Heather Warren

Respect Social-Gospel Style

Hi. My name is Heather Warren, and I teach in the department of religious studies. Every spring I teach a course called Religion in America Since 1865, and in one part of that course I get to talk about Christian leaders in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century who addressed the very workers' issues we are dealing with right now. These Christian leaders were Protestant and Catholic. I want to tell you something about them and what they say to us.

The Protestants generated a movement that became known as the social gospel.

These men and women-most of them were men and preachers-saw an American society that was urbanizing, industrializing, being populated by immigrants at a mind-boggling rate, and undergoing rapid economic change. Sound familiar? They also noticed that laborers-working people-were not sitting in the pews of the white, middle-class and upper-middle class churches on Sunday mornings. And when they talked to these laborers to find out why they weren't coming to their churches, these Protestants found that it came down to respect. One worker they interviewed put it this way: "When the capitalist prays FOR us one day in the week, and then preys ON us the other six, it can't be expected that we will have much respect for his Christianity." The social gospelers heard the truth of this worker. How could mainline Christianity gain the respect of workers when it seemed to ignore their daily struggles, struggles that were rooted in low wages and bad work environments? In response, the Protestant leaders fashioned a social gospel based upon their study of the life and teachings of Jesus. Their findings stemmed from new scholarship being done about life in Jesus' time and upon their analysis of the current economic situation. The fruits of higher education informed their views.

Two of the social gospelers' distinctive teachings bear on what has happened here at UVA in the past week. One of the chief ways they criticized the dominant economic order was in terms of law. We have heard and seen in the past week what UVA supposedly can't and can do in terms of law. One of the leading social gospelers, a minister named Washington Gladden, contrasted the law of supply and demand with the biblical law of love-"that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." He argued that the law of supply and demand could not be the definitive basis for business. It was unacceptable because it exalted self-love at the expense of God and neighbor. In other words, self-interest, whether individual or collective, as the basis for economic relations does not make for a society of mutual respect. A second key teaching of the social gospelers was that systems-whether companies, corporations, government, or society in its class structures-needed to be redeemed just as individuals did. For them, sin took systemic form as well as individual form. I think that today we can add universities to this list of systems that stand in need of reform if not outright redemption. The social gospelers did not call for the destruction of corporate entities; rather, they thought corporations could and should be reformed for the sake of human dignity.

In the Catholic world, one man in particular stood out. That man was Father John Ryan. After his ordination to the priesthood, he went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and earned a Ph.D. His dissertation became a book entitled-get this-A Living Wage. It was published in 1906, and one of leaders of Protestant social gospel, a man named Richard T. Ely, who was a well-known economist at the University of Wisconsin and a founder of the American Economic Association-he wrote a glowing preface to Ryan's book. Ryan combined American progressive thought with Catholic social thought. He argued that workers' wages should be sufficiently high to enable the worker to live in a manner consistent with the dignity of a human being. He distinguished between a living wage and a subsistence wage. Ryan also advocated profit sharing and copartnership in industry. For him, it was about respect: respecting your coworkers' abilities and judgments so much that you shared profits and risked losses together.

My social gospel guys and gals encourage us to work for respect-tangible, concrete respect. What a difference it would make if workers, faculty, and students were enlisted by the administration in thoughtful, creative problem-solving about the economic challenges facing our community-that is UVA, Charlottesville, and the surrounding counties. Wouldn't it be nice for our wage earners to be regarded has having sufficient God-given worth to be paid a living wage?

I am a person of Christian faith. And today I take courage from those social gospelers who have gone before me. For them, pressing for improved labor practice was about higher aspirations, such as dignity and creating a community of respect. For them and for me, such a life more nearly approximates the Kingdom of God. I encourage those of you who pray to pray on behalf of our wage earners, our administration, and our university.

Thank you.