During the 1880's, the public began to see the rise of the social Gospel movement.
This was a movement of theological liberals, who denied the authority of the Bible, and who were committed to the Progressive Movement's economic reforms. They were advocates of the welfare state, and they came in the name of Jesus. But they did not believe that Jesus is divine. They did not believe that the Bible is infallible.
Their strategy was simple. They wanted to mobilize what was then a majority of voters. They wanted to persuade these voters to adopt the welfare state. They also wanted lifetime income from the donations of conservative Christians who believe in the Bible and who believe that Jesus is divine. These people wanted to undermine the religious outlook of the congregations, and they wanted the congregations to finance this subversion. They were overwhelmingly successful.
In the United States, the Federal Council of Churches began in 1908. About 5% of the budget was paid for by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Rockefeller was a major promoter of the social gospel, as was his son.
Social gospel economics hit the Roman Catholic Church only after the death of Pope Pius XII. But it made rapid gains within a decade. Today, the American bishops are as far to the Left on economic and political matters as the Federal Council of Churches was in 1908.
A good book on the Federal Council and its successor after 1950, the National Council of Churches, was written a generation ago by the American Calvinist historian, C. Gregg Singer: The Unholy Alliance (1975). His editor was Lew Rockwell. You may download it here.
From the beginning, there have been opponents of these welfare state wolves in sheep's clothing. But there has been a problem with their attempt to refute the social gospel. They have maintained the position that the Bible is silent on these issues, and therefore the social gospel is illegitimate.
This surrenders the high moral ground to the defenders of the social gospel. The defenders of the social gospel come to the people in the name of the moral high ground. The opponents do not take this strategy. They simply say that the Bible doesn't speak to these issues.
Unfortunately for the opponents of the social gospel, the Bible does speak to these issues. This is why I sat down in 1973 to write a detailed economic commentary on the entire Bible. I wrote 31 volumes of exegesis to show that the Bible does speak to these issues. This is the first time in the history of church that anyone has done this. This puts me at a disadvantage. The project sounds too radical: "not invented here." Also, who is going to read 31 volumes of exegesis? Nobody. But anyone can look up a verse. But journalists won't do this -- too much work.
The critics of the social gospel have relied on the instinctive opposition of the man in the pew to a government that comes to take money out of his wallet. But this is not a philosophical or theological defense of the idea of liberty. So, step-by-step, generation by generation, the social gospel has penetrated the thinking of evangelicals and Catholics. It has been overwhelmingly successful in the mainline Protestant denominations, which, by the grace of God, have been shrinking for a generation.
MATTHEW LYNN OBJECTS
A recent example of this type of futile criticism of the social gospel was made by a financial columnist in the British newspaper, The Telegraph: Matthew Lynn. In financial matters, he is generally a sensible fellow. But in the area of theology, he is a blind man attempting to lead the blind, and they are going to go into the ditch.
He reports on a presently secret document issued by the bishops of the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church has been in the process of disintegration since the end of the 19th century. It has shrunk relentlessly. Fewer than two million Anglicans attend church at least once a month. There are almost three million Muslims.
With this as background, consider Mr. Lynn's critique of what he calls woolly-headed Leftist Keynesianism among Anglican bishops.
The Church has been hijacked by a woolly left-of-centre Keynesianism, where it is automatically regarded as more moral to support higher taxes, more government borrowing, and a more generous welfare system. And yet, in fact, there is very little basis for that. If you care to look, there are just as many passages in the Bible that support a smaller state and more liberal markets. It might be better if church leaders stayed out of the economic debate and just stuck to spiritual matters.
But social gospel advocates have been working since the 1880's to get deeply involved in spiritual matters, because they fully understand that spiritual matters affect the social order. They fully understand that whatever people believe about God, man, law, sanctions, and history will affect the way that they vote.
Their opponents deny this. Their opponents say that Christianity does not speak to the issues of God, man, law, sanctions, and history. Supposedly, Christianity speaks only to issues of eternal salvation and family government. This is another way of saying that the concept of Christendom is a heresy.
