4 

MOODY’S SOCIAL VISION 

His Theological Understanding of Social Ills 

 

Whitewashing the pump won’t make the water pure.¹

—DWIGHT MOODY

The previous chapter provided a look at the critical elements of Moody’s theology. This chapter will show how that theology shaped Moody’s social vision. In short, Moody believed personal conversion was the key to solving the urban social problems of the mid to late nineteenth century. He remarked, “It is a wonderful fact that men and women saved by the blood of Jesus rarely remained subjects of charity.”² In 1877, he said, “The nation is now crying ‘reform’ … but there can be no true reform until Christ gets into our politics. Men are all naturally bad, and cannot reform until the Reformer gets into their hearts.”³ Preaching at the 1876 revival in New York City, Moody commented, “I know there is great misery and suffering in this great city; but what is the cause of it? Why, the sufferers have become lost from the Shepherd’s care.”⁴ The picture becomes clear: Moody believed that social ills are solved by a change within the hearts of individual women and men. As Moody’s son William put it, “He insisted that the most efficacious means of reformation was through the individual.”⁵

Three essential points must be established at the outset. First, because Moody believed that individual conversion was the most productive means to bring about social change, it does not automatically follow that he objected to programmatic responses to social ills; he simply believed programs alone were ineffective. Second, Moody’s prioritization of evangelism over social action reflected the priorities of earlier evangelicals, including the great evangelist of the mid-nineteenth century Charles Finney and the renowned British preacher Charles Spurgeon. Third, Moody’s prioritization of evangelism reflected not only his personal theology and tradition but also his vocation.

CONVERSION, POVERTY, AND SOCIAL VICES 

Undoubtedly, Moody believed that conversion was the only solution for urban social ills. For example, Moody firmly believed conversion would solve poverty. He contended that sin was the cause of much poverty; therefore, conversion to faith in Christ would free men and women from the various kinds of sin that held them in poverty. Moody believed two sins, in particular, intemperance and laziness, were primarily responsible for poverty.

Moody mainly focused on alcohol. Preaching in Boston in 1877, he remarked,

It strikes me this curse of intemperance is worse even than our civil war. That cut off a great many men—ten, twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years earlier than their time; but think of the men that are being ruined body and soul by this terrible curse; and my only hope is that the nation will get their eyes open to the fact that it is a curse, and that there will be a cry going up to God. I noticed a few days ago in the papers that in Great Britain alone $600,000,000 are spent annually on strong drink, or $18 for each man, woman and child in Great Britain, and yet they are crying out there about hard times, and we are crying out about hard times in this country. I think if it were not for this cursed liquor traffic, we would not have any hard times.⁶

Conversion brought freedom from addiction to drinking. “God,” he exclaimed, “is going to destroy the works of the devil, and this appetite for strong drink is one of the devil’s works. Taking away a man’s appetite for strong drink is a supernatural work, and that is what God does.”⁷

The second sin was laziness. Moody believed conversion would make people into energetic, hard workers. To Moody, this meant being a Christian means being a worker.⁸ In 1868, he remarked, “I never knew a lazy man to become a Christian…. It is the devil whose workers are idlers.”⁹ In Boston in 1877, Moody made the point explicitly.

I never knew yet a lazy man to be converted. If he was, he soon gave up his laziness. I tell you that laziness does not belong to Christ’s Kingdom. I don’t believe a man would have a lazy hair in his head if he was converted to the Lord Jesus Christ. If a man has been born of the Spirit of Christ, he isn’t lazy, he wants to find something to do, and any manual labor is not degrading.¹⁰

Moody pointed out that since Jesus worked as a carpenter, manual labor was not beneath Him. The point was clear: if Jesus was not above manual labor, no one else should be either.¹¹ In explaining the work at the YMCA, he remarked, “Let’s keep harping on that word, WORK, until everyone who comes in here will feel perfectly wretched unless he is doing something for Christ.”¹² Again, in 1868 he proclaimed, “Every Christian has work to do. It lasts as long as life lasts. When God wants us to rest, He will call us home to heaven.”¹³ In 1869, while discussing church membership, he said, “When a man wishes to come into our Church, we ask him, what are you going to DO?”¹⁴

This emphasis on work is sometimes overlooked in studies of Moody. As early as the 1860s, Moody connected conversion and Christianity with work. One of the few works concentrating on Moody’s early years made this point. The author August J. Fry attempted to summarize Moody’s theology during these years by condensing it into six points. He then added a seventh—work. He wrote, “No idea receives as much attention as this idea—work. It might be said, in spite of the dangerous gauntlet of psychologizing history, that Moody was compulsive about it.”¹⁵ Fry was correct. All of Moody’s schools included required manual labor for all students.

