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Francis John McConnell was born on August 18, 1871 in Trinway, Ohio and was the son of Israel H. and Nancy Jane Chalfant McConnell. His father was a Methodist minister, and his brother, Charles Melvin McConnell, became a professor at the Boston University School of Theology, a Methodist seminary. Francis McConnell, however, rejected the strict legalism in which he was reared and reworked his Methodist zeal into social activism.
McConnell graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with the A. B. in 1894. He received the S. T. B. in 1897 and the Ph. D. in 1899, at Boston University. While a graduate student he served the suburban student parishes in West Chelmsford and Newton Upper Falls.
At Boston, McConnell came under the influence of Borden Parker Bowne, professor of philosophy and graduate dean. Bowne's philosophy of personalism is reflected in several of McConnell's own books, and in 1929 McConnell published a definitive biography of Bowne. After serving Methodist churches in Ipswich and Cambridge, Massachussets, and in Brooklyn, N. Y. , McConnell in 1909 was named president of DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. , a Methodist-founded liberal arts college. In 1912, at the comparatively early age of forty, McConnell was elected a bishop in the (Northern) Methodist Episcopal Church; that year he became chairman of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, an unofficial but influential channel for highly advanced and controversial political and economic views. In 1920, having been transferred from the Denver to the Pittsburgh episcopal area, McConnell was chairman of an interchurch committee to investigate the United States Steel strike of 1919. The report, published in the summer of 1920, created a sensation; it at once shifted public attention from the radicalism of the strikers' leaders to the steelworkers' working conditions, and it strengthened the demand for the abolition of the twelve-hour day in steel production. In the 1920's McConnell continued to champion the cause of labor and, during the Great Depression, especially of the unemployed. In 1928 he moved from the Pittsburgh to the New York episcopal area and was elected president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. In addition to his episcopal duties and his social crusading, McConnell wrote eighteen books, including Humanism and Christianity (1928), The Prophetic Ministry (1930), and Evangelicals, Revolutionists and Idealists (1942). He toured India and gave the Barrows lectures there in 1931. He delivered the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale in 1930 and served as visiting professor at Columbia, Garrett, Drew, and Scarritt. He died on August 18, 1953 in Lucasville, Ohio.
McConnell was an Ordained Minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church for many years, serving among other places a large church in Brooklyn, New York. Before election to the episcopacy, McConnell served as the President of DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, 1909-1912. During his presidency he led the University's first major fund drive, the Campaign for the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Fund, which produced a total subscription of $550, 546.
McConnell was probably the best-known champion of the social gospel in American Protestantism. McConnell retired in 1944 but returned to active service in 1948, presiding over the Portland episcopal area. His interest in social issues never flagged; as he once remarked, "You can't be a Methodist without putting things strongly. "
With access both to Washington, through the council's lobby there, and to the New York communications media, he was able to make his "social gospel" views known nationally and interdenominationally. He stood somewhat to the left of most socially concerned churchmen. For example, he supported the Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas in 1928 and 1932, and in his book Christianity and Coercion (1933) he called for "the social ownership of the means of production, or a social control that comes virtually to the same end. " But like most other liberal clergymen of the 1930's, McConnell moderated his socialism as the New Deal took hold. Nevertheless, he championed freedom of speech for more radical fellow churchmen, including the Methodist Federation's Soviet-leaning executive secretary, Harry F. Ward. In 1937, celebrating his silver anniversary as a bishop, McConnell declared: "The two important leaders who have in the last century taken the possibility of human perfectibility seriously have been John Wesley and Karl Marx. " Like those turn-of-the-century English Wesleyans who found a home in the Labour party, McConnell in effect put forth evangelical, socially conscious Methodism as an answer to Marxism. Totalitarianism of the right he outspokenly condemned; he was an early opponent of Hitler and championed to the bitter end the cause of Loyalist Spain. (Mingled with his opposition to the Franco regime may have been some traditional Protestant bias; like most Protestant leaders of his day, McConnell regularly and consistently opposed sending any official United States government envoy to the Vatican. )
To fundamentalists McConnell was anathema; a ministerial colleague brought formal charges of immorality against him in 1929, on the ground that he had advocated teaching the theory of evolution in violation of his ministerial vows. (McConnell was acquitted by a church tribunal. ) Political conservatives also found him objectionable; in 1940 the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce called him a Communist (a Methodist church in Newark demanded that the chamber apologize). But within his own denomination he was admired and respected, especially in the New York episcopal area, which in 1936 unanimously asked that he be given an unprecedented third quadrennial term as its presiding officer.
Quotations: "We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us"
On March 11, 1897, McConnell married Eva Hemans Thomas of Scioto County, Ohio; they had three children.
