Christopher D. Cantwell - The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class

THE WORKING CLASS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Editorial Advisors

James R. Barrett, Julie Greene, William P. Jones,

Alice Kessler-Harris, and Nelson Lichtenstein

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book .

Christianity and the
American Working Class

Edited by

CHRISTOPHER D. CANTWELL,
HEATH W. CARTER, AND
JANINE GIORDANO DRAKE

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2016 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cantwell, Christopher D., 1980 editor.

Title: The pew and the picket line: Christianity and the American working class / edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake.

Description: Urbana, Chicago : University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Series: The working class in American history

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015029049

ISBN 9780252081484 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 9780252098178 (ebook)

ISBN 9780252039997 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesChurch history. | Working classReligious life. | LaborReligious aspectsChristianity. | WorkReligious aspectsChristianity.

Classification: LCC BR 517 . P 49 2016 | DDC 277.3/08208623dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029049

Ken Fones-Wolf

Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake

Dan McKanan

Evelyn Sterne

Jarod Roll

Matthew Pehl

Kerry L. Pimblott

Arlene Snchez-Walsh

Alison Collis Greene

Brett Hendrickson

Erik S. Gellman

It is a real delight to see the development of this volume and of the work of the young historians who make up the contributors. The range of their topics is exciting and the ease with which they blend working-class and religious history would have been unthinkable a generation ago, or a little bit longer in my own case. Equally important, the chapters in this volume explore a wide range of Christian expressions among varied segments of the working class without reducing the essence of their spirituality to simple dichotomies that either assist or impede class formation. This is a giant step forward. The excellent introduction to the volume by Chris, Heath, and Janine makes it unnecessary to rehash the reasons that most labor historians paid so little attention to Christian faith. Meanwhile, scholars of American Christianity were not doing much better at paying attention to the part that faith played in the consciousness and ideology of social movements led by working people, nor did they recognize the contributions of working people to religious transformations. The combination of these lacunae in both fields of historical inquiry perhaps accounts for the long life of Herbert Gutmans 1966 article as well as the passages on Methodism and dissenting religion in E. P. Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class that scholars, myself included, picked through for helpful ideas.

This volume comes at just the right time. During the past decade, there has been a flood of exciting new work on the connections linking particular aspects of Christianity to the flourishing of modern capitalism and the rise of the New Right. Darren Dochuk, Bethany Moreton, Darren Grem, Kevin Kruse, and the late Sarah Hammond have unearthed the evangelical

The essays in this volume demonstrate the need to get under the surface of religious practices and sermons; only then can we understand how working people interpreted the messages they heard and how those interpretations affected their actions. One interesting example comes in the form of a memoir from Wilt Browning that I came across in my research. Growing up as the child of lintheads in Easley, South Carolina, Browning recalled the tense months in the late 1940s when his father and mother, a loom fixer and a spinner at the Easley Mill, talked quietly over Saturday and Sunday meals about the arrival of union organizers and the pressure they felt to resist their enticements. It was still a time when the majority of local disputes, even ones as minor as young men hitting a baseball onto another mans porch, might be settled by the superintendent of the cotton mill. The arrival of the union thus represented a considerable challenge to the world that mill management had carefully constructed. But it was also a boom time for local churches, which received new pews for the sanctuaries, new pianos, or fresh coatings of tar and gravel for the parking lot.

On a Sunday shortly before the looming union representation election, the mill superintendent attended the services of Wilt Brownings church to accept the gratitude of the congregation on behalf of the mill owners who lived elsewhere. The sermon that day at the Easley Church of God began with the Book of Revelation, chapter 14, which deals with worshipping the beast and receiving his mark. The preacher concluded by reading the nineteenth and twentieth verses of Revelation 19:

And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army.

And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into the lake of fire burning with brimstone.

With those words, the preacher closed the Bible with a thump and claimed that the mark of the beast would most certainly be conferred first upon union members, people who through greed sought more than their fair share from their employers.

The impact on Browning was unnerving. After that sermon, the young boy feared that some people sitting in the nearby pews might show up for work in a few days with a hideous mark on their foreheads or in the palms of their hands. Fortunately for the youngster, the union lost by a one-sided margin. Thus, perhaps just a few of his neighbors had been lost to the beast. Nearly forty years later, Browning recalled the incident with his mother. He learned that her foreman had actually asked her to be an informer against union sympathizers. Instead, despite the fear of the superintendent and the fire and brimstone sermon, Brownings mother quietly decided to vote for the union. Certainly, I heard the sermon, she told her son, but I was and still am fully capable of thinking for myself and making my own decisions. A proud linthead, Browning called her. This tale speaks volumes about how little the words of ministers and church publications can tell us about working-class Christianity. After all, the sufferance of following ones own conscience about the meaning of the scriptures was the essence of popular evangelicalism in the postwar South.

The contributions to this volume cannot claim to predict how working people in other situations would navigate between the personal and political aspects of their spirituality. The mix of determining factors typically derives from localized conditions and individual inclinations. The impact of the sacred on the politics of working people may follow patterns, but it is rarely certain. For instance, much of my reading on twentieth-century Protestantism suggests that working people should have absorbed the dire prophecies on the dangers of a powerful state and of creeping socialism. These were signs of the end times, according to the new evangelicals who were generously funded by antiliberal entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, labor historians who have listened to the voices of southern white workers emphasize something quite different. They note that many devout Christian workers loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. What are we to make of such incongruities? We have yet to adequately understand how evangelical workers reconciled Meanwhile, we are only beginning to discover the similar inconsistencies that characterized the outlooks of northern Catholics, black Baptists, or Latino Pentecostals. The maze between the pew and the picket line starts to look incredibly intricate.