In fact, Moody literally worked himself to death. He insisted on conducting a campaign in Kansas City, despite suffering chest pains for two weeks before it began. Moody told a confidant that he did not tell anyone in his family because they would have prevented him from preaching. On Tuesday of the first week, he confided in his colleague regarding the pain in his chest, but he still refused to see a doctor for two hours. Finally, after consulting with the doctor, he again refused to stop speaking, although he was forced to travel the two blocks from his hotel to the meeting hall by carriage. He preached again that Friday night but was so exhausted that he was forced to leave on a train that very night. He did make it back to Northfield but died within two months.¹⁶

CHARITY AND SELF-INITIATIVE 

Beyond mitigating the vices of alcohol and laziness, Moody asserted that conversion fills a human with the love of God, and this love, combined with the urge to work, produces charity toward others. In his sermon “To the Work! To the Work!” Moody made this connection clearly. “Christ has taught us very clearly that any man or woman who is in need of our love and help—whether temporal or spiritual—is our neighbor. If we can render them any service, we are to do it in the name of our master.”¹⁷

Moody’s disdain for laziness, enthusiasm for work, and regard for the Bible influenced his approach to charity. In an 1880 address to converted men, Moody cautioned against charity to men who will not work. He recounted a story of a man in Chicago who was married with five children. The man showed up at Moody’s home on a cold November morning. The man had no work, and the family had been evicted from their residence. When Moody asked the man what the problem was, he admitted he was lazy. Moody told the man, “I pity your wife and children, but I am not going to take care of a lazy man all winter.” In the evening, the man returned and asked for shelter for his wife and children. Moody recalled, “He knew I wouldn’t let those children stay out all night; he knew he had me.” When Moody asked what the man had been doing all day, he “used a great many big words, and said he had been studying the philosophy of pauperism.” Moody concluded: “It is not charity to help them. If a man will not work, let him starve. They never die. I never heard of them really starving to death. I never knew them to get out till they worked their way out.”¹⁸ As support for his view, Moody cited the Bible.¹⁹ He also provided for the wife and children.

At first glance, Moody’s behavior toward the family seemed inconsistent with his rhetoric. Having said men who do not work should be left to starve, he then cared for the man’s family. However, his behavior was consistent with his earlier work at the YMCA and the Sunday school. We have seen how he cared for the children and wives of alcoholic men. Moody’s reasoning on this was clear and grounded in what he believed the Bible taught. He argued that a man’s first job was to care for his family. He said that no one whose family is in want should give away money for charitable purposes. He then cited 1 Timothy 5:8: “If any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.” Moody concluded, “There is what Paul said to you on that subject. He is worse than an infidel.”²⁰ Moody believed the Bible held the husband responsible for his family; he must work. Therefore, while charity should not be directed toward a lazy husband, his spouse and children should be afforded full Christian charity.

Moody’s concern that charity ought not foster laziness also extended to his educational enterprises. Moody started several schools designed to provide educational opportunities for poor children. However, Moody demanded work on the part of his students. When asked why he did not offer free education for poor girls, he responded, “If a student can’t do her share, she isn’t worth educating. I am ready to meet any ambitious student halfway…. It’s better to help a person help himself. I find you can do real injury by doing too much for the individual.”²¹

Moody’s commitment to conversion as the catalyst for personal change explains why he was dubious about social programs not linked to conversion. In 1877, Moody made it clear he had no confidence in voluntary societies or the government to provide an ultimate solution to these problems.

We have tried a great many methods; we have our temperance societies and bands of hope, our lodges and our reform club, and we have had the pledge, and I don’t know but I am getting about discouraged with these things. I am coming to the conclusion that the only hope is that the Son of God is to come and destroy man’s appetite for liquor. You cannot legislate men to be good. We have appealed to our government, and we have failed, and now it is time to appeal to God…. When he comes to their hearts, he will give them victory over their appetites.²²

Speaking on the same subject in 1880, Moody told the following story:

A man there [Philadelphia] had a house built when he was out of town, and the contractor built it with a brown-stone front, but made the sides an imitation, just on the surface. This stood for a while; but when the winter came, it began to crack, and in the spring, he had to have it repaired. And every year he had to have it fixed over until he put in a wall like the front. And that was like a sinner trying to make himself better, when what he needed was to be made over again, a new creature. How many who heard him had taken their oaths that they wouldn’t drink again, had taken pledges, had written their name with their own blood, had promised their wives, and mothers, and friends, they would stop the use of the intoxicating cup, and yet couldn’t keep them. It was like painting the pump, expecting to get pure water.²³

When addressing social problems, Moody believed that any reformation effort must be subservient to evangelism. For example, in 1874, Moody was queried about the issue of drunkenness. He remarked, “It would take a day to answer that,” but articulated two sides to the question. On the one hand, Moody stated that he believed every Christian church ought to be a temperance society. In addition, he noted in passing that “some of the ministers and elders in Scotland … drink too much wine.”

