A moment in ecumenical history

May 1908: Deplorable U.S. labor conditions
prompt the 'Social Creed of the Churches'

For most children and adults in 1908, May was a month of warm sun, new blossoms and rebirth.

But for Methodist pastor Frank Mason North, the fragrance of May flowers could not mask the stench in which millions of Americans were forced to live. For them, May was a month of long days in stifling factories, hard scrabble farms and dark, dangerous mines.

For North and a growing number of U.S. church leaders, the scandal of suffering was unbearable. Laborers in factories and mines worked 10 to 12 hours a day under hazardous conditions, all for less money than they needed to support their homes.

Thousands of these workers were children three to 12 years old.

Lewis W. Hine, a teacher and sociologist, began photographing the conditions of child laborers in 1908. His picture of an 11-year-old girl glancing wistfully out the window of the mill in which she worked is one of the most famous pictures ever taken. In Bibb Mill No. 1 in Macon, Ga., Hines interviewed children who were so small they had to climb the spinning frame to replace bobbins. A 51-inch high girl in a cotton mill told Hines she earned 48 cents a day, often including a second shift at night.

Hine's vivid images seared these conditions into the consciousness of the U.S. church, which was in the early days of a quiet revolution. In the latter 19th century, mainline Protestant churches received significant financial support from the mill and factory owners and many turned their eyes from the squalid conditions that made them profitable. But in 1907, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist theologian and social activist, wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis, and his words galvanized North and others into a plan of action:

No mans shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life ... Whoever uncouples the religious and social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

In May 1908, Frank Mason North – completely committed to Rauschenbusch's strict interpretation of the Gospel – was chair of an ecumenical committee preparing a report on "The Church and Modern Industry" that would be presented the following December at the formation meeting of the Federal Council of Churches. "Rich and poor, capitalist and laboring man, are not classifications and distinctions made by the Church of Christ," North wrote in the preamble of the report. "To the Church there are but two kinds ... those who follow Christ and those who do not."

When North's report was presented to the Federal Council delegates, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The Rev. Charles Stelzle of the Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions called the report "the greatest paper on this subject that I have ever heard or read." He added: "If I can say to the workmen of America that the Federal Council really means it will be the greatest thing that I can say or that I have ever yet said."

The report on the Church and Modern Industry made several recommendations to the Council, calling upon the churches to study social conditions in the U.S. "as an immediate Christian duty," and to enter into "sympathetic and fraternal relations with working men" with the aim of improving conditions and salaries in factories and mills.

Most member churches adopted the recommendations, amplified them and – by 1912 – had codified them into "The Social Creed of the Churches."

The 32 communions that sat together during the first meeting of the Federal Council of Churches in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia demonstrated a zeal for social reform that put them severely out of step with most Americans during the period between the Spanish American War and World War I. The majority of the delegates favored immigration reform, labor reform, the abolition of child labor, improved conditions for the poor, and temperance. As a result, they were regularly accused of being socialists – a worn-out canard that  critics have not improved on in 100 years.

But their zeal had staying power. A hundred years after the adoption of the Social Creed of the Churches, their descendants in the National Council of Churches and Church World Service updated the declaration as "A Social Creed for the 21st Century."

Poverty and injustice still exist, but the Christian social movement that began a century ago has set high standards for the church's role in the fight for justice. The challenge of Frank Mason North is as critical today as it was in 1908:

" In dealing with human conditions the Church is bound to take the viewpoint of Christ, and from that viewpoint are ever discernible the world that now is and that which is to come. The Church's doors open upon the common levels of life. They should never be closed. Its windows open toward the skies. Let their light not be darkened."