Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

TltE demoralization of society which we have tried to bring before us in the preceding chapter ought to appeal most powerfully to the Church, for the Church is to be the incarnation of the Christ-spirit on earth, the organized conscience of Christendom. It should be swiftest to awaken to every undeserved suffering, bravest to speak against every wrong, and strongest to rally the moral forces of the community against everything that threatens the better life among men. But in addition to the call of unselfish duty, the Church may well hear in the present crisis the voice of warning to it to guard its own interests. The organized Church is a great social institution, deeply rooted in the common life of humanity, and if all other human lire about it suffers through some permanent evil, the Church is bound to surfer with it. It holds property; it needs income; it employs men. Therefore whatever affects property and employment will affect the Church. Its work is done on human material; anything which deteriorates that material, impedes the work of the Church. The warning of justifiable self-interest runs in the same direction with the call to duty and each reënforces the other, t In this chapter I propose to set forth this aspect of the  An article in which I set forth this line of thought in more rudimentary form was published in the American Journal o] So¢iology, July, 1897.

situation. It is not the highest line of appeal, but it well deserves consideration, hOt only by those whose professional interests are bound up with the Church, but by all who believe that the Church propagates and perpetuates the religious life, and that its vitality is of importance fo the higher life of humanity.

The Church is a large landowner. As soon as it gets beyond its first itinerant stage, it needs a permanent foothold on the land. Every enlargement of church work, every mission or parish-house, requires land. If land is cheap, church expansion is easy. If land prices are artificially high, expansion is checked. Land speculation, which checks and strangles every other business, hampers the Church too. The retarding influence of land prices is felt most in the founding of missions and young churches. It is a frost that nips the young shoots. A young church enterprise is usually feeble in its finances. If it has to pay a prohibitive price for a mere location, that may cripple it or frustrate it altogether. Now, land prices are highest where population is densest. Consequently it is harder to plant new churches in large cities than in small. A hundred working people in a small town might easily unite in buying a lot for $iooo. The saine htmdred persons, if living in New York, might have to pay $1%ooo for a lot of half the size. But the denser the population, the more unwholesome are the moral influences and the greater is the need of religious work. Thus land prices act as an automatic brake on church extension, and this brake presses the barder, the steeper the uphill grade is vhich the Church has to climb. îhis is one simple explanation of the

fact so often lamented, that the Church does not keep pace with the population in large cities. A certain church in New York fifty years ago planted a number of missions in the growing suburbs of that day by holding cottage meetings in the homes of its members and renting vacant stores in which it organized Sunday-schools. Several of these missions developed into vigorous churches. Forty years later the saine church desired to resume its early missionary career, but its members now lived in tenement houses, and the cheapest store in sight cost $600 a year. It was numerically and financially stronger than in its early days, but rent had increased faster than the ability of the church, and high rent quenched its missionary impulse. The pioneer ork which formerly rested on the spontaneous zeal of plain people becomes dependent on the assistance of wealthy individuals or city mission organizations. That conduces to prudence, and also to officialism. Of course single churches may profit by the land systew which hampers the Church at large. A church occasionally sells its old site at an enormous increase and builds luxuriously in a new neighborhood on the proceeds. Several denominations in New York City are forging ahead of others, not simply by superior spiritual eciency, but because they have long had an endowment in city land and are able to feed their religious work with the " unearned increment" created by the community. In general our land system works against the great majority of churches which have to live from hand to mouth. It bas long seemed to me that the land-tax system advocated by Henry George would create almost ideal conditions for the ordinary church. A church would then pay an annual rental or tax on the site occupied, just as if it occupied land under a perpetual lease. It would not have to raise a large sure for the initial purchase of the land, but could devote its available capital to the church edifice, and hope to pay its annual land-tax from its current income, just as it now pays interest on the church debt. The needs of modern industry shift and change the population. They denude the country and gather the people about the shops and mines. They invade a residence neighborhood with factories, scatter the old population, and ri_Il the chinks between the shops and warehouses with a population of lower grade, and perhaps of alien faith and tongue. This affects the churches profoundly. Fine old country churches are left high and dry. When a trust transfers a shop to another city, some church may be left behind, like Rachel, mourning for her children. Protestant churches wake up and find themselves in an Italian or Jewish neighborhood. Ail the endless labor and love which pastor and people put into the erection of a new church home may serve only for a few years, and then the location will have to be abandoned and the edifice sold for second-hand building material. The interest of the Church is in stability of population. A permanent location builds up an invaluable "good-will." People corne to love the local church for the memories and traditions which cling about it and make it more beautiful than the ivy on its walls. Churches are long-lived organisms, like trees, and strike their roots deeper with the passing years. When a speculative and frantic commerce hustles the churches around, they owe it no thanks. Competitive industry sweeps the people together in the great cities. Therewith it creates the problem of the down-town church. In a community o5 moderate diameter the people

on the outskirts can easily reach a church built in the centre. VChen a city grows very large, the outer fringe of homes drifts ever farther away from the ancient churches that stand in heroic loneliness like the Roman soldier dying on gdtrd at Pompeii. Their problem is aggravated by land speculation, which usually lays a belt of sparsely settled land about the city and compels home-seekers to cross that belt to nuclei of social life still farther out. These brief suggestions will suffice to show that at the bottom of some of the gravest problems that harass churches and pastors lies the land question in its relation to the complex total of modern life. The condition of the crowded and landless people ought long ago to ha,ce aroused the Church to examine the moral basis of our land system. Let it realize in addition that its own growth and stability is impaired by the same causes.

