The Social Gospel was alive and reasonably well. Methodist Bishop Francis J. McConnell chaired a commission to investigate the steel strike of 1919 and was shocked to discover "the twelve-hour day, the seven-day week, and the twenty-four-hour shift" had not yet yielded to the social creeds of the churches.
The leadership of southern Methodism took a stand against the Ku Klux Klan. Concern for arbitration, peace, and pacifism replaced the high pitched patriotism of World War I.
Of the 19,000 clergy who responded to a questionnaire during this period, 52 percent believed the church should neither sanction nor support any future war, while 10,000 said it was their purpose not only to refuse to sanction war but also to have no part what ever in any armed conflict.
Pacifism, of course, was not the only popular topic. A battle raged over theological modernism and fundamentalism, with the Scopes' "monkey trial" of 1925 providing a hook on which to hang pulpit rhetoric. Creativity in worship often meant more complex orders of worship in cathedral-like churches. The United Brethren, having made consulting architectural service available, expressed pleasure at the evidence of new churches that were "more beautiful, churchly, and modern." But these new and expensive churches were about to become millstones tied to the necks of congregations, when the decline in religion evident in the 1920s was made worse by the economic depression of the 1930s, and the churches of what is now United Methodism began to lose ground.