Big City Churches and the Social Gospel

Jane Giordano Drake’s review of Thomas Rzeznik’s Church and Estate:

Numerous, huge, substantial, ornate churches built in the early twentieth century occupied street corner after street corner in my town of Urbana, Illinois (like the one from my former neighborhood, pictured here). I wanted to know how these churches got there and how they were still around, but nobody seemed to find that an interesting topic of conversation (inside or outside of the graduate classroom). I lacked a lot of knowledge on the social history of rich people, especially Protestant rich people in the early twentieth century, yet it seemed taboo to ask questions about them. How are we going to understand battles over wealth distribution in the United States, I wondered, if we refuse to study the rich?…

Thomas Rzeznik’s 2013 Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial Philadelphia is an excellent example of how much we can learn about class relationships–anxieties, goals, aspirations, and jockeying for social and economic position–from a study focused entirely upon the rich. Rzeznik reads between the lines of denominational records in Philadelphia and teaches us about how denominations can serve as a source of social cohesion and consolidation of social capital.

Rzeznik explains the cluttering of the early twentieth century urban landscape with palatial and ostentatious churches in stunning and deeply satisfying detail. He argues that these churches grew out of the twin engines of a philanthropic sense of Christian responsibility, and a simultaneous sense of social ambition. Many of these churches were funded by and designed for wealthy patrons and their admirers. Wealthy patrons thought they did their denomination, and God, a service by bequeathing a large church to the network of extensions in new neighborhoods. Of course, they also gained for themselves a name as a Christian patron, and a meeting place within which to interact with other wealthy people. But, this noble status and responsibility for philanthropy was also a circular engine….

Yet, what makes this book excellent is that it’s about more than this. It’s also about the Social Gospel, which grew from the social and cultural earthquake of the 1910s which erupted from at least two causes. First, rabble-rousing academics and men of the cloth (as well as lots and lots of workers) attacked wealthy Protestant patrons for hypocrisy in their supposed philanthropy, and some ministers agreed and joined with workers in solidarity. Churches were fractured, and some men of the cloth created their own organizations in order to support workers’ own efforts at alleviating poverty. Ugly battles ensued over the extent to which patrons really disregarded the poor. And, two, many wealthy Protestants got cars and moved to the suburbs, and the urban churches began emptying.