Jean Miller Schmidt

Souls or the Social Order: The Two-Party System in American Protestantism (Chicago Studies in the History of American Religion)
by Jean Miller Schmidt

the rise of the social gospelters

I seldom finish uninteresting, uninformative or badly written books over the last few years, i leave them unfinished until they are due back to the library or boxed and put back into the shed. The mere fact that i finished a book means that it is well above average, to me, and a worthwhile and recommended read. This book is not an exception to this observation, i enjoyed the book and did get a lot of both information and structured argument from it.

It is a rewrite and expansion of a PhD thesis, it is however not overly technical or difficult to read. It is an analysis of the rise of the social gospel and the tensions this caused during the turn of the 20thC. It is excellent on the analysis of individual social gospel thinkers, it covers the rise of the social gospel well, talks about the confrontation and rise of the contrary movement-Fundamentalism, but there are other books better for this movement.

If you are briefly looking at the book, read chapter 3, the beginnings of Social Christianity, it is representative of the book as a whole. I would have like a much longer conclusion where several of the dominant ideas could have been tied together with the problems of those years. I think the best part of the book was the analysis of individual thinkers and how they interacted and taught each other. I think that the weakness is in analysis of the underlying forces that burst upon the later half of the 19thC with such force and how these thinkers reacted to it and contributed to ways of reconstructing society in it's wake.

I found it worthwhile my time, i suspect many will not. It is nice to see a rewrite and updating of an older serious book as the author learns from research and teaching over the years. I think this is one of the strengths of the book, the maturity of the author in having thought about these things for decades rather than reading for a few years for a thesis… (more)