gospeller

Clark Banack argues that Aberhart's decision to enter politics was not the result of a desire to "save the world," as was the case with many social gospellers, but an evangelical crusade to "save souls." (9) Aberhart believed that poverty and economic turmoil created a barrier between people and their salvation.

In the middle, and comprising the majority were liberal social gospellers. Liberals had a more structuralist and progressive understanding of the causes and of and solutions to social problems and were distressed to varying degrees by the excesses, abuses and shortcomings of capitalism --greed, political corruption, the unethical treatment of workers, etc.

David Benedict observed that many Baptists in the Carolina backcountry had little comprehension of the call to be "born again" that marked the preaching of Separates Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall who insisted that "it should be necessary to feel conviction and conversion; and to be able to ascertain the time and place of one's conversion." Benedict added that "their manner of preaching was, if possible, much more novel than their doctrines." (49) The Regulars were hot gospellers, to be sure.

And as the earnestness of the original social gospellers is beyond doubt, so is the perfervid self-righteousness of their secular successors.

Gospellers, a Meghalayabased band, say their aim is to stop youngsters from getting addicted to pre- marital sex and drugs and to get hooked instead to Jesus.

The term "New Jerusalem" indicates a connection with progressive social gospellers and radical Christianity.

(42) In The Scarlet Letter, the first of the three scenes on the scaffold (overshadowed by the pillory used to hush the likes of Quakers, Wanton Gospellers, and Antinomians, and hard by the whipping-post) dramatizes a public refusal to confess.

"I see continuing links between social gospellers such as Tommy Douglas and Stanley Knowles and contemporary people such as Bill Blaikie and Lorne Calvert, and Catholics such as Joe Comartin and Charlie Angus," Gruending says.

Wynn Thomas as a 'precursor of Movement Poetry' (13), is almost Wordsworthian--reminiscent of "Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (1798)--in its first ten lines: 'From this high quarried ledge I see/ The place for which the Quakers once / Collected clothes, my fathers' home, / Our stubborn bankrupt village sprawled / In jaded dusk beneath its nameless hills; / The drab streets strung across the cwm, / Derelict workings, tips of slag / The gospellers and gamblers use / And children scrutting for the coal /That winter dole cannot purvey [...]'.

But the point that often gets overlooked is that, if Americans are viewed as the arch-sceptics, they've also been the hot gospellers of climate change too; and in the vanguard of that movement has been Professor James Hansen.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924, had much the same trouble, having to balance a "medley of idealists, revolutionaries, dissident Liberals, hot gospellers, rebels and Marxists".

(31) The national leadership of the Protestant churches and some reform-minded Catholics were concerned about the social and economic problems plaguing industrial capitalist society and understood that redressing these problems required not only a vocal response at the national level but also concerted effort at the local level.(32) Denominational colleges began to provide courses on economics, sociology, and modern industrial problems, with reading lists that included the works of Henry George, prominent social gospellers, and British and American social scientists (33).

The divines themselves categorically rejected such a designation; when referring to themselves they chose "gospellers" or "the godly." Their detractors used "puritan"--more as insult than identifier--and applied it to persons with a wide variety of ecclesiastical, theological, and social concerns.

They call them the "New Olympians", those free market hot gospellers that gathered around Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek in the years following the Second World War and who now command the heights of national and intra-national economic policy.

[...](sig.A2-A3) Even worse, some of the "carnally minded" are preachers: "This our happie Common-wealth is not a little troubled with refractory rabblements of prophane gospellers, who live loosely & lewdly, turning fasting into feasting, & charitie into crueltie" (sig.