Joseph Chamberlain’s heart soared as he listened to the oratory of the Reverend George Dawson at the dedication of the Free Reference Library in Birmingham, England. An industrialist and the grandfather of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Joseph was inspired by Dawson’s pronouncement that “a town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature.”1 This was the heart of what would come to be called “the municipal gospel,” a belief that the government can enoble humanity simply by changing the environment. Chamberlain and Dawson would become its high priests. Unfortunately, they were Unitarians.2

There is no denying that these men did a lot of good. Mid-19th-century Birmingham was a mess. As Thomas Carlyle observed, “The streets are ill-built, ill-paved . . . Torrents of thick smoke . . . are issuing from a thousand funnels.”3 Chamberlain was appalled, and he began to formulate a plan to join, lead, and reform the city council. He was stirred by one of Dawson’s former parishioners, Reverend Robert Dale, who called the city “the new Church . . . in which there was no bond, nor text, nor articles—a large Church, one of the greatest institutions yet established.”4

Heretofore, city improvements relied chiefly upon “the charitable voluntarism of merchant princes occasionally bestowing gifts on a grateful municipality.”5 Most utilities were privately owned, and it was toward these services that Chamberlain directed his attention. In 1875, upon council action, he became chairman of the new Gas Committee, which now controlled the resources of two private companies which had been purchased by the city. Before long, unanticipated income flowed to the city, derelict company land was converted to recreational purposes, and the price of gas had dropped by 30%: “Here was the municipal gospel in all its practical glory.”6

But Chamberlain’s zeal extended beyond the acquisition of public utilities: “[The] city must have its parks as well as its prisons, its art gallery as well as its asylum, its books and its libraries as well as its baths and washhouses, its schools as well as its sewers.”7 And under his leadership, these amenities multiplied. But there was a fly in the ointment. Talk of a secular “church” was quite pleasing to the “collectivists,” and the municipal gospel began to morph into “municipal socialism.”8 Piggybacking on the expansion of local government, the 1900 International Socialist Conference in Paris declared it a “duty of all socialists . . . to endeavour to municipalize such public services as the urban transport service, education, shops, bakeries, medical assistance, hospitals, water supply, baths and washhouses, the food supply and clothing, dwellings for the people [etc].”9 One reasoned that “Bread is as much an article of universal consumption as water,” so a city bread service should parallel a city water service.10

When friends of private enterprise objected, the socialists reminded them of how thoroughly and happily government had impacted their lives. One wrote, “The Individualist Town Councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school . . .”11 Before long, “Municipal socialism contained a momentum of its own,” with a “self-generating bureaucracy.” City councils of high-minded volunteers gave way to busybodies “with time on their hands.”12 Entrepreneurs asked, “Who will risk his money in competition with Town Councils, which have the bottomless purse of the ratepayers to draw on, and have not to face any risk to themselves?”13

When the city becomes a “church,” it tends strongly to usurp private prerogatives and overestimate its ability to help mankind. Forgetting Augustine’s warning that the City of Man cannot become the City of God and ignoring the doctrine of the Fall, municipal officials exaggerate the spiritual impact of parks, hospitals, and water treatment plants, as wonderful as these may be. City councils cannot create “heaven on earth” since natural man has so much of the devil in him. Indeed, the only real cure for urban blight is the gospel transforming the hearts of lost people.

Of course, Christians must be involved in local politics, doing what they can to make their cities livable. The Golden Rule requires it. And if they leave matters to Unitarians, Socialists, and others who might desire to become priests of a secular city/church, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Footnotes:
1

Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 313-314.
2

Ibid., 317, 326.
3

Ibid., 324.
4

Ibid., 327.
5

Ibid., 359.
6

Ibid., 339.
7

Ibid., 353.
8

Ibid., 365.
9

Ibid., 367-368.
10

Ibid., 378.
11

Ibid., 374.
12

Ibid., 374-376.
13

Ibid., 376.

from the Kairos Journal

posted by the First Baptist Church which is in Cecil County, Maryland on Route 40, across from the Principio Health Center