It is misleading to regard the Christian Socialists of the nineteenth century as precursors of the modern advocacy of Church involvement with social politics. They were prophets of their times, not men who anticipated later developments – prophets, that is, in the correct sense: they discerned ultimate meanings and moral lessons in the conditions of their day. They were hardly political at all. Maurice's original belief that the existing society of contemporaneous England already embodied the institutional apparatus of the universal and spiritual society was plainly conservative, as was his conclusion that social regeneration would follow when all men recognized their integration with society. Westcott's expression of the same basic scheme of things, though with some variations of language and detail, showed that the Maurician inheritance continued to promote a non-political attitude to social reform. Those who followed Maurice's elevated doctrine of humanity, but who nevertheless departed from it by seeking some actual alternative to the structure of society – men like Ludlow, Neale, and Headlam – were still, in the end, extremely cautious of political action. Even Headlam, the most activist of them all, who had clear links with Fabian Socialism, finally declined to espouse a rigorously political version of the Social Gospel.

Most of the Christian Socialists were also very wary of ideology, except as deposited within rather orthodox theology. They allowed themselves a range of ecclesiastical preferences, from Maurice's and Kingsley's Broad Churchmanship to Headlam's Sacramentalism; but the general tone of their theological outlook was conservative.