Few subjects in American religious history invite interdisciplinary inquiries and readerships as much as does the Social Gospel. In the formal sense, it could be confined to a narrative of liberal American Protestantism c. 1900–1920. But, in the telling of Evans, its story begins a century earlier and, associated with new names, continues its reach into the present. Readers who have interests in the ethics of social reform, liberal theology and its opposition, African-American and feminist studies, rhetorical analyses of popular preaching, straight-out sociology, and the larger American historical contexts of movements and emphases like the Social Gospel will find reason to read this book with care.
Evans does readers a favor by offering a terse explication of the issues surrounding the Social Gospel, which includes words like liberalism, progressive, political, economic, structures, institutions, and more, all crammed into nine lines (2–3). He unpacks...