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American Protestantism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, c. 1865-1920
A Survey of Six Titles
Frank Bellizzi – May 17, 2016
What was the character of American religion, especially Protestantism, during the so-
called Gilded Age and the Progressive Era? From the end of the Civil War to the end of the First
World War, what sorts of changes and challenges emerged? How did leaders of the Protestant
establishment respond to various crises in American society? And how did they attempt to retain
or reassert the cultural authority of Protestantism?
Six titles I recently read offer at least three broad answers to these questions. They
indicate, first, that the years 1865 to 1920 witnessed Protestant leaders and their churches
struggling to respond to the unprecedented social and economic inequities brought on by
America’s industrial revolution. Second, one of these works in particular emphasizes “muscular
Christianity,” a response to the perceived problem of “overcivilization,” which resulted in men
becoming soft and weak in their sedentary office jobs. Third, still other works show how
American Protestants embraced, while others resisted, the rise of theological liberalism.
I.
In 1949, Henry F. May published Protestant Churches and Industrial America. He noted
that his work was not a religious history per se, but was rather a study of “American social
thought” covering the dates 1865 to 1895. In spite of that description, May’s treatment cannot be
called a social history. It is, instead, an intellectual and institutional-type history. May focused
his attention on five specific denominations: Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist,
and Episcopal. Together, these were made to stand in for “Protestant churches.” He did not deal
with, for example, Lutherans, or Disciples.1
1
Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), xvii-xviii.

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May establishes that from 1828 to 1861, Americans assumed that wealth and poverty
were related to one’s divinely-appointed lot in life. Poverty relief offered in the name of Christ
did not contradict these notions, because it was provided to individuals and families. That is,
churches were not seeking to achieve systemic reform. Following the Civil War and through the
years of Reconstruction, leaders like the well-known Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher
combined patriotism and devotion to democracy with the individualism of the antebellum period.
By 1895, however, the old consensus was no more. May argues that labor conflicts of the late
1870s through early 1890s brought about within Protestant churches a rejection of social
Darwinism and the embrace of a more generous religious ethic.
May presents what is likely his most significant bit of analysis in the fourth and final part
of his work. In “Social Christianity, 1877-1895,” he asserts that Protestantism responded to the
crises of the times in three different ways: “Conservative Social Christianity” enthusiastically
embraced church-sponsored relief, but rejected all forms of collectivism. "Radical Social
Christianity" sought systemic change and endorsed collectivism. “Progressive Social
Christianity,” commonly known as the Social Gospel, was the popular, mediating position.
Personified by Washington Gladden, the Social Gospel approved certain forms of labor
organization, for example, but opposed Socialism.2
May’s Hegelian analysis depended on his
2
Nearly twenty years after it was first published, a reprint edition of Protestant Churches and Industrial America
appeared in 1967. The reprint included “a new Introduction by the Author.” Here, May acknowledges the ways in
which his mind had changed since the initial publication of his book. He had, for example, focused his 1949 version
of the story of the Social Gospel on “the articulate, urban, middle-class section of American Protestantism.” By
1967, he had come to believe that powerful leaders did not speak “for the whole society” (viii-ix). The leaders did
not fully appreciate that at the time, but neither did historians after the fact. May acknowledges Timothy L.
Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, published in 1957, noting Smith’s thesis that the Social Gospel had
antebellum antecedents (ix). However, May distinguishes that before the war, reform had had much to do with
antislavery measures, whereas afterwards reform was focused on capital and labor (x). Most telling of all, May notes
that both conservatives and liberals of the late nineteenth century believed that “the leadership of Anglo-Saxon
Protestantism” was the key, vitally important (xii). What conservatives and liberals disagreed on was the role of
human agency. Liberals were big on human capacity, human ability to make a critical difference. “My main purpose
. . . was to describe the effects of Christian social thought on what then seemed the American mainstream”

