Jimmy Carter and the Progressive Roots of Sunday School
Visiting a factory town on business one day, Raikes was appalled by the spectacle of “wretchedly ragged” children playing in the street. When he asked a local about the problem, he was told that on Sundays, it was even worse: “The street is filled with the multitudes of these wretches, who…spend their time in noise and riot, playing at chuck, and cursing and swearing in a manner so horrid, as to convey to any serious mind an idea of hell rather than any other place.”
Raikes’s solution was to provide a school for them to attend on their one day off from factory work. At “Sunday school,” they would learn reading and writing, as well as moral and Biblical lessons. The classes were imbued with an ambient Christianity, to be sure, but their first purpose was to educate the poor.
The idea spread quickly within Britain, and by 1790 a group of Philadelphia Quakers had imported the plan to America. Over the course of the 19th century, Sunday School became increasingly evangelical and less academic. Gradually, respectable church families were encouraged to send their own children to Sunday School.
.. In many quarters, Sunday School is now likelier to be a source of “fellowship”—a social and devotional occasion—rather than primarily educational, let alone charitable. And although Carter’s brand of progressive Christianity is popular in the media, its future as a robust domain of American religious life is still up in the air.