Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars

New Directions in a Divided America

Darren Dochuk

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780268158798
  9780268201296
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268201289
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This volume reframes the narrative that has too often dominated the field of historical study of religion and politics: the culture wars.

Influenced by culture war theories first introduced in the 1990s, much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics is written in a mode that takes for granted the enduring partisan divides that can blind us to the complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics. The contributors to Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars argue that such narratives do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age.

This collection of essays, authored by leading scholars in American religious and political history, challenges readers to look past familiar clashes over social issues to appreciate the ways in which faith has fueled twentieth-century U.S. politics beyond predictable partisan divides and across a spectrum of debates ranging from environment to labor, immigration to civil rights, domestic legislation to foreign policy. Offering fresh illustrations drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods, these essays emphasize that our rendering of religion and politics in the twentieth century must appreciate the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm.

Contributors: Darren Dochuk, Janine Giordano Drake, Joseph Kip Kosek, Josef Sorett, Patrick Q. Mason, Wendy L. Wall, Mark Brilliant, Andrew Preston, Matthew Avery Sutton, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Michelle Nickerson, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, Kate Bowler, and James T. Kloppenberg.

PART I

SPIRITS OF REFORM

CHAPTER 1

Who Should Lead the Christian Workers?

Fights for Headship in Church-Labor Solidarity, 1912–1919

JANINE GIORDANO DRAKE

★

In March and April 1914, Frank Tannenbaum, a twenty-one-year-old busboy in New York City, organized a massive break-in on a string of churches of New York. One after the other, he and fellow members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) entered sanctuaries and demanded food and shelter. Some ministers, like Father Schneider at St. Alphonsus, called the police and had the men arrested. Tannenbaum told the New York Call, “Do you call that the spirit of Christ, to turn hungry and homeless men away?” Most ministers offered food and shelter but did their best to quickly dismiss the “unwashed” men. Newspapers and religious publications around the country referred to these break-ins as “invasions.”¹

Yet, that very March, barely two hundred miles away, Boston members of the IWW began a very different dialogue with church leaders. Methodist minister Harry Ward presented a series of lectures on syndicalism and socialism at Ford Hall Forum, a speaker series hosted by the Boston University School of Theology. The talks were widely attended, and the IWW Propaganda League of Boston raved at the “unbiased, unprejudiced and able manner in which he presented the controversy between capital and labor and its causes.” At the end of the talk, Ward handed over the podium to IWW members, begging them to address the audience of ministers, reformers, and employers with their suggestions for next steps. One of their requests was that Ward publish and circulate his talks on socialism, syndicalism, and the labor movement. Ward did so, and he used the IWW’s endorsement as prefatory material for his book.²

We can only understand the history of March 1914 by taking these stories together, for the 1910s are littered with simultaneously friendly and combative relationships between church leaders and wage earners. Both to make friends and stir a fight, oftentimes in the same evening, rank-and-file working people showed up in large numbers at lectures of traveling clergy. Sometimes, as in Boston’s Open Forum and New York’s Labor Temple, divinity schools and denominations sponsored the events.³ On other occasions, labor unions hosted clergy, both to give talks and to write columns in their newspapers. As the product of organized labor’s hard work, several professors of theology became convinced that Jesus did reject the tenets of capitalism, that the labor movement was part of God’s plan for social salvation and the redeemed Kingdom of God, and that capitalism was inherently abusive. The American Federation of Labor, a confederation of labor unions, exchanged conference delegates with the Federal Council of Churches and distributed tracts on the Christian value of trade unions. The Federal Council orchestrated revivals that encouraged workingmen to join both churches and trade unions. Ministers investigated strikes and reported upon them in deeply sympathetic terms, even as they shied from defending them. As Ken Fones-Wolf has shown, organized labor maintained such partnerships to prove to Christian workers that their unions were not antithetical to Christianity.⁴ But what kept Social Gospel clergy interested in workers?

