The Case for Social Righteousness

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Pack­ing Our Bags:
The Pro­mo­tion of Social Right­eous­ness in Con­text

Its Mean­ing Then and Now
The con­cept of the pro­mo­tion of social right­eous­ness will not res­onate imme­di­ately with many con­tem­po­rary read­ers. One rea­son is because it is not a term used as com­monly these days as it was dur­ing the Pro­gres­sive Era (ca. 1890–1913). Chris­t­ian believ­ers today tend to under­stand them­selves as either endur­ing an ungodly cul­ture (nei­ther in the world nor of it) or liv­ing in barely dis­tin­guish­able rela­tion­ship to the world (both in the world and of it). Those who see them­selves as “endur­ing” might, at first glance, under­stand the pro­mo­tion of social right­eous­ness to be ulti­mately futile.¹ The sec­ond group might have the impres­sion that pro­mot­ing social right­eous­ness is pre­sump­tu­ous: “Who am I to tell oth­ers what is right to do?”

Chris­t­ian believ­ers involved in the Social Gospel move­ment at the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury per­ceived them­selves as being in the world, but not of it. Their con­vic­tion was that teach­ing and liv­ing accord­ing to the man­dates of the gospel would lead to the trans­for­ma­tion of the soci­ety in which they lived. Chris­t­ian believ­ers who par­tic­i­pated in the tem­per­ance move­ments, suf­frage move­ments, and anti­slav­ery move­ments gen­er­ally under­stood them­selves to have a sanc­ti­fy­ing role in rela­tion­ship to the cul­ture at large.

A pop­u­lar man­i­fes­ta­tion of the turn-of-the-century com­mit­ment to the pro­mo­tion of social right­eous­ness is Charles Sheldon’s 1896 novel, In His Steps. The book had been trans­lated into nearly two dozen lan­guages by 1935 and was claimed by Wal­ter Rauschen­busch, a leader in the Social Gospel move­ment, as the inspi­ra­tion for his work. Some sources report that it is one of the top ten best-selling books of all time.²

In Sheldon’s story, a pas­tor named Maxwell is chal­lenged by a home­less man to live in light of his Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions. This pas­tor, in turn, exhorts the mem­bers of his con­gre­ga­tion to ask them­selves, before every deci­sion, “What would Jesus do?” As church mem­bers begin to take action in ways con­sis­tent with their answers to this ques­tion, the com­mu­nity sur­round­ing the church is transformed.

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Chris­t­ian believ­ers today tend to under­stand them­selves as either endur­ing an ungodly cul­ture (nei­ther in the world nor of it) or liv­ing in barely dis­tin­guish­able rela­tion­ship to the world
(both in the world and of it).
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While the con­tem­po­rary WWJD? move­ment (pop­u­lar in the United States in the 1990s) tends to empha­size indi­vid­ual spir­i­tual growth and renewal, the Social Gospel move­ment of a cen­tury ago, rep­re­sented by Sheldon’s story, focused on the renewal of soci­ety. Instead of lim­it­ing his gaze to per­sonal sin, Shel­don devoted him­self to renounc­ing sys­temic, cor­po­rate sin.

Just as WWJD? is com­monly asso­ci­ated with the­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal per­sua­sions very dif­fer­ent from those of Charles Shel­don, those who cur­rently encour­age the pro­mo­tion of social right­eous­ness have a dif­fer­ent agenda than our for­bears who included the phrase in the Great Ends of the Church. An Inter­net search promptly reveals numer­ous essays and other con­tem­po­rary mate­ri­als asso­ci­at­ing the pro­mo­tion of social right­eous­ness with the sup­port of “fam­ily val­ues,” the rejec­tion of homo­sex­ual unions, the enforce­ment of severe means of dis­ci­pline (includ­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment), and the denial of abor­tion except in cases that threaten the mother’s life. Those most com­monly asso­ci­ated with the phrase in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury would prob­a­bly have taken dif­fer­ent stands on some of these con­tro­ver­sial issues than those who com­monly claim the phrase today. They were engaged in a vari­ety of social issues: They worked to rem­edy the dehu­man­iz­ing impact of the slave trade; they advo­cated for women’s suf­frage; they fought for the basic rights of the worker. They believed that drink­ing alco­hol was vile and immoral because it led to domes­tic vio­lence, loss of employ­ment, child neglect, unhealth­i­ness, and poverty. All in all, those who upheld social right­eous­ness were con­vinced that Chris­t­ian believ­ers can and should take polit­i­cal actions that advance the com­ing of the king­dom of God to earth as it is in heaven.³

To this point, we have tried to get a his­tor­i­cal “feel” for what was and is meant by the con­cept of pro­mot­ing social right­eous­ness. I offer now a brief his­tory of how schol­ars believe this end came to be adopted by the Pres­by­ter­ian Church (U.S.A.).

Con­tinue read­ing on the next page…