Walter Rauschenbusch then returned to the United States where he graduated from the University of Rochester in 1884 and graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary of American Baptist Churches USA in 1886. When he returned to America via England, he spent a few weeks in London and made trips to Oxford and Liverpool. 

Walter’s oldest sister, Frida Rauschenbusch Fetzer, was born in September 1855. Christopher Evans notes that he did not develop a close relationship with Frida until his thirties. Not much is known about her. However, clues in a letter regarding her by Walter gives clues that she was a reformer in her own right. Rauschenbusch wrote to Reverend George Huntington:  “Mrs. Fetzer was not simply a wife and mother, but an active missionary force. She was, I suppose, the only college woman among the German Baptists, and she brought over the traditions of educated and progressive womanhood in America . . . She has for years edited the monthly paper of the young women’s organizations and has spoken and agitated wherever possible among the churches for organization and active participation of women in church life.” He goes on to conclude, “According to my judgment she has been more of a pioneering force than any of the American men.” She certainly seemed to have a passion for women and the active participation of women in the church.

I find his other sister, Emma Rauschenbusch Clough, to be perhaps the most interesting member of the family besides Walter himself. She was a missionary in the Telugu Mission in South India, where she educated girls and women. She also endured a major famine and witnessed a “second Pentecost,” when thousands of members of the Madiga clan were baptized. She worked with missionary – and, later, husband — John Clough to build Christianity into the social order of the people that she lived. If Walter discussed social Christianity, Emma actually did it. She earned a Ph.D. degree and later authored two books: While Sewing Sandals and Social Christianity in the Orient (the authorship of which is attributed to her husband John Everett Clough).

Progressives working within these faith traditions applied religious morality to the task of transforming American society during the industrial age away from the exploitation of workers and toward more cooperative forms of economic life. These faith-driven progressives insisted that society and governments uphold the fundamental notion that all people are equal in God’s eyes and deserve basic dignity, freedom, political rights, and economic opportunities in life. Religious progressives promoted the notion of community and solidarity above concepts of individualism and materialism and worked to stop unnecessary wars and military aggression across the globe.

The social gospel movement and Catholic social teaching played influential roles in the progressive search for economic fairness and justice in the 20th century. Both traditions promoted the belief that any true commitment to the Gospels and the example of Jesus Christ demanded followers to take concrete steps to address oppression and hardship in this world and to replace the laissez-faire attitudes of the late 19th century with a more communitarian outlook. 

Walter Rauschenbusch’s 1907 classic book, Christianity and the Social Crisis served as the most complete statement of faith-based progressivism and offered a compelling argument for the social application of the Gospels. Rauschenbusch stressed how “the essential purpose of Christianity was 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 purpose of this argument was to show people how Christian teachings and the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible could be put to use to foment social change during a period of want and suffering: “If anyone holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he must prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with him.”

which later expanded into the Brotherhood of the Kingdom helping shape the ethos of the Progressive Reform movement.

During the great industrial crisis in the 90’s I saw good men go into disreputable lines of employment and respectable widows consent to live with men who would support them and their children. One could hear the human virtue cracking and crumbling all around. Whenever work is scarce, petty crime is plentiful. But that is only the tangible expression of the decay in the morale of the working people on which the statistics can seize. The corresponding decay in the morality of the possessing classes at such a time is another story. But industrial crises are not inevitable in nature; they are merely inevitable in capitalism (Rauschenbusch, 1907, 238).
Rauschenbusch’s experience of pastoral ministry prompted him to rethink his theology. He believed that American Christianity was confronted by a seismic social crisis that cried out for a prophetic response to challenge those forces that exploited the working classes and made their lives intolerable. The themes of crisis and opportunity run like a repeated chorus through the books Rauschenbusch wrote between 1907 and 1917. Rauschenbusch was weighed down by the appalling conditions he witnessed in America at the turn of the century, but he was essentially optimistic that the church could rise to the occasion for the sake of the Kingdom of God. A better social order could be created, although it would never be perfect.
History was the fundamental category in Rauschenbusch’s thought. Rauschenbusch viewed the study of history as a search for signs of the Kingdom of God in human affairs. Although he never wrote a significant piece of historical scholarship, Rauschenbusch nevertheless utilized historical scholarship to make his case for the Social Gospel. He also drew upon sociology. Rauschenbusch was not interested in metaphysical speculation in doctrinal matters. He did not abandon the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, but he did reinterpret them in the light of his understanding of the Kingdom of God which points to a progressive effort to establish a more just social order. The doctrine was primarily about social ethics. The main lines of his thought were laid down in the late nineteenth century. He remained firmly entrenched in the categories of historical contingency, German idealism, evolutionary thought, and personalism. Rauschenbusch critically appropriated these themes in his own theology and ministry. He welded them together with his inherited evangelical piety that recognized the presence and power of a living God to transform human lives.