Matthew Pehl - The Making of Working-Class Religion

published to print with a grant

Figure Foundation

that meaning may soon find us

MATTHEW PEHL

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2016 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pehl, Matthew, author.

Title: The making of working-class religion / Matthew Pehl.

Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2016. | Series: The working class in American history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022066 (print) | LCCN 2016000556 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252098840 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252040429 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252081897 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Working classReligious lifeMichiganDetroit. | Detroit (Mich.)Church history20th century. | RaceReligious aspectsChristianity.

Classification: LCC BV 4593 (print) | LCC BV 4593 . P 44 2016 (ebook) | DDC 277.74/34dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022066

In 1961, the Detroit Industrial Mission (DIM) published a provocative essay titled Work: Curse or Joy? For four years, the middle-class Protestant ministers of DIM had toiled on assembly lines at Detroit-area factories, hoping to understand the religious mentality of workers. They had reached an unsettling conclusion. [I]n general, DIM asserted, [workers] hate their jobs and find industrial labor a distasteful necessity. Managers seemed oblivious or defensive, insisting that workers in industry are happy, or that, if they were unhappy, they could find another job. The union, meanwhile, appeared to have resigned itself to the philosophy that: (1) Work in most of modern industry is Hell, particularly on the production line; and, (2) this essential hellishness cannot be changed. Work, according to union leaders, might be made bearable and remunerativebut not enjoyable. The entire dilemma, according to DIM, alienated people from each other and from God: it stood opposed to the Biblical tradition, which insisted that work was meant to be a source of joy. Joyful work necessarily offers people a chance to become richer, deeper, fuller human beings. Was not something wrong with the very soul of modern society, DIM asked, if so many people were dehumanized by their work?

The biblical reading of DIM ministers offered a creative and thought-provoking analysis of the human (indeed, the spiritual) costs of industrial capitalism. Yet, their insistence that the biblical tradition unambiguously promoted work as an inherently ennobling human experience reflected their specific theological, historical, and class position. For centuries, laborers within the Western religious tradition learned a very different lesson: work was proof of the curse of human sinfulness. In the mythical fall from paradise, This exegetical debate over the religious meaning of labor was not limited to the learned ministers of DIM, but was wrestled with by working people themselves. Bill Goode, a skilled worker and later a union activist, witnessed this tension play out before his eyes. At lunch one day, Goode overheard two Finnish coworkers discuss whether there would be work in heaven:

Their answers were instantaneous and diametrically opposed. One maintained that work was punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve and that, of course, there would be no work in heaven. The other asserted with equal vehemence that work was fulfillment, that there would certainly be work in heaven. The argument raged all lunch hour, and it was probably one of the most interesting debates I have heard on the nature of work.

As these sources suggest, religion matters in working-class history. However, recognizing the importance of religion to working-class history doesnt necessarily get us any closer to understanding its meaning or significance . What, exactly, is a scholar to make of these two conflicting sources? Does an assessment of religious culture add any unique insight for understanding the power relations and social experiences of industrial work, or does it obscure deeper historical, economic, or political structures? Did religion entice workers into silently enduring suffering and injustice, or did it offer one of the few sources of dignity, autonomy, and resistance that workers possessed? How did working people interpret the role of religion in their own lives, and how do these readings compare with those of contemporary observers or subsequent scholars? Because human labor is embedded in socially constructed webs of culture and ideas, the experiences of work inevitably raise profound moral and philosophical questions, as well as difficult puzzles for historical interpretation.

Scholars struggles to understand the relationship between religion and class, and the role of religion within working-class culture, was present virtually from the creation of the modern intellectual debate about class formation and capitalism. As early as 1844, Karl Marx had staked out a damning critique of religion when he described it as the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

But, if scholars have long persisted in viewing religion as a tool for exploitation (at worst) or a compensation prize for historys losers (at best), another scholarly tradition has insisted on religions radical potential for inspiring social and political movements of lasting significance. Herbert Gutman set the tone for this more appreciative approach in his landmark article from 1966, in which he argued that Gilded Age workers found in Protestantism a transhistoric framework to challenge the new industrialism and a common set of moral imperatives to measure their rage against and to order their dissatisfactions. Ken Fones-Wolf brilliantly built upon Gutmans call to arms in his study of the relationship between the American Federation of Labor and Christian reformers in Progressive Era Philadelphia, while scholars of antebellum religion like Jama Lazerow and William Sutton offered correctives to Paul Johnsons analysis of Rochester. More recently, a host of scholarship has linked working-class religion to social activism. Joe Creech and Michael Kazin have shown the deep symbiosis between populism and evangelicalism in the late nineteenth century, while Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman have illustrated the commingling of radicalism and religion across the early-twentieth-century South. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Evelyn Savidge Sterne, Kenneth Heineman, William Issell, and James Terence Fisher have all documented the important role of Catholicism in politicizing Catholic

This book cannot resolve the debates between religion as an opiate and religion as a stimulantnot as a dodge from staking out a unified theory of religion and class, but because disagreement, messiness, and ambiguity define the role of religion in working-class culture. Ultimately, the actors in the two narratives that began this introduction debated and disagreed about the meaning and purpose of religion, just as scholars and critics have long disagreed about the nature and effects of religion in working-class life. Indeed, the central theme of this study might be contained by the word ambivalence . It is a quality at the heart not only of scholars explanations of working-class religion, but of workers experiences as well. Many workers, for instance, sought a religion with deep emotional exuberance, prayed for supernatural patronage and miraculous favors, and prioritized highly personal, individualized religious relationships. Yet, most of these same workers were attuned to the value of social discipline, craved respectability, held fast to traditional standards of morality, and were profoundly attached to a collective sense of religious peoplehood deeply rooted in an actual or imagined history. Religion was a crucial, if sometimes contradictory, mediator between individual spiritual strivings and collectivist values, between the desire to transcend into a higher world and the pragmatic demands of the earthly world, between the folk customs of the rural nineteenth century and the commercialized culture of the urban twentieth century. Working-class religions issued paradoxical demands: for submission and discipline, as well as for spiritual (and perhaps social) liberation; for adherence to the status quo but also, at times, for a transformative, purifying rebirth; for acquiescence to the needs of capitalism and nationalism as well as for prophetic critiques of these orders. Ambivalence shot through all currents of working-class religiosity and all forms of its cultural, intellectual, and political expressions.