The Social Gospel Movement in the South

As part of the Vanderbilt University Sesquicentennial celebration, last fall the Wendland-Cook Program was awarded a Sesquicentennial grant for our project, “The Unexplored Legacy of the Social Gospel Movement in the South: The Vanderbilt Contribution.” This Interventions forum kicks off a three-part series of writings on this subject. In the spring, we’ll launch a 5 part podcast series and host two virtual community forums.

This project aims to research the Social Gospel legacy of Vanderbilt Divinity School in the early decades of the twentieth century and to tell that story to a broad audience. Although the Social Gospel movement has attracted growing attention in recent years, the Vanderbilt story is largely unknown and untold. Vanderbilt Divinity’s designation as “school of the prophets” derives from this period, as it was an important intellectual and educational hub.

Various figures will serve as examples for this story. What makes them unique are not only intellectual and activist efforts but also the ways in which they were able to integrate cultural and religious sentiments of the South with progressive purposes and to link them to broader social movements. Among them are Dr. Alva Taylor, Howard Kester, Don West, and Claude Williams. But we aim to tell this story in a way that eschews the “great men” narratives, highlighting the institutional networks and the work of Black and white women who sustained this broad social and religious movement possible. This history will be examined and told featuring insights for faith communities aiming to navigate contemporary challenges.

In this first forum, we turn to historians and labor organizers in order to set the stage for future conversations to come.

Contributors: Aaron Stauffer; Janine Giordano Drake, Mary Bathory Vidaver, Vonda McDaniel

Aaron Stauffer

2 October 2023

Vanderbilt School of Religion in the 1930s was a hub of the Social Gospel. Students came to Vanderbilt to be trained as leaders in economic and racial justice fights in the U.S. South. Whether as pastor, organizer, or community leader, the work that students went on to is work that the Wendland-Cook Program picks up today — our work draws on a deep and rich legacy of the Social Gospel in the South.

Broadly defined, the Social Gospel refers to a Christian way of life that stems from the conviction that the Gospel has something to say about society’s problems. Social Gospelers, as Gary Dorrien has nicely summed up, believed that they were called to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.

Nowadays, when people hear of the “Social Gospel” — if they have any reference point at all — it typically calls to mind liberal white Christian clergy from the U.S. North who at the turn of the twentieth century advocated for the members of their congregations to become better people, so that society would then be better. This is certainly one stream of the Social Gospel and it adopted its own theory of social change that can be summed up as: the better the people, the better the society.

What is absolutely crucial to state out front is that there are many different streams of the white and Black Social Gospels: some streams were more radical and some more liberal. But those that interest us most are those who opted for a different theory of social change, one that instead argues: better the economic, political, and social structures of society and you’ll have better people. Those who adopted this standpoint were most often Black and white Christian democratic socialists: Howard Kester, Mordecai Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Mays, Walter Muelder, Walter Rauschenbusch, Ward Rogers, Vida Scudder, Alva Taylor, Harry Ward, George Washington Woodbey, Ida Wells-Barnett, Don West, Owen Whitfield, Claude Williams — and the list goes on.

People often forget (or simply don’t know) that this more radical Social Gospel movement has a deep and rich legacy in the U.S. South, one that is made up of a vast network of organizations and leaders who gave their lives to building economic, racial, and religious democracy.

With the arrival of Alva Taylor in 1928 from Oberlin College, Vanderbilt began to attract students who sought out a Social Gospel — a gospel of applied religion. Figures like Howard “Buck” Kester, Ward Rogers, Don West, and Claude Williams found their way to Vanderbilt because of Taylor and the sort of education they could get at here. Taylor argued that Christian faith made no real sense apart from social engagement and worked to introduce students and the broader public to the more radical Jesus of the Social Gospel movement

What makes this group of scholars and organizers unique are not only intellectual and activist efforts to confront economic and racial injustice in the U.S. South, but also the ways they were able to integrate cultural and religious sentiments of the South with progressive purposes and link them to broader social movements.

