Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [928]
Even Parkhurst’s short-term hopes were blasted when yet another Tammanyite, Thomas F. Gilroy, was elected mayor in 1892. It was clear that barring extraordinary circumstances—or the formation of a wider political coalition—New York’s government, and thus its moral landscape, would remain unpurified.
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Social Gospel
To a growing number of middle-class Protestant reformers, neither Parkhurst, Comstock, the Charity Organization Society nor the Salvation Army was attuned to the scale or complexity of New York’s problems. All these activists, in one way or another, focused on promoting personal salvation or constraining individual behavior, when what was really needed was a theological perspective that confronted issues at a societal level—a “social gospel” that rejected the inevitability of snarling conflict between capital and labor, spurned an inhumane laissez-faire acceptance of urban immiserization, and rejected competitive selfishness as the path to progress. Nothing less would reverse working people’s disaffection from the civic status quo or forestall their adoption of radical solutions for metropolitan ills.
Social gospel sentiments emerged in most Protestant denominations, though most Presbyterians and Methodists stuck to fostering individual redemption through prayer, frugality, temperance, and hard work. Baptists, still largely a rural sect, were slow to take up urban problems, though in New York City men like Walter Rauschenbusch began coming to grips with metropolitan realities. Before he came to New York in 1886 as pastor of the Second German Baptist Church, Rauschenbusch later recalled, he had “had no idea of social questions.” But in New York, “among the working people, my social education began.” In Hell’s Kitchen, “when I began to apply my previous religious ideas to the conditions I found, I discovered they didn’t fit.” Laissez-faire came to seem heartless and selfish, Rauschenbusch became a strong Henry George supporter, and he would go on to formulate a theology of social reform.
Congregationalist Lyman Abbott, who also took part in the George campaign, succeeded to the prestigious pulpit of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church after Henry Ward Beecher died in 1887. Abbott also assumed editorship of the Christian Union, a leading religious weekly, which became the Outlook in 1893. Abbott signaled a major change in his denomination’s approach when he argued that “individualism is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization,” and that “with all the good that competition has wrought, the principle is now a destructive one.”
It was the Episcopal Church, however, a sect that to all appearances was more interested in Society than in a social gospel, that took the lead in jettisoning laissez-faire ethics and tackling the city’s social problems. Henry Codman Potter, rector of fashionable Grace Church since 1868 and bishop of the Diocese of New York since 1887, had long been known as the favorite clergyman of the smart set, and he had devoted much of his attention to a sumptuous church building and beautification program. Despite some complacent clubbiness, however, churches in the Anglican communion had a long track record of taking seriously the obligations of the rich to the poor, a tendency nourished by New York Episcopalians’ ongoing connections to British Anglicans, who had never completely abandoned the old medieval dream of a society guided and led by their Church. When the mid-1880s depression had led to massive demonstrations in Britain and the growth there of a socialist movement (thanks in part to Henry George’s speaking tours), English church leaders responded by turning to a more