So absent mass conversion by Protestants and Evangelicals to Catholicism, traditional Calvinists, with their own venerable traditions of social engagement in the sin-soaked kingdom of man, will have to point the way forward. Troublingly, many Calvinists are instead succumbing to their own funk, partly based on their own unconscious perfectionism, disowning social engagement, especially statecraft, because society they think has become too depraved for reformation.

Wesleyan and Anabaptist perfectionisms are the emerging dominant forms of Christian social witness in America, according to this fascinating piece in First Things by Dale Coulter of Regent University. He’s certainly right about their pervasive influence but unduly optimistic about their plausibility and sustainability, much less desirability.

As a Methodist, I hope thoughtful Calvinists will provide a corrective dose of realism and sturdy doctrine to the social culdesacs and Utopianism towards which both perfectionist traditions seem to spiral when untethered from church teaching about the limits of fallen humanity. It’s not fair to fault Methodism exclusively for the excesses of the Social Gospel, whose key early proponent, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a liberal northern Baptist. It was fueled by German romanticism and New England, post-Congregationalist Unitarian transcendentalism. But Wesleyanism, once liberalized and unhinged from supernatural teachings about Christian cosmology, generously watered the roots of the Social Gospel movement and ultimately fully embraced it.

Methodism as a mass movement provided much of the activist machinery for Social Gospel energy if not much of the intellectual formation. This storyline is often repeated. Wesleyans are more comfortably doers than deep thinkers, Much of official Methodism, as it transitioned through its Prohibition crusade, easily abandoned traditional Methodism’s affirmation of human nature’s total depravity and complete need for transformation through the new birth. The new imperative, displacing evangelism and holiness, became earnest intent and constant activity for societal improvement. No human condition was beyond the reach of social and political reform.

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