ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ways Austin Phelps influenced the Social Christian theology of his daughter, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a widely read nineteenth-century writer and an important forerunner to the Social Gospel Movement. Specifically, the chapter argues that Austin Phelps’s emphasis on the Christian rhetor’s moral obligation to address social evils in order to instigate cultural regeneration provided a basis upon which Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Social Christianity could later take shape. In calling attention to the ways Austin Phelps’s sacred rhetoric loosened the grip of early Calvinist orthodoxy and opened space for the Social Christianity that his daughter later embraced, this chapter aims to recover an important dimension of his legacy that has been overlooked.
