Josiah Strong

Josiah Strong (April 14, 1847 – June 26, 1916) was an American Protestant clergyman, organizer, editor and author. He was a leader of the Social Gospel movement, calling for social justice and combating social evils. He supported missionary work so that all races could be improved and uplifted and thereby brought to Christ. He is controversial, however, due to his beliefs about race and methods of converting people to Christianity. In his 1885 book Our Country, Strong argued that Anglo Saxons are a superior race who must "Christianize and civilize" the "savage" races, which he argued would be good for the American economy and the "lesser races".

Josiah Strong was one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement that sought to apply Protestant religious principles to solve the social ills brought on by industrialization, urbanization and immigration. He served as General Secretary (1886–1898) of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States, a coalition of Protestant missionary groups. After being forced out he set up his own group, the League for Social Service (1898–1916), and edited its magazine The Gospel of the Kingdom.

Strong, like most other leaders of the Social Gospel movement, added strong evangelical roots, including a belief in sin and redemption. Strong, like Walter Rauschenbusch and George D. Herron all had intense conversion experiences and believed that regeneration was necessary to bring social justice by combating social sin. Though they were often critical of evangelicalism, they thought of their mission as an expansion of it. Their primitivist desire for noninstitutional Christianity was influenced by liberal, postmillennial idealism, and their attitudes influenced neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

His most well-known and influential work was Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), intended to promote domestic missionary activity in the American West. When the work appeared, Protestants had long been accustomed to meeting the sorts of perils that Strong saw threatening the country’s survival, Christianization, and world greatness. His work flowed from a tradition habituated to perceive threats to “our country.” It was a tradition that, perhaps ironically, helped ensure the end of slavery in defense of the Union during the Civil War, while also predisposing many northern Protestants to look past, if not entirely forget, the ex-slaves following the war. Historians also suggest it may have encouraged support for imperialistic United States policy among American Protestants. He pleaded as well for more missionary work in the nation's cities, and for reconciliation to end racial conflict. He was one of the first to warn that Protestants (most of whom lived in rural areas or small towns) were ignoring the problems of the cities and the working classes

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