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assertion that labor unrest in the 1870s to ’90s was critical to the rise and development of the
Social Gospel.
Paul A. Carter published The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age in 1971.3
Like May,
Carter restricted his discussion to the first three decades that followed the Civil War. Unlike
May, he treated a much wider range of topics, chapter by chapter, including skepticism, science
and technology, contemporary fiction, Calvinism versus Arminianism, conceptions of the
afterlife, and the Social Gospel. Carter said that the Gilded Age had been neglected in surveys of
U.S. history, often treated as boring or embarrassing. But, he insisted, the period actually had its
own inner logic and also seems more like the second half of the twentieth century than his
contemporaries might want to admit.
And what of religion during that time? Carter wonders if the Gilded Age might be one of
those points in history when it would be appropriate to quote Dickens: “It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times . . .” He cites a letter he received from William Hutchison in which he
wrote: “Faith was both growing and declining; the point is to figure out the special form (if any)
in this age, of our perennial paradox.”4
Carter notes that this is one of the explicit goals for his
book.5
His treatment of the same thirty years covered by May is thus much different. Instead of
identifying the source and narrating the origins of the Social Gospel, Carter treats several topics
related to the time as though they were different verses of a single song whose theme is national
ambivalence or contradiction. For example, in Chapter 4, “Fiction and Faith,” Carter points to
the bleak tales told by Ambrose Bierce. Referring to these stories, he writes: “Cumulatively these
(xiv). The popularity (in 1967) of Harvey Cox’s 1965 book The Secular City suggests “that many Americans,
including American Christians, are still moralists and activists” (xiv).
3
Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).
4
Ibid., viii.
5
I take Carter to be saying that he is trying to trace an outline from 1870 to 1970, according to which America
reveals a tendency to somehow both grow and decline in religion at the same time.

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takes added up to a very different world from the moral universe of Lew Wallace, where heroes
die happy and rich while only villains are mangled under chariot wheels.”6
Throughout his
cultural overview of the Gilded Age, Carter implies that the twentieth-century U.S. had not yet
answered the questions that grew up during that earlier time, an interpretation that must have
resonated with many readers in 1970s America.
In 2004, Christopher H. Evans published the outstanding biography, The Kingdom is
Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch. Evans begins by pointing out that few of
the many works written about the great German-American theologian “have sought to interpret
how he sheds light upon the historical circumstances of his own lifetime.” He announces that, by
contrast, his approach “examines Rauschenbusch’s significance in relationship to the theological
tradition that shaped his legacy in American Protestantism,” the Social Gospel.”7
Evans
highlights three paradoxes of Rauschenbusch’s life and work. First, although he is associated
with twentieth-century American theology, his social and cultural influences came from the
nineteenth century. Second, although he is typically considered a German-American,
Rauschenbusch spent many years in Germany, both as a child and as an adult. Third, the pastor-
professor’s output illustrates “the elusiveness of defining the social gospel as a historical and
theological phenomenon in American Christianity.”8
For example, one might ask if the Social
Gospel was something more than the religious face of Progressive politics in America, an apt
description of May’s interpretation. For his part, Evans considers it more expansive than that. He
6
Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age, 6.
7
Christopher H. Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2004), xviii.
8
Ibid., xxviii.

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points out, for example, that the Social Gospel was closely connected to the dawn of the
ecumenical movement that is still significant in America.9
Perhaps most significantly, Evans comments on Martin Marty’s thesis that in the Gilded
Age and early twentieth century, American Protestantism developed a “two-party system.”
Evans regards this interpretation as far too simple. After all, coming as late as he did in that era,
Rauschenbusch was content to be called an “evangelical liberal,” which is exactly what he was.
He delighted, for example, in the campaigns of D. L. Moody, and he collaborated with Ira
Sankey in the publication of a two-volume hymnal, which compiled German translations of
American gospel songs.10
In this and a variety of other ways, Evan’s work reveals the
significance and potential of biography or biographical microhistory. The details and complexity
of a single life can point up the inconsistency or superficiality of binary categories and survey
narratives.
II.
In 2001, Clifford Putney published Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in
Protestant America, 1880-1920, which got its start as the author’s doctoral dissertation at
Brandeis University. Using mainly primary sources as well as the historiography of modern
sports, Putney has produced what is likely the definitive monograph on his topic. In each of his
chapters, the author explores a different aspect of muscular Christianity in America near the turn
of the twentieth century. Consequently, the chapters have a stand-alone quality. Salient points in
Putney’s coverage include his contentions that muscular Christianity was partly a male reaction
against the religious leadership of women; that the movement grew out of a fear that as a result
of industrialization, men were becoming weak as a result of their sedentary jobs; and that the
9
Ibid., xx-xxii.
10
Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming, xxviii-xxx.

