DNA of the Social Gospel

Peter Steinfels has an interesting piece in the NY Times (registration required, but free)

A century ago, Walter Rauschenbusch was the leading thinker of what was first known as "social Christianity" and then simply as the social gospel. The textbooks say that by 1918, the social gospel, like Rauschenbusch himself, was on its deathbed; but in fact its genes lived on in religious responses to the Depression and helped shape the civil rights movement of the 1960's.