The Social Gospel: Egalitarianism with a Christian Vocabulary

UAW President Shawn Fain uses a once prominent Christian tradition to mobilize the have-nots against the haves

Read the CNN article from which this photo is taken here.

The CNN article, “There’s another Christian movement that’s changing our politics. It has nothing to do with whiteness or nationalism,” by John Blake, CNN, is a surprisingly (given that it is published by CNN) good article. I encourage you to read it.

Blake discusses what I would call the implicitly egalitarian revolutionary values and aims of the UAW (United Auto Workers) union members led by UAW President Shawn Fain. Blake highlights Fain’s adoption of the themes of the Social Gospel, a Christian movement from the past that is now re-emerging.

Blake recounts the following:

The Social Gospel was a Christian movement that emerged in late 19th-century America as a response to the obscene levels of inequality in a rapidly industrializing country. Its adherents took on the exploitation of workers and unethical business practices of robber barons like oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who, when once asked by a reporter how much money he needed to finally have enough, purportedly said, “Just a bit more.”

The Social Gospel turned religion into a weapon for economic and political reform. Its message: saving people from slums was just as important as saving them from hell. At its peak, the movement’s leaders supported campaigns for eight-hour workdays, the breaking up of corporate monopolies and the abolition of child labor. They spoke from pulpits, lectured across the country and wrote best-selling books.

The popular trend of people wearing WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets, for example, didn’t start off as Christian merchandizing. It was the slogan of a popular 1897 novel, “In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do,” written by the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a Social Gospel leader.

Blake also discusses how the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, is an adherent to the Social Gospel and how this is a big part of his leadership of UAW workers, in particular in the recent UAW strike.

Warning! I am not an insider to the doings of the UAW and hence I have no knowledge regarding whether Fain is providing good or bad leadership, even within the terrible self-defeating modus operandi of U.S. big labor unions as discussed by Dave Stratman in his “How the Unions Killed the Working Class Movement.”

So, what’s my take on this as an egalitarian revolutionary?

Here it is. Most people in the world since there have been human beings that looked like modern human beings (if not earlier) have had, and presently have, an innate respect for the Golden Rule, as I discuss here. This is why the Golden Rule is expressed explicitly in one way or another in virtually all religions of the world, including of course Christianity. The Golden Rule is the basis of egalitarianism, as discussed here.

People are not egalitarian because their religion is egalitarian. It’s the other way around. Religions have egalitarian content (though not exclusively so) because people have an innate respect for the Golden Rule.

When people wish to cite an authority for their egalitarian values and aims they often cite egalitarian passages in the scriptures of their religion, and just ignore the contrary content. In this connection, Reza Aslan explains that atheists such as Sam Harris don't understand religion:

"There is a fundamental misunderstanding among these critics of religion in that they believe, first and foremost, that people get their values, their morals from their scripture, when in reality the exact opposite is true. You bring your morals and your values to the scriptures; you don’t extract them from them. You learn that on day one of the study of religion — day one, that’s the first thing that you learn!"

EGALITARIAN CONTENT IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT

Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All, by Richard A. Horsley, was a real eye-opener for me. Horsley shows that if one reads the Old and New Testament with careful attention to the actual social context of the time when people first read them, then the stories and supposed histories, etc., were clearly about the importance of treating each other according to the Golden Rule (which is what the 4th through the 10th Commandments command) and not “having any other god before me” who says otherwise.

Alas, “each other” in the sense of the Golden Rule was restricted to one’s tribe—the Israelites in the time of the Old Testament and the Jews at the time of Jesus and the New Testament. As we know, there are sections of the Old Testament in which God commands his people to commit genocide against “the other” tribe or people.

MOST PEOPLE ARE EGALITARIANS

Most people are egalitarians even if they have never heard that word. They are egalitarians in two senses.

First, they think it would be wonderful to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. I show here that this is true.

Second, most people in the little corner of the world over which they have any real control, in their everyday lives, try to have relations with others that are based on concern for one another, mutual aid, equality—the opposite values of our capitalist rulers. The ruling class makes it very hard for people to do this; it controls all of the important social institutions and uses them to shape society by the opposite of egalitarian values: inequality, domination of the many by the few, selfishness.

In trying to shape the world they have some control over by egalitarian values, most people constitute an implicitly revolutionary—anti-capitalist—force, even if (as is typical) they have no subjective awareness of the political significance of what they are doing and certainly do not think of it as political but rather as just “doing what is decent and right.”

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

The moral of the story is the ordinary people are the solution, not the problem. I write about this here.