MAGA Evangelicals Attack James Talarico, or, the Never-Ending War on the Social Gospel Continues
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this righting america interview. And for Kennedy’s most recent sermons and articles, see theprogessivepreacher.com.
The fierce MAGA evangelicals’ attack on Texas Representative and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico belongs to an ancient blood feud between fundamentalist/evangelical Christians and moderate/liberal Christians.
Evangelicals remain known by the enemies they selected in the late 19th century: Evolution, biblical criticism and the social gospel. All three enemies still unsettle the evangelical mind.
Now, deep in the heart of Texas, we are in the early stages of an all-out war against the social gospel. That is, an all-out war against James Talarico. And let’s be clear. It’s not that Talarico is preaching a new gospel. His message has been preached for generations. And it’s not that Talarico is preaching an anti-biblical gospel. His message is grounded in the Scriptures.
But it’s a gospel message that evangelicals simply cannot abide and have not been able to abide for 150 years.
The term social gospel refers to a Protestant movement that came to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Promoters of the social gospel sought to apply Christian principles to social problems.
In the social gospel, heaven and hell can wait. Meeting human need in material, fleshly, bodily ways has to happen now. Practices and politics meeting human need constitute salvation. The radical community called “Church” is more important than individual salvation.
Originally both liberals and evangelicals supported the social gospel. That is to say, evangelicals were for the social gospel before they were against it. Randall Balmer reminds us that evangelicals used to support women’s rights, labor unions, care for the poor, and voting rights.
But those days are gone, and have been gone since the 1920s. Today evangelical preachers are preaching a gospel with none of the politics of Jesus (that is, nothing from Matthew 25 and nothing from most of Luke’s gospel), nothing about economics, nothing about health care, nothing about care of the stranger, nothing about support of LGBTQ+ individuals.
Theirs is an empty gospel, “all hat and no cattle.”
Evangelicals attacking Talarico today are just carrying on an old family tradition. Their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers and great, great grandfathers hated and berated the social gospel.
Two prominent critics of the social gospel in the early 20th century were William Bell Riley and J. Frank Norris. Compare the arguments of Riley and Norris with the attacks on Talarico, and one finds that they are the same boring, contrarian arguments.
Riley’s idea of the government’s role was to “restrain evil. Today Robert Jeffress says, “Governments have one responsibility …. to avenge evil-doers.” He then rephrased, “The goal of government is to protect us and leave us alone to practice our faith.”
William V. Trollinger, Jr., in God’s Empire, refers to an article Riley wrote in School and Church: “In this piece Riley asserted that a modernist confederacy had recently emerged which sought to unify Protestantism around the banner of the social gospel. This confederacy was such a threat that ‘the life of the true Church is at stake, and the interests of the Kingdom are in the balance.’” With a nice touch of historical sarcasm, Trollinger goes on to say: “Fortunately for Christendom, the Holy Spirit had inspired Christian leaders like Riley to create a countermovement to fight the modernists.”
For J. Frank Norris, the social gospel was of one piece with the higher criticism of Scripture, evolution and liberalism. His sermons attacked modernism as an attack on America. As Barry Hankins notes in God’s Rascal, Norris believed “the whole American way of life was threatened.”
And now, a likable, cherub-faced neophyte politician pops up in Texas proclaiming a gospel of compassion, a social gospel of care for the body, for all bodies. Evangelicals can’t stand to be told that there is a social gospel rooted in the teachings of Jesus.
Texas seems an odd choice for a revival of the social gospel, but I think the Holy Spirit, from time to time, calls certain ones to make clear the meaning of the Gospel. The Spirit often calls these holy ones into action in the most unexpected places. So while the Holy Spirit could have called someone to run for Senate as a social gospel preacher in Vermont, Washington, or Wisconsin, I think it is poetic justice to call James Talarico to raise the banner of the social gospel in Texas. Maybe God made Texas in order to give the social gospel a vast land to conquer.
