What’s the Social Gospel?

  • Background

    The term “social gospel” was first used to describe a Protestant Christian intellectual movement that first came to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those who adhere to the social gospel seek to apply Christian ethics to social problems such as poverty, slums, poor nutrition and education, alcoholism, crime, and war. Advocates of our movement interpret the Kingdom of God as requiring social as well as individual salvation and sought the betterment of society through application of the biblical principles of charity and justice.


    But then came the Great Depression of the 1930s, which saw the enactment of Social Security. Formerly it was the churches that took care of the needs of the poor, but once the government got involved, it effectively took over the role that churches and other nonprofits had. As a result, churches got a bit lazy and depended on the government more than they should have. This went on until the early 1950s, when the banner of the Social Gospel was taken up once again, this time through the civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 1960s, being led and rejuvenated by Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr.

As a self-described “advocate of the social gospel,” King’s theology was concerned “with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being”. His ministry built upon the social gospel of the Protestant church at the turn of the twentieth century and his own family’s practice of preaching on the social conditions of parishioners.

After King’s assassination, the Social Gospel lost a little of its punch, only to be revived by the 2008 economic crash and the Atlanta-based Social Gospel Worship and Learning Center (Minister Paul J. Bern, pastor), which took up this cause with its founding in 2018 by Rev, Bern. Today, largely as a result of increasing poverty and homelessness, the Social Gospel has been revived in the southeastern US and elsewhere across North America as something that can benefit a lot of sick and hurting people, as it paves a way forward to ending poverty and hunger without government interference while reestablishing Bible-based social and economic equality for all the people.