The social gospel's advocates understand that there has to be a consistency between what people believe about God, man, law, sanctions, and history in personal matters and also in social matters, including politics. The critics of the social gospel are terminally naïve. This is why they do not win. They tell the bishops to sit down and be quiet. The bishops never do. Show me a bishop, and if he is a bishop in a church larger than 200,000 members, I'll show you a social gospel defender, unless he is an outright socialist. The defenders of the social gospel took over the seminaries a century ago. These are the people who train each generation of ministers, who in turn become bishops.
The Bishop's Manifesto has not been issued yet, but the leaked version has already been attacked by the Conservatives for a series of misleading claims about the economy. It argues that unemployment has not 'risen as high as predicted' when of course it has fallen under the coalition. It complains about a rise in 'in-work poverty', even though it has stayed the same, and complains about the wealthy not shouldering the burden of deficit reduction, when the figures show the better-off are paying a great share of total taxes than ever.But this is the type of attack we have come to expect from the Church. Only this month, Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, attacked welfare reforms as 'a disgrace'. The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, has criticised the 'bedroom tax', and argued that government spending needs to be returned to its long-term averages. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has attacked what he describes as excessive consumerism, criticising events like Black Friday Sales. Justin Welby has emerged as one of the main critics of the finance industry, calling for more credit unions and a revival of regional banks and attacking the energy companies for excessive price rises. By far the most radical attacks have come from Rome, where Pope Francis has launched a series of blistering tirades on the inequality that capitalism supposedly generates.
The problem is this: he writes as though this were some recent development. This has been going on for over a century.
Back in 1984, I participated in a book project in which this topic was debated: wealth and poverty. Four of us wrote articles on the Bible's position on wealth and poverty. Mine was the free market position. There was a Keynesian businessman. There was a back-to-the-land communalist. Finally, there was a minister of the Anglican church, who defended outright socialism. He later became a bishop. You can read the book here. It was suppressed by the publisher within a year of its publication, probably because of my hard-core rhetoric in favor of the free market. Anyway, I like to think so.
Lynn continues:
Anyone listening to all this might suppose there was some theological basis to it, and that the Bible was one long Fabian pamphlet, with endless sermons about redistributing wealth, spending more money on welfare, and putting up taxes for the rich, all mixed in with some fuzzy Keynesianism about ramping up the deficit and not worrying about the government running up too much debt.But of course it isn't. If you choose to look, you can find just as many quotes in the Bible supporting deregulation and flat taxes as you can wealth distribution and price controls. Such as? Well, how about this for starters. "The prince shall not take any of the people's inheritance, thrusting them out of their property." That is from Ezekiel, 46-18. From the sounds of that, it looks as if George Osborne's now largely forgotten pledge to ease the burden of inheritance tax has solid Biblical foundations. Indeed, the tax might have to be scrapped altogether. The mansion tax might well be a non-starter as well.
Here it is: the ever popular "the Bible teaches everything about everything" position. This is another way of saying that the Bible speaks to nothing with any degree of authority, except the spiritual condition of individuals and possibly their families.
He misquotes the Bible, arguing that a payment to the Temple was in fact a payment to the state.
Moses, it turns out, was in favour of flat taxes, which puts him a long way to the right even of Ukip. According to Exodus, Chapter 30, verses 11-16, everyone was required to pay half a shekel to the Lord in a temple tax. "The rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less", runs the instruction. In fact, it is a fixed amount, rather like fuel tax, and not even as progressive as a flat tax, in which the rich do at least pay more because they have more money. It is the most regressive system of raising revenue there is.
I devoted a chapter to this mistake in my commentary on the Mosaic case laws back in 1990.
The Bible does not have much good to say about debt either. "The borrower is a slave to the lender," according to Proverbs 22:7. You can use that to attack payday lenders, or the banks in general if you want to, and anyone who has run up a big bill with Wonga might well see that truth of that sentence. But you can just as easily use it to attack deficit financing if you feel so inclined.
Again, how are we to interpret the passage? He doesn't try to explain. He doesn't try to explain, because he doesn't think the Bible speaks authoritatively to this issue anyway.
