THE DISINTEGRATION OF FAITH: THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND MODERN AMERICAN CULTURE (RELIGION, CONSUMER CULTURE, PROTESTANTISM, REFORM, PROGRESSIVISM)

In the early twentieth century, two important events shaped the culture of the United States in the modern era. The first event was the articulation of the social gospel among prominent American Protestants that sparked a renewed interest in religion--especially in the midwest and in urban centers. Hoping to revitalize the religious categories of their parents, social gospel Protestants set out to Christianize the social order, to apply the tenets of Christianity to everyday problems and concerns, to promote programs of reform both in and out of the church, and to formulate a new Protestant creed based on social salvation, social justice, and social responsibility. The results of their efforts included social missions in urban America, political involvement in campaigns of reform, institutional churches that met the material as well as spiritual needs of their parishioners, and a new theology that dismissed stuffy questions about the forms of religion in exchange for concern with its substance and its results. The social gospel placed moral issues at the center of American culture.;"The Disintegration of Faith" shows how the attempts by young turn-of-the-century Protestants to revitalize American Protestantism served to reinforce the secularizing tendencies that came to prominence after the war because both the embrace of the social gospel and the impulse to consume derived from vast social and cultural changes in the decades between the Civil War and the Great War in Europe. It is an account of the ironic complicity of American Protestants in the development of secular culture and an assessment of the ambiguous legacy of reform in twentieth-century America.;The second event that shaped modern American culture was the Great War of Europe. Most scholars agree that the first world war ushered in the modern, secular world. It accelerated many of the incorporating, secularizing tendencies that appeared with industrialization, immigration, and urban development in the late nineteenth century. Particularly in the United States, the brief involvement in the European war affirmed greater interdependence between business and government in the War Industries Board; a new ideal type for statesmen who, like Herbert Hoover, were both moral and efficient; and the power of the nation to provide security and well-being. The aftermath of the Great War witnessed an explosion of consumer goods and an advertising industry that formed the basis of a new dominant cultural mode in the United States: a culture of abundance, youth, and buying. By the 1920s, this consumer culture had overtaken Protestant culture that characterized nineteenth-century Victorianism.