Skip to main content

From Social Sin to Social Gospel: The Antislavery Origins of Social Christianity

Moderately antislavery Protestants including Leonard Bacon, Horace Bushnell, and Edward Beecher believed that slavery was a sin, but not a sin of the regular sort it was a social sin, and as such, its eradication necessitated the moral progress of society. Oshatz will trace the unorthodox and troubling notion of social sin from its antislavery origins through the late-nineteenth century development of the Social Gospel.