Together for the Common Good by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

A movement re-engaging with the common good

Evangelicalism has profoundly shaped the common good of modern British society, yet unlike Catholicism and Anglicanism it has never developed a profound account of the common good.209 Since its emergence in the early eighteenth century, the movement has made deeply formative contributions to the public life of this country, yet at no point did it develop a distinctive or consistent language of ‘the common good’ by which to name or guide what it has been doing.

Evangelicalism has been marked much more by its periods of energetic social activism than by the depth or coherence of its social theology.210 The story has been frequently told of how evangelicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries initiated or lent vital support to a plethora of initiatives for social and political reform.211 Often these interventions were launched from the platform of dynamic local churches or voluntary associations, some of which then coalesced into larger campaigns for state action against various social ‘sins’ – the slave trade, prostitution, poverty, lack of education, poor housing, sanitation and health, drunkenness, child labour and other forms of factory exploitation.212 Until the end of the nineteenth century evangelicals were conspicuous by their presence in, and often leadership of, an array of initiatives intended to address palpable social ills. They were prominent contributors to the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’, the widely influential public ethos which decisively shaped Victorian national life (often, if not always, for good).213

There was, however, a lengthy and regrettable retreat from the movement’s strikingly activist history, running roughly from the 1910s to the 1960s.214 During this period, and for a variety of doctrinal, sociological and institutional reasons, large sections of the British movement (the Salvation Army being one shining exception) abandoned their proud history of common good activism and retreated into a doctrinally narrow, ecclesially defensive and socially passive mentality. Many of its foremost proponents, overreacting to the ‘earthly’ preoccupations and ‘liberal’ theology of the Social Gospel movement, reduced the gospel to the offering of a purely interior salvation of the ‘soul’, obscuring that it is much more the incorporation of the converted believer into a redeemed community called to bring the healing and transforming power of the gospel to the whole of human life.215 This amounted to an abject disavowal of the movement’s remarkable legacy of public engagement and an eclipsing of its earlier, at times quite stirring, vision of biblical wholeness.

The movement has still not fully recovered from this amnesiac phase. However, abridging a long and patchy story, the tide began to turn in the 1970s when the British movement found itself confronted by a variety of internal and external challenges, prompting it to abandon its introversion and isolationism. It began to reclaim its earlier commitments to social and political engagement – to a vision of the gospel impinging on all aspects of the personal and common good.216 The result is that, today, many parts of the movement have once again become significant contributors to faith-based (as well as secular) social and political action, operating in many social contexts and on a wide range of issues.

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