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emphasis on masculinity in black Protestant churches tended to be more focused on the
achievement of civil rights for all blacks, whereas in white churches muscular Christianity seems
to have been more a matter of white men protecting their social dominance. As he concludes,
Putney points to what muscular Christianity had done during the forty years that preceded 1920:
In the field of sports, muscular Christians had reduced mind-body dualism,
broken down evangelical Protestant resistance to sports, invented 'character-
building' games such as basketball, and acquainted the world with Western
athleticism. They had also made headway in the field of education, which
was transformed during the Progressive Era by the spread of physical
education programs, outdoor camps, nature-oriented clubs, boys'
preparatory schools, and other educational entities in which muscular
Christianity was highly visible.11
Putney argues that after the end of the Great War, new resistance to militaristic imagery,
along with the newsy rancor of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, took muscular
Christianity off the front page. Also around this time, those men who had championed the
phenomenon for a generation—Theodore Roosevelt, Josiah Strong, Lyman Abbot, and G.
Stanley Hall—were one by one fading away. Significantly, all of them died between 1919 and
1924.12
True, muscular Christianity survived the deaths of these men, but what remained did not
seem to be dedicated to the service of anything high or noble. It appeared, rather, to be devoted
to the service of self.13
Regarding literature of the period, reminiscent of Paul Carter, Putney
observes that the readers of the post-war years had no patience for Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A
Tale of the Christ. They found the main character in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
much more compelling.14
11
Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-2.
12
Ibid., 199-200.
13
Ibid., 200.
14
Ibid., 201.

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III.
Two other works deal with the question of how theological liberalism has fared in
American history. In 2006, George M. Marsden published the second edition of his widely-
acclaimed Fundamentalism and American Culture, the first edition of which appeared in 1980.
Marsden’s basic conclusion was that the fundamentalists he describes “experienced profound
ambivalence toward the surrounding culture.”15
He acknowledges that such is true of many
distinct groups and movements. But, he notes, conservative Protestants in the U.S. went from
being respectable in the 1870s to being peripheral and a laughingstock by the 1920s. What
happened? Marsden replies that historians can only respond to a question like that, not by
proving anything—not scientifically, anyway—but by an illumination that comes by way of
what he calls “sympathetic insight.”16
In his description of fundamentalism in America, Marsden begins by insisting that the
phenomenon was essentially a religious movement. A basic definition of fundamentalism is
“militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism.”17
Marsden is quick to add that in
American history fundamentalism has been “a loose, diverse, and changing federation of co-
belligerents united by their fierce opposition to modernist attempts to bring Christianity into line
with modern thought.”18
Fundamentalists saw this battle as a battle for true Christianity and for
civilization.
Marsden’s work intervened in the historiography of fundamentalism by denying or going
beyond previous attempts to interpret it. Previously, writers had portrayed it in one of two ways.
15
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),
x. By culture, Marsden means “the collection of beliefs, values, assumptions, commitments, and ideals expressed in
society through popular literary and artistic forms and embodied in its political, educational, and other institutions”
(ix).
16
Ibid., x.
17
Ibid., 4.
18
Ibid.

