Four men in a basket labeled “The Church” of a hot-air balloon labeled “Religion without Superstition” throw out sandbags labeled “No Museum, Blue Laws, Bigotry, [and] No Sunday Recreations” that are used for ballast, enabling them to soar higher, above dark clouds labeled “Ignorance” and “Superstition.” Caption: The more rubbish they throw out, the higher they can go.
comments and context
Comments and Context
The immediate context of this cartoon was the stir in religious and intellectual circles caused by William James’s lecture series at the University of Edinburgh in 1901, published in 1902 as Varieties of Religious Experience. Liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel was taking hold of American mainstream denominations, reflected in James’s book and in turn fueled by it. Puck, long an advocate of liberal theology — in fact never addressing theology itself, but the Church’s role in society — portrays leaders of the Social Gospel movement in this cartoon. In the foreground, left to right, Washington Gladden, William James, and Bishop Henry C. Potter. In the background is John D. Rockefeller Junior, who advocated against Sundays closings at museums associated with his family; and who was a major benefactor of the Riverside Church in New York City. He caused to have the prominent liberal minister and anti-Fundamentalist, Henry Emerson Fosdick, installed as Pastor, at Riverside (still colloquially called the “Rockefeller cathedral”).
