476 - A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture

A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture
By Susan Curtis
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 320 pp. $38.95.

The thesis of Susan Curtis' book is that the social gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in its reaction against the emerging industrialist-capitalist ethos, ended up underwriting most of the cultural conventions it claimed to be attacking. By examining the soteriological shift from the individual to the social, from self-denial to self-realization, Curtis seeks to illumine, through a series of biographical sketches, how the private, inner struggles of these men and women, along with their social and political agenda, created a social gospel that, in its critique of the individualist consumer ethic, eventually succumbed to that very ethic. For example, while the social gospelers were contemptuous of the competitiveness, alienation, and poverty created by a capitalist economy, they themselves joined the market competition by packaging and promoting their version of the gospel as a commodity available for public consumption. "They believed, " she observes, "in the social gospel in much the same way that merchants believed in their products-with zeal for its power to make the user a better person, with conviction that the same results could not be obtained from an off-brand, and with proof of results from the people who had already tried it."

The social gospel, then, in Curtis' view, aided in the increasing secularization of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American life, and she traces this process in five areas: changing notions about work and salvation, American families, the intersection of church theology and state politics, reactions to the first world war, and the influence of advertising and mass media. Curtis remarks early in the

478 - A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture

book that "[t]he social gospel appeared at a critical moment in American history-a moment that marked the unraveling of the Victorian culture of the nineteenth century." The dramatic and rhetorical flair of such an assertion aside, Curtis seems to make a much too tidy distinction between the "Protestant-based Victorian culture of the nineteenth century and the modern, secular consumer culture that emerged in the twentieth century." Her rhetoric implies a radical disjunction between the two in which the social gospel movement (by itself?) becomes the link making the transition possible. The "link" may be a bit more tenuous and ambiguous and the disjunction itself not so radical nor so apparent. Certainly there are those who would contend that Christianity's coopting of the secular order occurred long before the late nineteenth century; namely, once Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, the church made it its business to legitimate and further the aims of the state. But, in fairness to Curtis, she is interested primarily in exploring the social gospel's relation to consumer culture and in that vein she makes some persuasive arguments.

There are, however, three fundamental flaws in Curtis' approach. First, her decision to treat Rauschenbusch's contribution to the social gospel under the rubric of family life (with an interesting analysis of his sexual insecurities) does not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of his theological thought. One need not be a defender of Rauschenbusch's understanding of Christianity to admit to the profound significance of his work in this period. Within Curtis' frame-work, however, his formal thought remains largely unexplored and his importance diminished.

A second flaw is the way in which biography works (or, rather, does not work) in her book. Instead of allowing the stories of the social gospelers' lives to render their meaning within the array of complexities in which they surely must have been located, the biographical accounts seem imposed onto Curtis' own agenda of proving the "secularization" thesis. This is not to say that Curtis' entire argument fails; it does not. She quite admirably demonstrates that, in many ways, the social gospel did participate in, even fostered, the developing consumer culture. But a lot of other things were going on that necessarily render an accurate description more complex. It also strikes me that Curtis, in wanting to do "cultural history," fails to take account of the enormous importance of Scripture in the lives of the social gospelers. Not everything they did or said was motivated by familial dysfunction or seduction by the forces of capitalism; these people were reading the Bible. Some weight needs to be given to the ways in which Scripture was functioning in their theology.

Third, and most important, Curtis' focus on America's developing consumer culture commits her to posit, falsely, a monolithic structure and cohesiveness to the social gospel movement difficult to demonstrate. (I even hesitate to use the term "movement.") Organized

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around the theme of consumer capitalism, many social gospelers do indeed look alike. But a more comprehensive analysis of the social gospel's complexity and multiplicity renders accounts such as Curtis' at best incomplete and at worst reductionistic. Curtis also leaves the reader with the impression that all of protestantism was captivated by the social gospel, denying any real possibility of looking at the forms of resistance to it, particularly within the growing forces of fundamentalism. Further, the anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and blatantly racist polemics of many social gospelers are ignored by Curtis because, one presumes, such concerns are only marginal to an analysis centered on consumerism. (Curtis does not include any African American social gospelers.) But, in fact, they are not marginal at all; they go to the heart of some tough questions: Just who were the legitimate "consumers" in the eyes of the social gospelers? Just who is included in this "christianizing of the social order?" Curtis believes that she can avoid theology by talking about "ideology," that somehow the former is secondary to or separate from the latter. But, of course, as in every time and place, theology and ideology and politics and sexuality get all mixed up together, and it is not always easy (nor desirable) to try and untangle them.

Debra Dean Murphy
Drew University Graduate School
Madison, NJ