In the essays that follow, the contributors will explore the significance and diversity of the Social Gospel in the South. Importantly, many of the fights that figures in this movement faced we still face today. These figures and movements believed that building solidarity between working people was the surest way to end economic exploitation and racial injustice —this is what Claude Williams understood to be the point of applied religion. The Kingdom of God is about building deeper unity here on earth, not garnering a ticket to heaven. The task then of building the Kingdom of God, or the Cooperative Commonwealth as it was often called, is primarily focused on building relationships of solidarity so as to ensure economic, political, and religious democracy.

Our project is based on a sense that studying the past is less about exploring what has been rather than an exercise in rooting ourselves in a movement tradition that can resource us in our struggles today. Learning these stories helps us situate ourselves, draw inspiration from them, and to shed naive assumptions about the nature of the problems we face today in white supremacist gendered racial capitalism.

History is often told through the narrative of “great men.” We hear stories of the Black Freedom Movement, say, that focus solely on the significance and magnanimity of spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Recent revisions of this history have made their way forward, however, that ground King’s legacy in a broad landscape of organizations and institutions that formed and shaped him and the broader movement. King would not be the King we know and cherish without the Black church radical Social Gospelers that also raised up leaders like Mordecai Johnson and Benjamin Mays, who gave their lives for their people in their fight for democratic socialism and racial justice.

Part of the point here is to talk intentionally about relationships of economic and political power and their force in our lives. That is why it is important to talk about organizations - not just individuals or communities, as if organizations form organically without intention or struggle. Institutions and organizations consist of certain relationships of and between people and communities -- building organizations is slow, patient work that involves getting those people, communities, and relationships organized together in a certain way and to do something specific. It's not enough for us to talk about communities or people as if they somehow come together to form organizations or to do things -- it takes struggle and intention that often times involves loss and sacrifice. Claude Williams was deeply familiar with the loss that his struggle for economic democracy wrought: he was defrocked by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) and kicked out of the Southern Tenants Farmers Union due to red-baiting by his own friends — Kester one of them; Alva Taylor was forced out of Vanderbilt in the late 1930s because of his support for labor.

Social change happens when people come together to build economic and political democratic power for working people and their communities. This does not mean that forming, norming, or sustaining these communities is easy. For those of us who find ourselves deeply drawn to, yet uncomfortable with the church, this is a familiar truth. Williams and Kester knew this: Both were initially embraced by the churches, and then found their work pushed them out of the church as it was institutionally established into the sharecroppers fields or to the union halls.

Still, Kester, Taylor, and Williams were institution builders — Kester himself was at various points in his life an anti-lynching investigator with NAACP, a student organizer with the YMCA, a field organizer with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Committee on Economic and Racial Justice, a school headmaster at the Penn Normal, Agricultural, and Industrial School, a staff and faculty member at Eureka College, and finally a Dean of Students a Montreat College. Williams started or was a part of as many church, educational, or activist organizations as Kester. Both sought to build up a movement of racial and economic justice grounded in a social gospel. For people like Kester and Williams, they sought to teach and organize around a social Gospel — the Gospel of the Working Class — that sent people home mad, rather preach sermons that sent people home happy.

Rev. Aaron Stauffer, PhD, is the Associate Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice and Director of Online Learning at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. His forthcoming book Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Values, and Broad-based Community Organizing, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He graduated from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York in 2020 with a PhD in social ethics.

By Janine Giordano Drake

25 September 2023

The term, “Roaring Twenties” was an insult to the many Americans in the South who lived in poverty before the Depression. The fine, fitted clothing in the display windows of large cities, the debauchery of youthful urban life, and the overwrought celebrations of the American flag all seemed to prove that Southerners were behind the times. Northern politicians, journalists, clergy, and even labor leaders often didn’t know very much about the South. Southern food, dialect, culture and religion all appeared to be foreign, “old-fashioned” relics of what life in the North used to be. The struggles among the nation’s farmers seemed no different from the struggles of farmers in any other part of the world.