The income of the Church in former rimes and in other countries was mainly derived from landed wealth or from state subsidies. In our country the churches with few exceptions are maintained by the current contributions of their living members. It is therefore of the utmost importance to the financial welfare of the churches that their members shall have a regular and secure income, from which they can readily support their church. Thus the Church has the greatest possible interest in a just and even distribution of wealth. The best community for church support at present is a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. A social system which would make moderate wealth approximately universal would be the best soil for robust churches. If, on the contrary, society tends to divide into a few rich familles and a mass of poor wage-eamers, the troubles oi the Church are before it. We ail understand that a man receiving $5oo a year cannot pay as much to religious institutions as a man receiving $5ooo, but the universal impression seems to be that he can faifly be expected to contribute the same proportion of his income. The Old Testament law of tithing is very generally recommended as the ideal to be followed by ail, on the supposition that ten per cent of an income of $500 is the saine proportion as ten per cent of an income of $5000. This commercial method of calculation leaves some fundamental facts of human nature out of account and has inflicted a grave wrong on the poorer portion of out churches. Dr. Ernst Engel, long the eminent chier of the Prussian Bureau of Statistics, compiled from a large number of family budgets the proportion expended for various purposes. The following table 1 contains the main results:—

Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1885. I)r. T. Ely has a brief discussion of the table in his " Outlines of Economics," pp. 243-245.

The minor items of this table will vary somewhat in different countries, according to local prices and customs; but the main deduction, which is known in Political Economy as "Engel's Law of Consumption," is as universal as human nature. It will be noticed that the first four items include those expenditures which satisfy the animal necessities of the body: food, shelter, and warmth. The other four satisfy the higher needs. As the income rises, the proportion spent on the first group sinks, and the proportion spent on the second group rises. Within the first group the proportion spent for lodging, heat, aad light is the saine in all classes, and the proportion for clothing nearly so. But the proportion spent for food is far larger with the poorest familles. The human body has certain imperious demands for its maintenance, and these demands cannot be compressed below a certain minimum. If the income is small, the largest part must go simply for stoking the human machine, and the higher needs of the social, intellectual, and religious nature must be starved. If food prices fise, that proportion will be still greater. The nearer the people descend toward the poverty line, the less will be available for the higher If, then, any average wage-earner in the churches has actually given a tenth of his income, he deserves profound respect. It is heroic giving for him. And if we have allowed the impression to prevail that the giving of one-tenth by all was equal giving for all, we have unwittingly inflicted a grievous injustice on the poorer church members. In every church working among the poorer classes there are a number who contribute nothing or are dependents of the church instead of supporters. Every season of economic distress depresses additional families below this line. But some self-respecting people may choose a different line of action. If their church membership involves too heavy a tax, they drop away. Other causes and motives may work in the saine direction, but the pressure exerted by the systematized giving of the modern church, and the insistence on this virtue in pulpit teaching, must alienate some. They simply cannot afford church life. The fraternal societies, which offer insurance and mutual help in sickness and death, have increased immensely among the wage-earners, while the Church confessedly has lost ground among them. Is this due merely to religious indifference and unbelief, or to poverty coupled with self-respect? I ara not in a position to prove this, but I offer it as a working hypothesis to explain in part the alienation of the working classes from the churches. Certainly the churches are deeply affected by the economic pressure resting on the wage-workers. Engel's Law deserves serious consideration from the point of view of church finances. I have never corne across any discussion of it nor any indication that it is tmderstood in its bearings on church life. If the people become poor, they cannot afford to share in a self-supporting church. The unequal distribution of wealth thus tends to strip the churches of their poorer clientage. The saine inequality of wealth threatens the churches in other ways on the side of the strong who profit by it. If a church is composed of many wage-workers with a few well-to-do families, the contributions of these few will be of inordinate importance in the financial affairs of the church. The departure of a single family may mean that the church can no longer pay the minister's salary nor support itself.

