A Fair Wage System Did Not Exist Even Before The Industrial Revolution

During this time of enlightenment and exploration however, the standards of Christianity and ethical thought challenged science and its moral reasoning. Despite the large progress in society, the church's vast power led the people to fear science. However the church's fear was not just for the salvation of their church, but that science would disprove the proof of God and take God's place in

During this era, modern people were beginning to gain a voice while the Church was becoming less powerful and losing their control over everyone. Since people were gaining confidence and were allowed to live with some autonomy, they began to innovate ways to develop the world while minimizing effort and costs in the process. Examples of the innovations that took place were with Ben Franklin and his lightning rod, Watt’s and his steam engine, and many more that can be held on a large scale of importance and value, but in the end all of the developments led to the same result. That result was the betterment of the livelihood of all social classes whether one was poor or rich, which was all thanks to the efforts to increase productivity and minimize opportunity

Individuals had to ensure their salvation by having a personalized relationship with the Lord instead of just doing good works in the hope of going to heaven. The thought was that the Pope was human and could make errors, but the Scriptures were infallible. As such, obeying the Lord was more important than obeying the Pope or the king, and the colonists themselves looked into the scriptures and read about the basic human rights that were granted by God - and often withheld by the monarchy. Believers of this new doctrine were called New Light Worshipers. Old Light Worshipers such as Puritans, Anglicans, and Calvinists, which originally made up the religious majority, decreased as New Light beliefs, such as Evangelism and Modernism, became more

The Fundamentalist-Modernist dispute was a religious dispute that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s within the confines of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America that ended up creating separation in most of the American Christian movements also. In fact, convinced that the literal truth of the Bible formed the basis of Christian belief, fundamentalists initiated a campaign to eradicate Protestant denominations of modernism and to fight the new individual freedoms that seemed to contradict traditional morality (Foner 788). What is more, the press portrayed fundamentalism as a movement of backwoods bigots. Yet, it was a national phenomenon. Fundamentalism continued to be an important strain of 1920s politics and culture (Foner

Weber argues that religious beliefs contributed to major social change- specifically the emergence of modern capitalism in Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Modern capitalism differs from capitalism as it is based on systematic, efficient and a rational pursuit of profit and profit for its own sake rather than consumption. Weber calls this the spirit of capitalism.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a young minister of the gospel in Detroit who criticized the comfortable equation of Christianity with industrialization. He was keen to study the effects of industrialization to the very people who were facilitating the process; the workers. On the other hand, Edward Earle Purinton, who was a pro-business writer, declared that America gave the first priority to business. These two men had very conflicting views of the industrial society and spiritual progress as discussed below.

This concept of the dignity of labor was not new. Most Americans came from a Protestant background, in which “nobility of labor was an article of faith.” [3] In Calvinist theology, each man had a divine calling. In order to properly live life, each man should provide evidence that he was predestined to enter heaven. Wealth became a way of serving God on earth in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Labor was a religious value and many aspects of a successful work ethic were obligations. These beliefs were more concentrated in the Northeast. In Rochester, New York, in the 1830s for example, Charles Finney, an evangelist during the Second Great Awakening, took part in this spiritual revival. The Second Great Awakening is known as “a missionary crusade that transformed America”. [4] People who wished to slow the social and political change of the Industrial Revolution and reinforce social control through Christian values organized this resurgence. They wished for modernity with Christian self-control. [5] Charles Finney’s arrival in Rochester provided a solution to the “social disorder” and “moral confusion” the town was facing. [6] The town was encountering much uncertainty with its adjustment to a free labor economy. Therefore, industrial capitalist beliefs of the free labor ideology became attached to visions of a perfect moral order based on individual freedoms.

Poor people read the Bible and found out the church lied to them a lot about how they can go to heaven. They were now able to read the Bible for themselves and they didn’t have to depend on the church to tell them what it said. Scientific texts were spreading faster and that made what

The church ultimately took a back seat to wealth and political

The Social Gospel started in the early twentieth century as an intellectual movement. The purpose was to live out The Lord's Prayer during our day to day lives. Social Gospel applied Christian ethics to social problems like the issues of social justice. A group of liberal Protestant progressives started the movement because they weren't satisfied with social problems around them and they did not feel enough was being done to solve the problems. Social problems associated with rapid industrialization, urbanization, and increasing immigration of the Gilded Age were the primary concern.

Although Christianity was well known throughout the affluent classes, Jesus’s philosophies touched the hearts of the plebeians. The self-proclaimed Messiah often spoke of money and riches not being needed in the afterlife, and that God measures you not on how much money you have but on your values you showed throughout your life. This touched the working class’s heart as it informed them that there is hope for a better life that everyone can achieve but not a lot deserve. Therefore, this was the main reason why Christianity was spread as quickly as it could.

Also there was the 2% of the Church's people that ruled with their minds and had ways to control the ones around them. Manipulation of faith and believes played a large role in

The social gospel was a Christian religious movement that had focused on industrialism and city growth. Instead of eternal salvation, the gospel preached social salvation. The adherents were not seen to be in need of salvation for themselves to achieve it in the social realm. The gospel preached that individuals were only able to achieve a sin-free life if they were taken from the social and economic situations that had bore them to it. Individual salvation was seen as second to social reform, and that God’s kingdom was derived from government and economic institutions which taught people of communal love and

In The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism , Max Weber writes on the principles of modern day capitalism and what he thinks is the source of those principles. Weber published this work in  1905, however, the ideas in  this work still applies to today`s society in many ways. Weber writes that the protestant religion pushes people to look for signs that they have been saved. These signs include wealth on earth. This pushes people to work hard and accumulate wealth. Weber describes wealthy people as people who ascetically saved money and worked. If weber states that people who are saved are wealthy, then poor people were probably seen as sinners or bad people because they did not hold the same ascetic ways of life as the wealthier

The social gospel was developed by the protestants during their movement in which they had incorporated Christian ethics to combat the problems that had arisen due to hasty suburbanization as well as industrialization which included but not limited to poverty, crime and lack of education and nutrition. The social gospel was used to make sure that the problems of society where addressed and not cast away and ignored as ignoring the problems was looked downed upon as its everyone’s reasonability to understand that the way to expel the evils of society was by coming together as one and following in the example of Jesus in helping the sick and poor. “Any treatment of social questions which failed to bring the reasonability for right social actions