Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Lutheran-turned-Baptist whose experiences as a minister in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York at the close of the nineteenth century led him to write Christianity and the Social Crisis, the publication of which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Social Gospel movement in American churches. (The book was among the few King would ever cite specifically as an influence on his own religious beliefs.) Rauschenbusch rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of
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