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As early as the 1920s, fundamentalism was described as an angry, dying way of thinking and
living. Time and education, some suggested, would take eventually take care of all of that. In
addition to this “social explanation,” others like Earnest Sandeen took fundamentalism as a
serious movement that staked its identity on doctrine. According to Sandeen, that doctrine was
dispensational premillennialism.19
Marsden suggests that Sandeen’s book was good, as far as it
went, and that if fixed in a certain, later time period, the thesis makes sense. But, he added, the
roots of fundamentalism are much more complex than dispensationalism, stemming from and
combined with Princeton theology. As Marsden himself put it, “evangelicalism is an older
tradition that has been shaped by many other factors.”20
So, said Marsden, fundamentalism was neither “a temporary social aberration” nor a
doctrinal movement that advanced dispensational premillennialism above all else. It was, instead,
“a genuine religious movement or tendency with deep roots and intelligible beliefs.” Yet, it did
not develop in a vacuum. Rather, it was “conditioned by a unique and dramatic cultural
experience.”21
Above all, it was forever changed by the American experience of the Great War,
which “intensified hopes and fears, and totally upset existing balances in American culture.”
Fundamentalism fought back on two fronts: theological liberalism and Darwinism. From its
struggle, what emerged was a paradox: a movement that sometimes identified with the privileged
establishment, and at other times saw itself and acted as though it were a beleaguered minority.
This dynamic, along with fundamentalism’s connection to the evangelical heritage and the motif
of trust versus distrust of intellect are the central themes of Marsden’s survey.22
19
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 4-5. See Earnest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism:
British & American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
20
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 5.
21
Ibid., 5-6.
22
Ibid., 6-7.

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Fundamentalism and American Culture offers several opportunities for comparison to
other works mentioned in this paper. For example, both Marsden and Carter take up the subject
of conservative Protestants and Darwinism in the first two decades after the publication of On
the Origin of Species in 1859. According to Carter, believing scientists in America published
works that assumed and asserted that the pursuit of truth according to science could only
strengthen faith and lead people to God. Washington Gladden, commonly regarded as the father
of the Social Gospel, took the view that the church would never be able to successfully deny
Darwinism. Christians would somehow have to adopt it. On the other hand, Louis Agassiz, a
Swiss-born Harvard biologist took the fight to Darwinism. His work was hailed by the leading
Methodist weekly of the time as “a demonstration of the baselessness of all atheistical
philosophy.”23
Marsden reports the same early ambivalence, but cites different sources.
According to him, some spokesmen regarded Darwinism as a mere theory, adding that scientific
inquiry in the form of theory was basic to the enterprise. Taking sides, on the other hand, were
leaders like Charles Hodge at Princeton who insisted that Darwinism could not possibly
correspond to biblical teaching. As early as the 1870s cracks were beginning to show in the
foundation of the Protestant establishment.24
Yet, according to William R. Hutchison, those
cracks began to develop long before the end of the Civil War.
Hutchison’s, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism, a kind of religious and
intellectual history, was first published in 1976. Not one to hide his commitments, Hutchison
characterizes himself as a hopeful liberal. Among other things, this means that he finds
theological liberalism more compelling than its early-twentieth century neo-orthodox
23
Carter, Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age, 29-31.
24
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 18-21.

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corrective.25
He says that by the time modernism was a well-known term in the U.S., it had come
to mean mainly three things: first, a knowing, conscious adaptation of religious ideas to modern
culture; second, a belief in the immanence of God in both human nature and cultural
development; third, the optimistic assumption that society could, more and more, approximate
the Kingdom of God, the righteous and benevolent rule of the Almighty on earth.26
He contends
that these ideas have a relatively long history in America, one that reaches back at least as far as
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Moreover, although many interpreters have attempted to
distinguish a supposedly hard-edged modernism from a liberalism that was more loyal to the
historic truth claims of the Christian faith, these distinctions are “largely invalid.”27
Of course,
there can be no doubt that the events of the early twentieth century—the Great War and
Depression, followed by the Second World War and the Holocaust—took their toll on liberalism.
Nonetheless, Hutchison maintains, we should see Protestant modernism “as a contribution to
debates of persistent and very current importance within American religion and the Western
culture.”28
On the other hand, if we can for argument’s sake distinguish between modernism and
liberalism, then, yes, the former expired, but the latter did not. Hutchison’s happy contention is
that the modernist impulse in America was born long before the end of the Civil War, and that it
never died. The liberal tradition would not be going away.
25
William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1976), ix. In terms of his general outlook, I appreciate Hutchison’s commitment to “a supposition that
religious ideas are as likely as their secular counterparts to operate with some autonomy, that religious thought is
only partially reducible to social experience or explained by it” (viii).
26
Ibid., 1-11.
27
Ibid., 8.
28
Ibid., 11.