On the other hand, he pointed out that too many temperance people prioritize temperance above all else. In doing so, they became like a one-string violin, annoying and ultimately ineffective. Moody concluded, “And so with temperance; only, when you get the chance of a word, slip it in, and give strong drink a rap.”²⁴

Moody’s attitude toward prisoners is an excellent example of this priority on evangelism as a means for reform. He said,

We must not suppose that all prisoners are hardened criminals. Many a young man has committed a crime in a moment of anger, or under the influence of liquor. The records show that nearly half the prisoners are under twenty-five years of age. At this time of life a young man is not supposed to have become settled in his character. If he can be reached by the gospel message before he sinks lower and lower, there is every hope for his salvation for this life.²⁵

Moody’s position reflected earlier American evangelicalism, particularly as Charles Finney expressed it. Like Moody, Finney always made personal conversion the priority of his work. While speaking aggressively and repeatedly against slavery and alcohol, neither took precedence over evangelism. Making the same argument Moody would make a half a century later, Finney maintained that social change was ultimately the product of personal conversion. This is a point that Charles Hambrick-Stowe made in his biography of Finney. Regarding Finney’s approach to abolition, he wrote, “The primary work must be to save sinners, for once saved, believers would reject slavery and every form of sin. Finney advocated making abolition an appendage, just as he made temperance an appendage of revival work in Rochester.”²⁶

We have seen how the Chicago Fire served to focus Moody so that, after 1871, evangelism became his focus. As an evangelist, it followed that Moody would concentrate on conversion. Commenting on Moody’s ministry, Charles Spurgeon said:

I thank God that our dear brethren [Moody and Sankey] do not commit themselves to any particular line of thought other than the Gospel, and take no concern in various matters which are in dispute with different sections of Christians. I hold that every man should teach the entire truth as he believes it, and if he be a settled pastor, he must not keep back any part of it; but the evangelists are to show forth only the great cardinal truths of the Gospel, and this our friends do.²⁷

However, his anthropology was the primary reason for Moody’s commitment to conversion as the only sure means of social change. Moody’s anthropology was a function of his evangelical theology—specifically, Moody’s belief that all humans are ruined by sin. As we saw in the last chapter in the section on the “Three Rs,” sin for Moody was personal, and a function of each person’s nature—a corrupt nature inherited from Adam.²⁸ In other words, the nature of an individual, not their environment, determined his propensity to sin. As such, Moody simply could not see how any attempt to change the urban environment could ultimately solve social problems, which he believed were rooted in sin.

As a committed evangelical, Moody believed only Christ could redeem humans from sin. He thought that the sole remedy for human estrangement from God was the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. The cross did more than merely demonstrate God’s love; it cleared the object of sin out of the way and allowed humans to experience God’s love.

Moody believed God’s love was transformative. Thus, truly redeemed and regenerated men and women would work hard and love others. Their love would be supernaturally produced by the Holy Spirit and cause them to love those in need, including their enemies. As Moody put it, “The regenerate man loves his enemies and tries to repair all wrong he has done…. If this sign is not apparent his conversion has never got from his head to his heart.”²⁹ Moody held that, because of sin, humans needed to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit. He believed humans are in such a condition that only a supernatural act of God can change them. For Moody, Christianity was an inside-out religion that re-created people internally before transforming the external world in which they lived. He, therefore, believed it was useless to attempt outside-in societal transformations.

