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Full Description
In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong.
In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.
In The Gospel of Church, Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers' efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Gilded Age Churches and the Vacuum of Denominational Authority
Chapter 2: Christianity and the American Commonwealth
Chapter 3: Planting the Church of Social Democracy: Socialism and Christian Socialism in the Socialist Party of America
Chapter 4: Between Religion and Politics: Christian Socialists and the Socialist Party
Chapter 5: Socialism and the Limits of American Protestantism
Chapter 6: Reframing the Moral Lessons of the Labor Movement
Chapter 7: Charles Stelzle's Labor Temple and the Constested Boundaries of American Religion
Chapter 8: The Great War and the Victory of White Protestant Clergy
Chapter 9: The Interchurch World Movement and the Christening of the Open Shop
Afterword: On the Heroic Narrative of Christian Social Service
