American Baptist minister and the central figure of the Social Gospel movement. Born in Rochester, New York to a German Baptist family, Rauschenbusch was pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in Hell's Kitchen in New York from 1886 to 1897 — the decade in which, watching the conditions of his working-class immigrant parishioners, he worked out the theological position that would make him famous. From 1897 until his death in 1918 he taught at Rochester Theological Seminary and produced the three books that defined American progressive Christian social thought.
Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) is the book that turned the Social Gospel from a loose tendency into a self-conscious movement; it was the single most-read religious book in America for a generation. Its argument: the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus was not an otherworldly hereafter but the righteous social order he expected and demanded, and the 19th-century American church, individualist and pietist, had lost the prophetic and social dimensions of its own founding texts. Christianizing the Social Order (1912) offered the programmatic sequel; A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) was the dogmatic synthesis. Rauschenbusch worked out concepts — the "kingdom of evil" as the social counterpart to personal sin, the solidaristic rather than individualistic character of salvation — that entered the vocabulary of American liberal Protestantism and, through King (who read Rauschenbusch as a seminarian and cited him throughout his life), entered the vocabulary of the civil rights movement.
His limits were real. Reinhold Niebuhr, a generation younger, spent his career arguing that Rauschenbusch's optimism about the possibility of a Christian social order underestimated the depth of human sin and the intractability of collective power — a critique that has mostly stuck and that has to be answered if Rauschenbusch's project is to be recovered.