Such a condition will almost inevitably breed an unwholesome deference at some points and an unwholesome jealousy at others. It would be strange, too, if those who are the financial stays of the church did not have the feeling that their wishes ought to be decisive about the coming and going of the minister and other matters deeply affecting the spiritual life. But the preference of wealthy men and their wives may select a pastor who is more of a courtier than a saint. The fundamental evil in the union of Church and State is that worldly men with their interests and points of view dominate the life of the Church which ought to be guided by moral and Christian interests. The point of contact between the Church and the State was frequently the local nobleman, who had the right of "patronage" and could "present the living" to some candidate of his own selection. It was this which caused the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in x843. Church and State are separate with us, but the essence of the evil may creep in once more as soon as the mass of church members are financially weak and a few persons hold the financial existence of the church in their hands. Church democracy and voluntaryism presuppose approximate fmancial equality. The danger just described has been averted usually by the fact that in the larger cities, where there is more than one church of a denominaten, the wealthier families do hot remain 1 the poorer churches, but gravitate toward churches composed in the main of their own class. Water seeks its level and so do men. If a young man rises to wealth, and if he and his wife have social ambitions, or if they have intellectual and oesthetic tastes, the wealthy church attracts them. If a man from Chrïstian motives remains in a church of poorer people and bears its burdens, he may find that undesirable associations threaten his growing children there. There are a hundred perfectly natural and legitimate reasons to recommend a transer of membership to the more congenial surroundings. As fast as the social extremes draw apart and society stratifies in classes, the churches will pass through the saine process. The very democracy of out intercourse in America makes it the more inevitable. But this situation creates the saine problem of dependence on a larger scale. The poorer churches become financially dependent on those which contain the wealth of the denomination. If a small church becomes a "mission" of a wealthy church, it thereby secures volunteer workers and a safe budget, but it loses its independence and something of its virility. If a city mission organization undertakes the support of the poorer churches, it is certain to draw its income chiefly from the wealthy churches, and the situation will again be essentially the same. The inequality of wealth affects the churches on a still larger scale. Most denominations bave a few very wealthy supporters. The yearly balance of the great denominational boards and institutions may depend on the single-handed contributions of these large givers. The initiative in the larger religious enterprises will fall to them. If they hitch their steam-tug to the denominational canal-boat, it will float away to a prosperous voyage; if they hold off, it will stick on the mud-bank of poverty and all the poling of the crew may hot get it afloat. They may, and often do, use their vast powers very wisely to develop the latent resources oftheir denomination. But it is at least conceivable that men whose character has been moulded by commercialism, may be guided by points of view very alien from the Christian spirit, and that personal dislikes or class prejudices may decide questions of the greatest spiritual importance. Thus the mere fact of great inequality of wealth injects a monarchical element into denominations with democratic government, and in bodies with episcopal government it creates a financial episcopacy back of the bishops. Then there is always the danger of change. The rich man may grow weary of the constant demands on his help and the disheartening experiences of untruthfulness and parasitism which he is bound to make, and may slacken in his giving. It is not as delightful to be a god on a small scale as outsiders think. Or the children of the rich man may be debilitated by the atmosphere of wealth and be more interested in orchids or art curios than in the Church their father and mother loved so well. Or they may follow the drift of their social set toward the ritualistic churches, which offer more oesthetic satisfaction and bring to this country some of the social prestige and antique grandeur which they have in older countries. In any of these contingencies the revenues of an entire denomination, which have been adjusted to these important contributions, may be upset and its missionary policies at home and abroad may surfer calamitous retrenchment. If wealth is in few hands, there is the pleasant possibility of very large and swift benefactions, but there is also a constant danger of instability. The safest income is from the moderately wealthy. There is more to say, but this will suffice to show that the financial welfare of the churches is bound up with the economic health of society, and that its perils increase as wealth accumulates in few hands and the social extremes draw farther apart. Moreover, the finances of the Church have always affected its constitution and inner life in the subtlest ways. 1 The bishops probably rose to power in the early Church first of ail by controlling the purse-strings of the churches. One cause for the fise of the papacy was the large wealth early controlled by the bishop of Rome. The history of the Church in the Middle Ages and its struggles with the secular powers were largely due to the fact that the Church was a eat landowner and fought for its income. The corruptions of the papacy and its financial extortions, which alienated the Northem nations and prepared them for the schism of the Reformation, were due in part to the economic changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The financial necessities of the Church even created new sacramental observances, and indirectly the doctrines based on them. In the Reformation financial interests played a decisive part throughout. The democratic polity of the vaflous conegational bodies, which is most in harmony with the genius of American lire, grew up in homogeneous bodies of plain people. It works best where social equality is greatest. Its essence is imperilled as soon as equality departs. Financial changes are apt to involve far more than any one foresees at the rime. When financial control shifls, other elements and functions of church lire are sure to shift with it. The Church surely has an interest at stake in the distribution of social wealth. 2

1 See an article by Profesor Harnack in the Contemporary Rev¢z'w, I9o4, p. 846, on "The Relation between Ecclesiastical and General History." * On tl'ds entire subject see "The Captive City of God," by my friend Mr. Richard Heath, a book written with searctfing insight and prophefi¢ power.