This chapter examines the Progressive Era relationship between laborers and clergy as a competition over who should direct the spiritual lives of workers and who should lead the cause for justice within the Christian nation. In 1914, at a summit on the role of Christianity in industrial reform, anarcho-syndicalist Arturo Giovannitti challenged left-leaning Christians to choose their allies carefully. A former minister, he said that Christ called Christian workers themselves to lead in the holy revolution. Orthodox Protestant clergy soundly rejected any suggestion that working people did not need church. Moreover, they insisted that Jesus never called for revolution. Both church and labor authorities agreed that industrial relations needed to be redeemed and reconstructed. Yet, as this chapter illustrates, the churches and the labor movement fought over who ought to lead that movement and what that “Christian America” ought to look like.

Ward was probably the most left-leaning and most requested speaker among all ministers who spoke to workers about Christianity and labor. In 1912 he addressed audiences in 17 states, including 347 special forums and 36 conferences. This included twelve colleges, three normal schools, three theological schools, and a number of high schools. He likely also spoke within the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a national shopfloor revival co-coordinated with the YMCA and the American Federation of Labor.⁵ Newspapers called Ward the evangelist for the Social Gospel, for the emphasis of his talks always pinpointed the source of social problems in the unwillingness of Christians to follow the divine moral order.⁶ He told audiences of mixed background that it was their Christian responsibility to promote the flourishing of all people; they should “make possible to every individual free access to all that is best in life.”⁷ Insisting that the churches were firmly committed to the industrial reconstruction, the British immigrant pastor argued that the profit system was out of alignment with the hope of a Christian civilization. He often invited union leaders to join him on forum platforms.⁸

Ward’s speeches often sounded like those of Christian Socialists of the previous thirty years, for he combined assaults on religion and capitalism. He affirmed Christian Socialists’ claims that capitalism operates around the production of “things and trusts that somehow the Kingdom may be added. It would use the life energy of women and children to the point of exhaustion, and then let the wearied remnant make for the higher life as it can.” He echoed their ideas that the “wealth-making process” was essentially a religious concern and, in this respect, preached to socialists that Christianity was on their side. As Ward repeated frequently, to deprive some of a living wage impeded on the proper practice of Christianity in the United States.⁹ He believed that workers should be paid more, even if it came at the expense of businesses. He accused modern industrial capitalism of being “unregenerate” because it used people, especially women and children, as tools in the production of material goods. He affirmed socialists’ contention that there was more than enough wealth available for all to live comfortably; if only wealth was more equitably redistributed, humanity would advance and a more noble civilization be established.¹⁰ At times, he even applauded Jesus’s confrontational approach to the “authorities of his day,” as they were characterized by “revolutionary boldness and thoroughness.” In Denver, soon after the Ludlow massacre, he implicitly endorsed a boycott, arguing, “The time has come for the people to refuse to take the products of industry at the cost of life of the working class.”¹¹

Between 1912 and 1917, Ward distributed fifteen thousand copies of his book The Social Creed of the Churches, a Federal Council–endorsed declaration the human “rights” of all workingmen to a host of industrial reforms. These included a “living wage,” old-age insurance, a reduction in work hours, safe working conditions, the end to child labor, a weekly day off, “the application of Christian principles to the acquisition and use of property, and for the most equitable division of the product of industry that can be ultimately devised.”¹² Ward frequently received notes of appreciation from other Methodist pastors on the ways that his work was increasing church attendance. Ward kept notes from those who praised Social Creed. One minister in a mill town of Massachusetts requested more, “both in English and Italian.”¹³ Another, from a steel town in Ohio, asked the same. He added that his initial canvass of the work “secured us many new S.S. [Sunday school] attendants.”¹⁴ Florence Simms, executive secretary of the YWCA and member of the FCC Committee on Social Service, worked closely with the YWCA to be sure it was shared with working women. Social Creed did call for limitations on women’s hours and extra provisions for their safety.¹⁵ The book was translated into several immigrant languages and often distributed with invitations to area churches and their array of ministries. These often included language schools, social events such as moving pictures, church nurseries, and—of course—services.¹⁶ Both the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops praised Ward for Social Creed.¹⁷

