Recently I passed the above United Methodist church touting its anti-gun stance. United Methodism has officially backed gun control since the early 1960s. This stance is just one of many examples of official Methodism’s post-Social Gospel political perfectionism.
Wesleyan perfectionism, as conceived by John Wesley, emphasized that the individual Christian, relying on the Holy Spirit, constantly seeks the perfection of Christ. For this reason, United Methodist ordinands pledge they are “going on to perfection.” There is never to be complacency about sin. Christ is both our strength and our goal.
But Wesley was ever a grounded realist. He didn’t counsel that a Christian make plans for tomorrow as though all sin were overcome. The struggle for holiness is lifelong. We must be always aware of our fallen inclinations, avoiding temptation where possible, and seeking forgiveness when needed, which is often, while trusting God will keep us under His watch as we trust in Him.
And Wesley certainly never counseled that Christians should operate socially and politically as though the effects of all or most sin in the world were already vanquished. Again, he was a realist. Most, even in nominally Christian cultures, are not living seriously Christian, he certainly knew, as he toiled to spiritually vivify nominally Christian Britain. And even the devout are constrained in their redemptive work by their own stumbles and finite understandings.
Politically, Wesley was adamantly the realist. He stalwartly supported the British constitutional system of crown and parliament because he thought, for all its imperfections, it provided an approximate social good preferable to the alternatives. Unlike the Puritan regime of the previous century, which sought rule by the saints, Britain in Wesley’s day was governed by sinners constrained by balances of power. This system did not assume virtue but assumed human frailty while at its best incentivizing virtue.
Wesley didn’t approve of the American Revolution because, once again as the realist, he thought it could not improve on Britain’s constitutional system. But likely had Wesley lived longer he would have at least grudgingly realized that the new American constitutional system replicated many of the assumptions of Britain’s arrangement. He would have certainly agreed with James Madison’s explanation that government in this world is not of angels and must instead factor fallen human nature. Madison and the other Founders created a regime where competing interests would balance against each other, inhibiting too much power to any one segment.
Of course, Wesley believed in social reform, which he thought chiefly the work of the church as it evangelizes and disciples. But he also favored the pursuit of just laws that at least approximated the lofty justice of God’s kingdom without pretending that God’s Kingdom could be completed through human law. He likely would have agreed with America’s Founders that in the wider body politic, enlightened self-interest is usually the best for which to hope even in the very best of times.
The Social Gospel 100 years after Wesley’s death inverted the pursuit of perfection, making it chiefly political and systemic, not personal and spiritually redemptive. This new spin on Christianity imagined God’s Kingdom could be realized through mobilization and legislation. A perfected society would then perfect individual souls. Wesley would have thought the whole project absurd.
So much of Wesley’s understanding of political order in a fallen world has been erased from collective memory that I have suggested Wesleyans should ponder the Calvinist example regarding human limitations. But as Wesley well knew, even Calvinists have at times dreamt of politically consummating the Kingdom of God. Christians of all stripes must be always on guard against utopianism and even less sweeping forms of social perfectionism. Social arrangements with modest goals that recognize the central power of self-interest should inform Christian political witness.
Liberal Christians must be warned against trusting expansive welfare and regulatory states to defeat poverty, against naive international peacemaking, against pretending that human laws can redirect global climate, against romanticizing illegal immigration as biblical sojourning, against pretending that global energy needs can depend on windmills, the sun and seaweed, and against ignoring the limited and chiefly punitive vocation of the state in restraining evil.
Conservatives Christians are usually more comfortable admitting the limits of human nature. But we also must acknowledge in our fallen world, this side of the eschaton, there will always be abortion, sexual immorality, intoxication, blasphemy, corruption, gambling and every form of human vice, even in the very best of societies. We can pray and labor to bring down the most egregious high places of rebellion against God’s purposes. But the struggle is ongoing and never complete. We mustn’t romanticize a past that never existed or fantasize about a perfected society built by our own hands.
God is always redemptively at work in our sinful, tumultuous world. Personally and politically, we should seek to align with His purposes, as best we understand, realizing our own limitations, and having confidence only in His perfection.
Comment by Dan on July 31, 2014 at 9:11 am
Very nice article Mark. I would suggest that we consider renaming Social Gospel as espoused and lobbied for by the UMC hierarchy and fellow travelers as Socialist Gospel.
Comment by Adrian Croft on July 31, 2014 at 5:40 pm
That “No Guns Allowed” sign is funny. If some nut-ball decides to get his 15 minutes of fame by staging a shooting, these squishy left-wing churchgoers may regret having a sign like that out front.
