Corporatism and the Social Gospel - Then and Now

One year ago today,on January 24, 2010, an article appeared in the ReligionDispatches on-line magazine.  (see excerpts below).   The article discusses the Supreme Court ruling and recalls that in the 19th century, many Christians were leaders in opposing the rising strength of corporate powers in American life.  One of the targets of the Social Gospel Movement was the harmful effects of corporate strength and the movement called for reforms which would improve the social conditions of individual Americans.


It seems that Corporate wealth and power has seldom been stronger in our country than it is today.  And many mainline Christian churches have become corporation-like themselves, they've coalesced with the powerful corporations and adopted corporate practices to enhance and grow their mega-churches into economic engines raking in vast sums of money through product sales and television rights.


Are faith-based groups standing up to corporate America today and defending worker rights and demanding reforms?  If so, who are they and how do they compare to the faith-based efforts of the Social Gospel era of the 19th century and early 20th century?

• Welcome to the (New) Gilded Age: Supreme Court Delivers the Goods to Corporations
• An Essay By PETER LAARMAN

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• I hope we shall... crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan, 1816

We should mark 1886 for its singular gift to the robber barons. This was the year in which the Supreme Court declared, in Santa Clara County, that corporations are persons under the meaning of the 14th Amendment. As David Korten writes of this very peculiar decision:

In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the US Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court’s taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution. Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite simply pronounced at the outset that “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

The irony of the Court’s fully enfranchising private corporations at the very same time that it was systematically disenfranchising the actual persons the 14th Amendment was designed to help—African Americans—has not been lost on historians. Three years earlier, in 1883, the Court had invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875; ten years later in Plessy v. Ferguson, it would formally validate the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine.

........And we should not forget the role religion played in legitimating anti-corporate sentiment. For every preacher castigating “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” there were many more who stood with the working poor against the gross exploitation symbolized by child labor, 12-hour working days, unscrupulous tenant farming practices, and open bribery and corruption in politics. It was during this same era (from 1880 to 1910) that the Social Gospel took root under the leadership of figures like Gladden and Rauschenbusch. .....

Do we have anything like a solidly-rooted and theologically-sanctioned movement that is prepared to do battle with today’s equivalent of the railroad barons? If you can’t answer the question in less than two seconds you already have your answer. Yes, we have noble community-labor-religion coalitions scattered across the country that are winning mostly limited victories over abusive employers. And at the national level we have some feisty networks like Interfaith Worker Justice, PICO, and the Center for Community Change attempting to mobilize people from below to resist unjust power.

[ source: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/2217/welcome_to_the_(new)_gilded_age:_supreme_court_delivers_the_goods_to_corporations ]