I went back and looked at the Social Principles adopted by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1908 as part of preparation for a larger diary I'm thinking about. I'd read them before - I remember my atheist mother shouting, "I want to be a Methodist in 1908!" when I shared them with her. But looking at them directly again, after not seeing them for years, they remind me of the sort of thing "Progressive politics" meant in the late nineteenth century, with demands that we're still struggling to secure, some of which are being eroded, and some of which probably strike most of us as utterly unfeasible now.
The principles and some short commentary on the flip.
The Methodist Episcopal Church stands
- For equal righs and complete justice for all men in all stations of life.
- For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions.
- For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational diseases, injuries and mortality.
- For the abolition of child labor.
- For such regulation of the conditions of labor for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community.
- For the suppression of the "sweating system."
- For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all, and for that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.
- For a release from employment one week in seven. [!!!]
- For a living wage in every industry.
- For the highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.
- For the recognition of the Golden Rule and the mind of Christ as the supreme law of society and the sure remedy for all social ills.
Quoted by Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope
To be sure, we wouldn't want to go back to the patronizing view of women or "the mind of Christ as the supreme law of society" in this day and age, but certainly they were way ahead of us on labor issues. I assume the "sweating system" refers to Sweatshop labor - if any historians of the period can confirm or clarify that point, I'd be very grateful.
The principles adopted by what was one of the largest Protestant denominations reflect the huge influence of the Social Gospel on Protestant theology around the end of the nineteenth century. The most prominent Social Gospel theologian was Walter Rauschenbusch, author of A Theology for the Social Gospel.
I look at those principles, and the fact that they passed a committee vote in a mainstream church - a process of compromise that tends to take the radical edge off proposals - and feel a keen sense of envy for a world in which such optimism was possible. Daily Kos gives me some hope, but it's a limited bulwark against the constant onslaught of Republican erosion of the most basic principles of American democracy and sustainability. I constantly take on small tasks to stave off the worst, but it feels like constant damage control, rather than galvanizing for a truly just future.