Then he comes to the famous bottom line: none of this applies to anything.
None of that, however, actually means that Christians should be in favour of scrapping progressive taxes or ending welfare or getting the budget back into balance tomorrow. That would be just as crazy and misguided as suggesting they should automatically be in favour a 50pc top rate or easing up on austerity. In fact, everyone can come up with quotes for whatever argument they want to make from the Bible. There are just as many parables and passages that make out a generally left-of-centre case for more welfare spending and more government debt. There is a lot of stuff about self-reliance and hard-work, just as there are plenty of passages about helping the poor, and remaining honest. The reality is that the Bible is, like any religious work, primarily a spiritual document. It doesn't make any real arguments for either free markets or state control of the economy, and it is certainly not much of a guide to technical issues of welfare reform or financial regulation, or whether we need more competition in energy markets, or some kind of price controls.
Conclusion: nobody should say anything about economics in the name of the Bible. "In fact, the bishops would be better keeping out of economic issues altogether -- and they should certainly stop pretending that somehow their position gives them any special insight or wisdom on anything other than purely religious matters."
This is not the moral high ground. This is moral quicksand. This is the moral no ground. This is the traditional pietistic argument that the Bible doesn't apply to anything outside of individual salvation and family government.
This is one more case of a man arguing for the social irrelevance of Christianity, in the name of Christianity. This is regarded in conservative theological circles as a perfectly good rejection of the social gospel. Meanwhile, the opponents lose battles: in the hierarchy, in the seminaries, and finally in the pulpits.
A STATIST GOSPEL
The problem with the social gospel is not the social aspects of the gospel. It is the statist gospel. The social gospel does what statists have done for two centuries, namely, equate voluntary social justice and social change with state-managed change.
The response of the anti-social critics has been this: to tell readers that the Bible doesn't apply to society in general -- just to individuals and families. They don't go for the jugular: the Bible does not promote statist policies promoted by welfare state socialists and Keynesians. In other words, they try to fight something with nothing.
The social gospel's promoters have taken what appears to be the moral high ground in the name of society, and then they have used a bait-and-switch operation. They have substituted the conclusion that the state is the primary agency of society, and therefore the state has a moral obligation to redistribute wealth by legalized coercion. To summarize their position in a slogan: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."
The heart of the error of the social gospel is this: it promotes an illegitimate transfer of authority from voluntary social organizations, which do have social responsibilities, to politics. In the name of social reform, they promote a system of welfare state wealth redistribution. They substitute coercion for voluntarism. They identify areas that need social reform, and then they argue that the Bible teaches that the state should be the initiating agency of such reform. The Bible does not teach this. I have written 31 volumes of commentaries to prove this point.
The correct approach to refuting the social gospel is twofold. First, identify the bait-and-switch operation: from social reform to state coercion. Second, refute the social gospel's interpretations of the key biblical passages, which the defenders of the social gospel invoke in order to promote their idea of statist wealth redistribution. Third, offer a comprehensive economic alternative to the social gospel -- one based on explicit exegesis of the passages dealing with economics. The third step is crucial. You can't beat something with nothing.
The critics of the social gospel do none of these. I have been waiting to see this line of reasoning for over 50 years, and I have yet to find a single critic of the social gospel who has done this.
This is why I decided in 1973 to devote my time to a detailed examination of what the biblical texts actually say. You can't beat something with nothing.
I can tell you this much: Matthew Lynn's response to the bishops is going to fail. This is not life and death. The bishops have no clout. They have no influence. They really are woolly-headed Keynesian Leftists. Nobody pays any attention to them. But if we are going to pay attention to them, we ought to pay attention first to what the Bible really says.
The simple answer to the social gospel is this: it's a statist gospel. The more detailed answers appear in 31 volumes. I intend to write a multi-volume summary of the overall system.
What will not do, and what has never worked, is the standard response of the people who did not do their homework, but who do not like the conclusions of the bishops. This is to argue that the Bible teaches every position, and therefore it's useless except as a guide to spiritual living. This is a cry of despair. This is the moral no ground. It is an attempt to beat something with nothing. It has never worked, and it never will work.
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