participating. Although the FCC was well pleased with these statistics, the preaching mission was continued in 1937 with an even greater number of ministers participating. In 1940 the Council organised a new series of national evangelistic events with the inauguration of the National Christian Missions program. The first was held in Kansas City, Missouri, in September 1940 and the last in Los Angeles in March 1941; each mission lasted one week. The missions were held in twenty cities and over two hundred speakers took part. E. Stanley Jones participated in all twenty-two missions. Murial Lester of London and Adolf Keller of Geneva also played prominent roles.

In 1938 the FCC concentrated its preaching missions on university campuses. This evangelistic campaign was not officially part of the national preaching mission, but another facet of the nationwide crusade to propagate the social gospel. It was certainly one of the more successful propaganda enterprises established under the tutelage of the FCC. Missions were held in sixteen colleges and universities with sixty-six preachers involved. E. Stanley Jones and T.Z. Koo were the featured speakers at many of the schools. They skilfully presented the social gospel and liberal Christianity in an attractive form to their student audiences. Some one hundred and thirteen thousand students attended these meetings, which were held at such schools as Ohio State University, and the universities of Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

In 1939 the growing crisis in Europe and the outbreak of war in September of that year brought a shift of interest among the students, and the university missions were gradually phased out. Yet even in 1939 preaching missions were conducted on twenty college and university campuses. In spite of this unified and well financed attempt to make liberal theology appealing to large numbers of students, it is not clear that these efforts left any lasting impressions on their minds. Many of them discovered that liberal theology, despite its pacifist philosophy, could not sufficiently answer the pressing question of how to avert war in a modern world. The idealism of liberal theologians was useless in dealing with the crisis of armed conflict confronting Europe and America.

Unable to assess the true impact of the preaching missions, and elated by the positive, but mostly superficial, reception of the social gospel, the Council regarded the national campaign an overall success. At least it accomplished its purpose of calling the Christian public to arms, to defend a western civilisation on the verge of overthrow by irreligion. The Council once more stressed the reasonableness of the Christian faith in a personal God, its appropriate provisions for the deepest needs and aspirations of human life, and its redemptive, creative powers in organising and shaping a bewildered society after the standards and ideals of the kingdom of God.

If there be any remaining doubt as to the purpose of the mission E. Stanley Jones should set it at rest. We believe that we see the goal and we believe that men can get hold of that power to move on to that goal. That goal is the Kingdom of God on earth. The Kingdom of God is a new order standing at the door of the lower order. The higher order, founded on love, justice, goodwill, brotherhood and redemption, stands confronting this lower order founded on selfishness, exploitation, unbrotherliness, with its resultant clash and conclusions ... it [the higher order] will finally replace this lower order, for it is God's order. We shall present Christ as the open door to that era. We shall unfold the possibilities of that era both within the individual and the collective will.

In 1940 the Council launched a new project, the annual Worldwide Communion Sunday. The first was held on October 6, 1940. In this it followed the example of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, which had earlier initiated a similar event.

To reach the broad masses in the big cities with the social gospel, the Council began to expand its radio broadcasting program, using the facilities of several networks. Already in 1939 the Council claimed that it had at least one Christian message on the radio every day of the year. In that year Oscar Blackwelder, Ralph Sockman, Paul Scherer, Daniel Poling, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Frederick K. Stamm, Harold Paul Sloan, John Sutherland Bonnell, Jesse Bader (secretary for propagation for the FCC), Norman Vincent Peale, and Joseph Sizoo, were preaching over the air waves on behalf of the Council. In general, these programs were based on liberal theology, though a few moderate evangelicals were included to give the programs a wider hearing among those who were conservative and preferred the evangelical message. The content of the messages was usually on a high cultural level, appealing to the more educated classes of the country.

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© 2005 Martin Erdmann