In a sermon published in 1884, Moody graphically illustrated this belief. He asked his audience to imagine a drunkard’s home in any city in America. He described the home as a kind of hell on earth. The place was wretched, the wife and children poorly clothed and fed. The man often came home drunk and beat the family. However, one day the man arrived home and announced that he had been converted at a gospel meeting. Moody continued, “Go down to that house again in a few weeks and what a change!” Moody painted a picture of the wife and the husband sitting in their home together with their children singing hymns. He concluded, “Is not that a picture of Regeneration? I can take you to many such homes, made happy by the regenerating power of the religion of Christ. What men want is the power to overcome temptation, the power to lead a right life.”³⁰

Because he believed in the power of personal conversion to moderate social evil, Moody sometimes offered advice to the working class that demonstrated a lack of understanding of the complexity of the labor problems. For example, he advised, “Work faithfully for three dollars a week, it won’t be long before you have six and then you will get ten dollars and then twelve … get these employers always under an obligation to you.”³¹ He concluded, “You must be so helpful to your employers they cannot get along without you … and your employer will increase your wages.”³² While addressing a group of converted alcoholics, he urged, “Get something to do. If you cannot earn more than a dollar a week, earn that. That is better than nothing and you can pray to God for more.”³³ While working in Boston, he encouraged reformed alcoholics to leave the city and go out into the country, arguing, “It is not degrading to go out and hoe and shovel in the field, it is noble I think.”³⁴ He added, “I don’t see how a man can follow Christ and not be successful.”³⁵ Moody saw this pattern in his own life and often commented, “The whole of my early life was one long struggle with poverty … since I began to seek first the kingdom of God, I have wanted for nothing.”³⁶

Moody believed that a combination of charity and self-initiative was the answer to unemployment and disability. He benefited as a boy from charity and engaged in and supported numerous charitable activities. Moody believed Christians were required by the Bible to be generous toward others, the only exception being the lazy. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, he was willing to criticize businesses and the wealthy for their lack of charity. In Moody’s opinion, charity and self-initiative were grounded in conversion.

THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

The context of conversion, charity, and self-initiative helps to explain the advice he gave to his coworkers. First, he urged them not to have “anything to say about capital and labor. You don’t know anything about it.”³⁷ This attitude was driven by Moody’s belief that experts should manage politics and operate the economic system. The evangelist’s job was to preach the gospel and save souls.³⁸ He gave similar advice about using the pulpit to address sociological topics, saying, “I say when we have got all the people to repent of their sins and live as God wants them to live, it’ll be time to talk about sociological questions.”³⁹ Despite this, Moody occasionally did raise social issues. For example, in London in 1884, he was asked how Americans might contribute to the understanding and general uplift of the population in Britain. He replied that the greatest need in London was for houses, noting, “At present your poor people shift aimlessly from place to place.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, when Moody did talk about governmental reform, he usually cited the need for conversion. He stated, “You can’t reform the government without men who have been themselves reformed, and that reformation must be regeneration through the power of the Holy Ghost.”⁴¹

However, working conditions in American urban centers were appalling and, if anything, worsened during Moody’s lifetime. Moody was keenly aware of the unrest among workers. As early as 1869, he engaged in a series of conversations with Samuel Fielden, a leading figure in the labor movement.⁴² As Fielden recalled it, Moody initiated an “animated” conversation that lasted over an hour and a half. Despite Fielden’s passionate arguments, Moody remained steadfast in his commitment to conversion as the ultimate solution. Fielden concluded, “We parted at the door with the best feeling toward each other. I am only sorry to say that my opponent has persisted in following the wrong path to this day. I am truly sorry for him. I only wish that we both turn to the right before it is everlastingly too late.”⁴³

Labor leaders like Fielden found particularly fertile ground in Chicago. Within the immigrant class were groups of men well-versed in Marxism and anarchism. In the late nineteenth century, radical labor movements began to emerge so that by the 1880s, Chicago had become the center for the socialist and anarchist movements in America. Other, more moderate forms of labor organizations flourished as well.⁴⁴

Moody’s comments on labor issues during these years were particularly telling. In 1883 in Chicago, he compared the conditions among the working class in Chicago with those in England. He described the workers in England as “hard-hearted and hard-headed men who gather in their shops on Sunday, or someplace else, and talk communism or infidelity.” He concluded, “We are drifting the same way in this country.”⁴⁵

In Chicago, the labor issue came to a head in the Haymarket riot of 1886. Workers gathered at the McCormick reaper plant on the evening of May 4 to protest about working conditions. During the speeches, someone threw a homemade bomb into the crowd of police officers monitoring the gathering. When order was restored, eight police officers lay dead and sixty others wounded. No one has ever determined the exact number of those killed and injured among the crowd. Eight leading figures in the city’s anarchist movement were arrested and eventually tried for murder. The business community carefully orchestrated the trial. The jury quickly returned a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced seven of the eight men to death by hanging. The judgments were met with outrage throughout the country and the rest of the civilized world. International figures like George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy condemned both the trial and the verdict. Both pleaded for leniency for the convicted. Despite this, the Chicago city leaders remained resolute. Marshall Field, in particular, resisted any call for clemency. Although two death sentences were ultimately commuted, four other defendants were hanged on November 11, 1887. The remaining prisoner committed suicide.⁴⁶