Leftism is all about “I’m SO compassionate!” Don’t ever confuse that with being a Christian – Christianity is centered on a holy God, not on worshipping your own sweet compassionate self.
Comment by stefanstackhouse on August 1, 2014 at 9:14 am
This is why I don’t like to even use the term “social justice”, and prefer instead to talk about and act upon “social responsibility”. It is a naive conceit to think that we can approach anything even close to the perfect justice of God, either in our own lives or in our society. This does not absolve us, however, of our responsibility toward God and toward our neighbor. We must live responsibly, and we have a responsibility to work to the extent that we can toward a responsibility society, where people are expected and encouraged to take personal responsibility for themselves to the extent that they can, and where neighbors are expected and encouraged to take responsibility to help their neighbors to help themselves, and to help them to the extent that they can’t help themselves. We all have a responsibility to do our best to minimize social problems and to maximize whatever good we can build in our society. Most of all, we all have a responsibility to not make the perfect (but perfectly impossible) the enemy of the good and possible.
Comment by Jeremy Smith on August 1, 2014 at 9:30 pm
Are you sure that Rauschenbusch would have said that “a perfected society would then perfect individual souls”? Also, what do you think of the way Martin Luther King interpreted Rauschenbusch? I think that if one reads King’s classic Strength to Love, one does not come away with the impression that for King (or for Rauschenbusch), the notion of the social gospel implies that improvement in material conditions is the sole real aim of Christianity and that there is no independent spiritual dimension. Here is how King describes Rauschenbusch’s view: “Rauschenbusch gave to American Protestantism a
sense of social responsibility that it should never lose. The gospel at its best deals with the whole
man, not only with his soul but also his body, not only his spiritual well
being but also his material well being.
A religion that professes a concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that
damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social
conditions that cripple them, is a
spiritually moribund religion.” It is of course very true that in the “liberalism” that a great many people implicitly assume is in fact guilty of the confusion you ascribe to the social gospel as such (and that I assume that you would ascribe to Rauschenbusch–probably quite incorrectly). In fact the pervasive secularism in our culture–a secularism to which the UMC is hardly immune–does incline many to confuse God’s act of the redemption of humanity through Christ with a mere moral ideal that will somehow accomplish something thought of as redemption with the unfolding of temporal history. Much Christian liberalism is in fact just another form of moralism. And in addition, there are many supporters of the social gospel who do believe that government intervention will cure all of society’s ills. I doubt that a careful reading of the founders of that movement would completely support such a reduction, although the emphasis of their discourse does rather tend in that direction. I think there is a more fundamental way to understand the essential insight of the social gospel. It is that the love ethic of Christ applies not only to individuals but to societies. And societies consist partly of institutions. And those institutions include states and governments as well as corporations and churches. To hold that Christ’s love ethic is a command directed not only to individuals one by one, but also to societies and institutions, is simply not the same as holding that any particular social institution (such as government) can solve all problems, or that there is no end for human life that lies beyond the time of the secular world. What you have to say embodies the wisdom that really does lie in true conservatism. What I have just tried to do is define the wisdom I think really does lie in true liberalism. I believe that there is also a great deal of folly that goes by the name of liberalism–and also of conservatism. You have some warnings for liberals due to their folly. Martin Luther King has some warnings for conservatives that I think are a response to the follies that often go by the name of conservatism: “In all fairness, we must admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to permit luxuries to be given to the few, and has encouraged small-hearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty stricken humanity….God intends that all his children shall have the basic necessities for meaningful, healthful life. Surely it is unchristian and unethical for some to wallow on the soft beds of luxury, while others sink in the quicksands of poverty. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cut-throat competition and selfish
ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a
life….Capitalism may lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as
the theoretical materialism taught by Communism.”
Comment by Don Bryant on August 2, 2014 at 5:39 am
Well said. The great success of the American political system has the undesired effect of numbing the senses to the true evil that lies at the door of high civilization. An upsurge in Evangelicals toying with pacifism is such an example. Pacifism is “in” among some of our up and coming thought shapers. It’s hip. There is a diminishment of the falleness of man and an overconfidence in moral IQ. It is just hard for them to imagine that someone would really want to kill them in the name of some ideology or totalitarian scheme. This is history’s lesson, and I am constantly being surprised how easily it is overlooked.
Comment by John S. on August 4, 2014 at 8:00 am
When sin is no longer preached (biblical sin as opposed to political sin) and the Methodists (and many other denominations) are convinced they are “OK” they can believe that everyone else is OK too and will behave in the approved, rational, UMC manner.