However, while Ward’s sympathies with socialism were sincere, his deepest loyalties were to the institutional church. In 1912 he hoped that the Church, in its universal sense, would be the newest social movement, and that middle-class and working-class people together would topple social and political authorities. To the extent he was a Christian Socialist, he was so in the pre-1886, “Great Upheaval” sense. Born in London in 1873 and steeped in the traditions of Social Christianity through Fabian reformers, Ward’s understanding of the gospel implied the need to transform culture. He understood the golden rule as key to the practice of the faith, but he saw true transformation in industrial relationships as impossible without the Holy Spirit. Ward wanted industry to be “responsible to a higher law” and thus answerable not to workers but to God for its actions.¹⁸ He was profoundly skeptical of any social movements that were not church-related, especially those he saw as competing with churches for the responsibility of spiritual and moral leaders within poor, working-class communities.

Put another way, Ward soundly rejected nondenominational People’s Churches, barn revivals, and parachurch ministries such as the Christian Socialist Fellowship as churches. He agreed with many of their ideas but dismissed the notion that Christian wage earners should reconstruct industrial relations without reestablishing the authority of the church to regulate the excesses of industry. While he dedicated the prime of his life to dialoging with wage earners and emphasizing the concept of social salvation, he earnestly encouraged those workers to work within a Federal Council–affiliated church. His clipping files brim with testimonials of workers who were so touched by his talks on the labor movement that they decided to join a church.¹⁹ Ward positioned himself and his clerical colleagues as emissaries, or missionaries, of the Church to the people. He saw the Social Gospel movement as “the product of the modern missionary awakening.”²⁰ A British-born Victorian, Ward accepted the colonial framework of a missionary dispensing truth to a “mission field.”²¹ He did not condescend to workers, and he made it his business to understand and relay all the debates among different types of unions, socialist strategies, and methods by which to compel the action of employers. But he did not believe any labor strategy would have lasting value without working with and through the churches. Similar to Father John Ryan, Ward and the Federal Council believed that the only way to truly transform industrial relationships was to change the way business leaders and workers talked about “good” business.

The hope of clergy to become both spiritual directors and lobbyists for the labor movement was expressed through their major investment in strike reporting. The Federal Council and its affiliates investigated the 1910–1911 Bethlehem Steel strike, the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, the 1911–1912 Muscatine button workers’ strike, the 1913 Paterson (New Jersey) silk strike, and the experience of coal miners (especially in Colorado, West Virginia, and Michigan) in 1913 and 1914. In fact, it was Federal Council executive Henry Atkinson’s report on coal miners’ conditions behind the Ludlow massacre that socialist Upton Sinclair used in his research for King Coal.²² The reports consistently illustrated the danger of working conditions and the very low wages of workers in relation to their cost of living. Yet, in every one of these cases, pastors’ strike investigations came too late to be helpful at the bargaining table.

While strike reports functioned to keep a national spotlight on particular kinds of workers for a middle-class reading audience, the Federal Council was careful not to validate unions as independent, Christian vehicles of justice. Consistently, reports emphasized the need for “neutral” church leadership to intervene in the interest of justice. Strikers usually accepted such solidarity gestures carefully. After all, the Federal Council had assiduously assembled mailing lists for churches in nearly every town in the United States.

To take one example, the 1910 Bethlehem Steel strike illustrates Protestant ministers’ self-interested alliance with labor, as well as labor’s half-hearted cooperation. Overworked steel workers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, disputed wages, the speed-up, and the length of the workday, but they began the strike by protesting Sunday work, for Social Creed had explicitly mentioned the value of a weekly day off. Yet, the Federal Council’s local affili...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Darren Dochuk
• Part I. Spirits of Reform
• Part II. Redefining Church, State, and Civil Society
• Part III. Faith-Based Activism in an Age of Fracture
• List of Contributors
• Index