Moody seemed hardly surprised by the event. On the eve of the Haymarket riot, he had warned,

Either these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known. It don’t take a prophet or a son of a prophet to see these things. You can hear the muttering of the coming convulsion even now, if you open your ears and eyes.⁴⁷

The quote illustrates once again Moody’s solution to a social problem—mass conversion. He acted accordingly and redoubled his efforts to bring them the gospel.⁴⁸

A letter to A. P. Fitt from Charles Goss dated November 16, 1910, gives more insight into Moody’s thoughts. In the letter, Goss recounts to Fitt an episode where he was sitting with Moody and Francis Murphy.⁴⁹ He wrote,

Mr. Moody sat on one side of me, on a lounge, and Francis Murphy on the other: (both weighing, singly, twice as much as I did) and tried to rid me of certain socialistic views. Put together with other statements; one can safely surmise Moody is no friend of the Labor movement.⁵⁰

However, toward the end of his career, Moody began to see things somewhat differently. Accordingly, in the late 1880s into the 1890s, he began to speak out against riches and big business.⁵¹ In 1888, he commented, “It is more profitable to have a clear conscience with God, than to have wealth gathered by defrauding the poor, and grinding the unfortunate.”⁵² He lashed out against greed and covetousness that “fastened on the hand of Chicago, along with many another Western city.”⁵³ A similar refrain was heard in 1890. “We have too much wealth and too much poverty. Why don’t some of the people who have made their fortunes stop and go out into the highways and byways and help the poor? That’s my idea of Socialism, and it’s founded on the ideas of Christ.”⁵⁴ He attacked employers in 1894, charging, “We treat our servants just about as we treat our sewing machines, if they do their work well, all right; but if they don’t, we kick them out.”⁵⁵ In the same year, he called A. T. Stewart, a prominent New York department store owner, “supremely selfish,” stating, “One of his clerks got sick and couldn’t come to the store for two or three or ten weeks; his wages were cut right off.” Moody continued saying Stewart thought “he wasn’t responsible for aiding the clerk.”⁵⁶ In 1897, he directed another verbal broadside toward employers. Moody asked rhetorically, “Are you guilty of sweating your employees? Have you deprived the hireling of his wages? Have you paid starvation wages?”⁵⁷ Again, in 1899, Moody spoke out, and it is interesting to note that he addressed the structural problem of big corporations: “What can a poor young man do nowadays, unless he goes to work for someone else who is wealthy? … Trusts, corporations, are bad for young men.”⁵⁸ Moody believed employers should treat their workers fairly; nonetheless, he never condoned labor unrest. Notwithstanding his misgivings about how workers were treated, Moody was never moved beyond his belief in personal conversion and charity as the ultimate solution to societal problems.

Moody’s social vision was a function of his theology. Because of his belief in the “Three Rs,” he doggedly maintained individual sin was the cause of the problem and regeneration was the only solution. He appealed to the Bible when dealing with perceived laziness. Moreover, because of his belief in the imminent return of Christ and the inevitable destruction of society, he was unwilling to move away from constantly proclaiming the gospel.

However, for Moody, proclaiming the gospel was never merely a matter of speech alone. Christianity, as Moody conceived it, was about living and doing. Therefore, the following excerpt of one of his published sermons on the topic of “The Good Samaritan” probably best summarized Moody’s social vision.

If you want to get into sympathy, you need to put yourself into a man’s place. Chicago needs Christians whose hearts are full of compassion and sympathy. If we haven’t got it, pray that we may have it, so that we may be able to reach those men and women that need kindly words and kindly actions far more than sermons. The mistake is that we have been preaching too much and sympathizing too little. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel of deeds not words. May the Spirit of the Lord come upon us this night. May we remember that Christ was moved in compassion for us, and may we, if we find some poor man going down among thieves, or lying wounded and bleeding, look upon him with sympathy, and get below him and raise him up.⁵⁹

The crux of Moody’s social vision was that Christians must love and care for the poor because Jesus loved us, and the Bible demands it. He maintained that part of evangelism consisted of doing good deeds, and this ability to do good was rooted in conversion and the subsequent empowering of the Holy Spirit.