Instead, they attributed the accumulation of wealth and conspicuous consumption to pure greed. They rejected Andrew Carnegie’s contention in The Gospel of Wealth that God had sanctioned the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few because of their superior ability to utilize that wealth for the good of society. Ministers like Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch spoke of the need to correct the abuses of the capitalistic system that had resulted in extreme poverty and hardship for much of the working class.
Private Protestantism continued to focus on the redemption and salvation of individuals while public Protestantism added a component of social welfare to the mix. What emerged in the late nineteenth century is what some have labeled “two-party Protestantism“, private Protestantism and public Protestantism. Thus, the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the many reform movements of the time, such as the temperance movement, the abolitionist movement, and criminal reform movements, to name a few. As well, the emerging need of religious thought to accommodate Darwin’s theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest posed new challenges for the Christian community. The late nineteenth century added the new challenge of the dislocation of many Americans due to urbanization and industrialization. If man was perfectible, Christians had the responsibility to make that a reality. A core tenet of the Second Great Awakening was its belief in the “perfectibility of man“. While the First Great Awakening had focused on personal redemption and salvation, the Second Great Awakening had added the component of social consciousness: the need to redeem and save society as well as oneself. The Social Gospel probably had its roots in the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and 1840s. The message that there was a Christian responsibility to look out for the well-being of the disadvantaged was particularly aimed at middle and upper class who, in the minds of social gospelites, had turned a blind eye to the hardships of the poor.
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