I think one reason that Talarico spooks MAGA evangelicals is because he looks, talks and smiles like another Texas deeply involved in politics as a professing Christian, David Barton. The difference: Talarico speaks truth, while Barton has made a career of concocting an untrue revisionist history of America and selling it to conservatives as truth.
The arguments swirling around Talarico are as old as Western civilization. Socrates knew this practice well. He named it dialectic, meaning argument as the process of sorting through a host of ideas about justice in search of what is the most true, most good.
Of course, there is good argument and bad argument. And the hyperbolic ad homimen outrage of MAGA evangelicals is uncivilized argument. Calling Talarico names doesn’t make the social gospel less true or less just.
But these ad hominem attacks grow out of the reality that evangelicals are more obsessed with rooting out the social gospel than Senator Joe McCarthy was with exposing all communists. McCarthy is a good model for MAGA evangelicals because they consider the social gospel as socialism. The MAGA attack on the social gospel is leftover anti-communism.
Two towering Americans paved the way for Talarico. Walter Rauschenbusch and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Rauschenbusch basically wrote the social gospel; Roosevelt implemented it.
The social gospel is in its second century of existence. Walter Rauschenbush, the intellectual and theological father of the social gospel, has been dead for 108 years. His book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, was published in 1907.
Rauschenbusch identified the economic exploitation of the poor as nothing less than a national sin. He argued, “The essential purpose of Christianity is to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God. , , , , The Christian Church has never undertaken to carry out this fundamental purpose of its existence.”
As long as evangelicals are counting the souls saved and the number baptized, as long as they are asking preachers, “How many you run?” (that is, “What is your church attendance?”) – instead of asking how many hungry have you fed, how many homeless have you housed, how many sick have you healed, and how many prisoners have you restored – the evangelical church will fail the gospel.
Evangelicals attacked Rauschenbusch for being soft on sin, badly mistaken on the nature and purpose of the church, and wrong about the second coming of Jesus and Scripture. In other words, he was not a Fundamentalist. But such attacks did not (and does not) make Rauschenbusch’s theology and the social gospel less true.
And then there’s Franklin Roosevelt. Talarico is not the first politician to embrace the social gospel. In the 1930’s Franklin Roosevelt promoted the values of community, cooperation, prudence, and sacrifice. With his Good Neighbor Policy and with his overhaul of the government, and as limited and flawed the New Deal was, Roosevelt has been the only president to ever attempt to legislate the Social Gospel into the soul of America.
But the values promoted by Roosevelt have been almost completely submerged by an evangelical leadership suspicious of – even opposed to – empathy.
Attacking the social gospel as if it were a form of secular politics – i.e., socialism – caused evangelicals to become the champions of capitalism, despite the fact that Jesus clearly says “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24), and despite the fact that Paul clearly connects the love of money (greed) with idolatry (Colossians 3:5).
In contrast, evangelicals have embraced wealth as a form of godliness, baptizing greed as virtue and empathy as vice, in the process blatantly contradicting the message of Jesus. With the inclusion of independent pentecostals into the evangelical circle, the prosperity gospel has found a church home.
Evangelicals are reaping the whirlwind because decisions made politically have consequences. To put it bluntly, wealth made war a necessity. Evangelicals would never admit we go to war to protect American wealth. But President Trump has said the quiet part out loud: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”
In contrast, Talarico represents the spirit of Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Fosdick and Roosevelt. He gives renewed hope to Christian churches taking the lead in radical social change.
Perhaps the opportunity of the church to liberate America from evangelical reduction of faith to the individual has arrived once more in Texas. Maybe the 19th century passion of evangelicals for the poor can bring about revival.
Think of the possibilities when an evangelical community adds the social gospel as part of its theological commitments. When an evangelical community returns to its historic roots. This is not an either/or, but, instead, a both/and possibility.
When this happens, we can all then sing the social gospel hymn of Katherine Lee Bates while we work together to reduce, even eliminate, the grinding inequalities in our nation:
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw
. . . . . .
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
