Saving Souls and Society

The fight against slavery

For most of Christian history, the churches accepted slavery as part of the social order, though they urged masters to treat slaves kindly. Christian nations ran the Atlantic slave trade, which carried some 12 million Africans to the Americas in brutal conditions. Church bodies, including the Church of England's missionary society, even owned plantations with enslaved workers. This is one of the great moral failures of Christian history.

The first sustained Christian opposition came from Quakers, who by the 1760s–70s required members to free their slaves, and from evangelicals like John Wesley, who called slavery "that execrable villainy," and John Newton, the former slave-ship captain (see John Wesley and the Methodists). Formerly enslaved Africans played a crucial role in exposing the trade's horrors. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1789), a converted Christian, was a bestseller.

In 1787 a small committee, mostly Quakers plus the Anglican Granville Sharp and the young researcher Thomas Clarkson, launched the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Their spokesman in Parliament was William Wilberforce (1759–1833), a wealthy young MP who had experienced an evangelical conversion in 1785. He considered leaving politics for the ministry, but John Newton persuaded him to stay. Wilberforce wrote in his diary that God had set before him two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners (morals).

Year after year, Wilberforce introduced bills to abolish the trade, and year after year they failed, defeated by the powerful West Indian sugar interests. The abolitionists pioneered modern campaigning methods: mass petitions (one in 1792 had nearly 400,000 signatures), consumer boycotts of slave-grown sugar, and the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes showing Africans packed like cargo. Josiah Wedgwood's medallion of a kneeling slave asked: "Am I not a man and a brother?" Finally, in 1807, Parliament abolished the British slave trade. In 1833, three days before Wilberforce died, it voted to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, freeing about 800,000 people.

The Clapham Sect

Wilberforce belonged to a circle of wealthy evangelical Anglicans who lived near Clapham Common in London, later nicknamed the Clapham Sect. Besides abolition, they founded or supported the Church Missionary Society, the Bible Society, the colony of Sierra Leone for freed slaves, and schools for the poor. The writer Hannah More wrote cheap moral tracts and founded schools in poor villages. The Clapham circle's mix of personal piety and political activism became a model for later evangelical social action. Critics noted their paternalism. They did not support democracy or trade unions, and they worried about working-class "immorality."

Christians and the end of slavery

America: a house divided

In the United States, slavery split the churches. Northern evangelicals, inspired by revivalism, joined the abolitionist movement. Black Christians like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman spoke powerfully against slavery, often using biblical language of exodus and judgment. Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of a famous preacher, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

But many Southern Christians defended slavery from the Bible. They pointed out that Abraham owned slaves and that Paul told slaves to obey their masters. In the 1840s the Methodists, Baptists and later Presbyterians split into Northern and Southern churches over slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 for this reason. (In 1995 it formally apologized.) Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address (1865) that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, each invoking his aid against the other. Slavery ended only through the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865).

Christians and the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain around 1760–1830, drew millions into crowded, filthy factory towns. Children worked 14-hour days in mills and mines. Many urban poor had no contact with any church. Christians responded in many ways:

• Sunday schools: In 1780 Robert Raikes, a newspaper publisher in Gloucester, started schools on Sundays to teach working children to read and to learn the Bible. By 1831 over a million British children attended.
• Prison reform: The Quaker Elizabeth Fry visited the women's ward of Newgate prison in 1813 and was horrified. She organized education, work and humane treatment for prisoners and campaigned for reform.
• Factory and mines laws: The evangelical aristocrat Lord Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885) led decades of campaigns that limited child labor and working hours, banned women and children from coal mines, and improved care for the mentally ill.
• Orphanages: George Müller in Bristol cared for over 10,000 orphans. He never asked anyone for money, relying on prayer alone. Thomas Barnardo founded homes for destitute children in London.
• Young people: The YMCA (1844) and YWCA (1855) offered young workers in cities a Christian alternative to the pub.
• Christian Socialism: Anglican thinkers like F. D. Maurice argued that Christianity implied cooperation and fellowship rather than competition, and they founded workers' colleges.

The Salvation Army

William Booth (1829–1912), a Methodist minister, and his wife Catherine Booth (1829–1890), a powerful preacher and advocate of women's ministry, began working in the slums of London's East End in 1865. Their "Christian Mission" was organized along military lines in 1878 as The Salvation Army, with "generals," "officers," uniforms, flags and brass bands playing popular tunes. Women served as officers equal to men from the start.

They took the gospel to drunkards, prostitutes and the homeless, and were often attacked by mobs (the "Skeleton Army") stirred up by pub owners. Their approach was summed up as "soup, soap and salvation." Booth's book In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) proposed a comprehensive scheme of shelters, labor exchanges and farm colonies. The Salvation Army is now one of the world's largest charitable organizations.

The Social Gospel

By the late 1800s some Christians believed that charity was not enough. The causes of poverty, such as low wages, slums and exploitation, had to be changed. In the United States the Social Gospel movement, led by the Baptist pastor and professor Walter Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), taught that the kingdom of God meant transforming society according to Christ's teaching. Rauschenbusch had pastored in New York's "Hell's Kitchen," where he saw children die from poverty. His Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) argued that sin was social as well as personal, built into economic structures. The Social Gospel influenced labor laws, the settlement house movement and Progressive politics. It was closely linked with liberal theology, and conservative evangelicals increasingly distanced themselves from it, which some historians call the "great reversal."

Catholic social teaching developed in parallel. Bishop Wilhelm von Wilhelm von Ketteler of Mainz championed workers' causes, and Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) followed. In the Netherlands, the Calvinist theologian and prime minister Abraham Abraham Kuyper developed a Christian approach to politics based on "sphere sovereignty," in which family, church, business and state each have their own God-given domain.