Among politicians, sharecroppers and tenant farmers did not seem worthy of anyone’s attention. Republicans, who represented the urban and suburban middling classes of the North, generally saw the rural South as a cause for either charity work or resource extraction. The Democratic Party, a thinly-held coalition of those suspicious of Northern businessmen, worked hard to suppress African Americans from voting. Ostensibly, Southern Democrats supported all white men’s voting rights, but in practice many white tenant farmers did not have the education or poll taxes to legally exercise that right. Few politicians traveled the muddy, dirt roads to rural districts to even show their faces. Those who did travel through small towns wanted the votes of the landowners, not the people who worked the land.

Clergy from the largest denominations, who were in receipt of lavish donations from businessmen in the early twentieth century, also largely ignored the Southern, rural poor. A steady stream of visiting missionaries, clergy, traveling preachers and social workers traveled through the South in the early twentieth century, mostly to visit. Some just wanted to preach and turn hearts. Some used the excursion to give themselves an encounter with global poverty. Others used the tour to raise money for charity schools and hospitals for the Southern poor. A few among the travelers worked for a few years in places like Berea College or in ministries associated with the Country Life Movement. Visiting missionaries offered the types of classes in “Americanization” that they would have offered to immigrants in Northern cities, indigenous peoples on reservations, or native peoples on reservations or in Hawaii or Puerto Rico. But, the pay was so poor, and the work offered so little “glory,” that visiting missionaries to the American South rarely lasted very long. Howard Kester of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union was right that “The Protestant church has regarded the country as a place from which everyone, including the minister of God, should escape.”

If the story of the Social Gospel in the industrial North is a story of clergy uniting to tame and shape working-class rebellions in mining and factory towns, the story of the Social Gospel in the rural South is rather different. Northern workers received more attention from Northern reformers because they had unions and political parties that not only made demands of their employers, but which also made demands of religious leaders to act as allies. Before long, earnest “Social Gospel” clergy found themselves smothered in the Rockefeller money, “donations” that came with the expectation that clergy would suppress unionization and encourage “right-to-work” theologies. By 1919, wealthy donors like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller convinced a good fraction of American clergy to entrust “Christian” business leaders as “stewards” the future of the “American family,” claiming that these good businessmen were better spiritual leaders than godless, rank-and-file socialists.

By the early 1920s, as the Ku Klux Klan “rose again” in the American heartland, the region that the nation had most neglected would become the chief cornerstone of a renewed faith. Many Southern farmers had been continuously participating in communitarian spiritual communities since the cooperative experimental settlements of the 1890s. While the Men and Religion Forward Movement, combined with an official party embrace of “secularism,” crushed the Christian Socialist movement in the North in the 1910s, little of this made a difference for Christian Socialists in the South. How could Southerners, after all, be unamerican? How could their socialism be godless? By the mid-1910s, the height of Christian Socialist fervor in the United States, Southerners—in states like Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama—were the largest fraction of dues-paying members in the Socialist Party. The chief party organizers in the South were men and women formally trained for the ministry, people like Mary Kules, Oscar Ameringer, George Washington Woodbey, and Florence Wattles. The South had hundreds of clergy who counted themselves members of the Christian Socialist Fellowship. These clergy planted seeds in the early decades of the twentieth century that grew into what Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman described as the “Gospel of the Working Class” in the 1920s and 1930s.

Thank God for the small town folks who kept the gospel of cooperative economics alive for the twentieth century. The very people who seemed to pose no threat, or promise, to the future of either the labor movement or the Church—the very people who seemed to live in the past and whose political faith seemed hopelessly antiquated—turned out to lead both the churches and the labor movement in the 1930s. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was a true gift to both the American labor movement and the American churches, and it arrived in a moment of great weakness for both within the South. Southern farmers’ methods of interracial alliance building, their theologies of land and agricultural production, and their critique of people in seats of national power would provide the insight that people in poverty, not just in the South but now throughout the nation and throughout the world, had long been praying for.

Janine Giordano Drake is author of The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement and coeditor of The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class. She teaches in the History department at Indiana University.