Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America

By Darren Dochuk

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268201289

Book preview

Introduction

DARREN DOCHUK

Both the text and sentiment of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, left little doubt that America was embroiled in an epic clash with itself. Unleashing the rhetorical fire and provocation that had made him infamous, the politico railed against Bill and Hillary Clinton and his liberal Democratic foes, deeming them an enemy every bit as evil as the Stalinists who had forced America to the brink of destruction during the Cold War. Next, he laid out the terms of America’s new cold war and the high stakes of the impending presidential election. Friends, this election is about more than who gets what, he charged. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. Feeding off the crescendo of his own words, he ended with a flourish of prophetic urgency that brought an already energized crowd to its feet. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.¹

With a cascade of us-versus-them, good-versus-evil chatter, Buchanan encapsulated the spirit of his age. To be sure, the rift that Buchanan identified in 1992 was one with deeper traction in American society; it was not, in other words, merely an act of political opportunism during an election campaign. It was esteemed sociologist James Davison Hunter, in fact, who first introduced the term culture wars one year before Buchanan’s speech in order to explain the acute partitioning of the U.S. political map. Having investigated hot-button issues such as abortion, gun politics, church and state, and homosexuality, Hunter delineated a sharp divide between two seemingly innate and perpetually oppositional value systems: progressivism and orthodoxy. According to Hunter, the former—progressives—privileged rationalism and reoriented their faiths to modes of modern life, while the latter—conservatives—privileged objectivism and commitment to an external, definable, and transcendent authority. Cautious in his use of the terms, Hunter’s categories nevertheless stuck and were quickly politicized by the likes of Buchanan.²

However much Buchanan’s bluster welcomed and fostered exaggeration, as Hunter showed in his work—and as more recent scholars, such as Andrew Hartman, have shown in theirs—the culture war motif fairly and effectively captured the substantive fissures that emerged in the late twentieth century, and it spoke to the depth of division that demarcated American society on fundamentally contested conceptions not just of gender and sexuality but ultimately of national identity and purpose, individual responsibility and human nature. Indeed, as Hartman writes, the culture wars of the late twentieth century were not just about competing social values (as Hunter proved) but about clashing notions of truth itself, pitting a post-1960s moral relativism against an older, fundamentalist belief that asserted truth is universal, no matter the circumstances. In the culture wars moment of the late twentieth century, Americans reached a point like no other in their nation’s history, during which the very authenticity of their state of being and their understanding of their existential condition were being probed, questioned, and thrust into uncertainty.³

It goes without saying that the caustic spirit and uncertainties of Buchanan’s age did not dissipate as the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first; quite the opposite. Morally charged concerns that divide progressivism and orthodoxy, as well as debates over the nature of American identity and purpose, and the very nature of truth itself, continue to animate the American citizenry, splitting it into distinctive blocs. More than ever, politicians like the ones who first noticed the benefits of polarizing the American voting public for their own personal ends in the 1970s and 1980s continue to stoke the flames of animosity with their heated rhetoric and their framing of single-issue campaigns in momentous terms, as a fight for the very soul of a nation teetering on collapse. As I write this, with President Donald Trump in power, culture war politicking has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, with aggressive political posturing, pressing anxieties fed by a seemingly omnipotent and relentless mass media, and a widespread desperation to fix a broken nation a daily norm purposefully nurtured and prodded by the White House’s primary resident.⁴

While the culture war of the past generation remains a real and serious conflagration, with polarization an ongoing concern, stark political divisions of the kind promoted and imposed by politicians and the media do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age. Lost in the clamor of Buchanan’s day—as well as our own—are the more substantial evidences of a robust pluralism that sparked and continues to spark religious and political thought and action across pronounced divides. In his recent book, Confident Pluralism, legal theorist John Inazu acknowledges that at least some of our most important beliefs cannot be reconciled with one another. It cannot be the case, for example, that the act of abortion is both morally acceptable and morally intolerable. It cannot be the case that God exists and that God does not exist. The differences Hunter pointed out twenty-five years ago, in other words, are structurally embedded in American society, and they do matter, for everyone. Yet Inazu also asserts in normative fashion that these divisions do not need to be so destructive or paralyzing for this nation’s citizenry. American citizens, he charges, need to reclaim their nation’s founding creed of pluralism; embrace differences in beliefs, values, and identities without becoming mired in crass and unbending politicking; and, most importantly, reconstruct a robust civil society based on age-old constitutional principles of toleration over protest, humility over defensiveness, and persuasion over coercion. If overly hopeful in his assessment, Inazu nevertheless points to the potentials of encounter, engagement, and even exchange that still exist in the vast political terrain between the right-left, Republican-Democratic poles that this country’s politicians, pundits, preachers, and lobbyists have accentuated for political gain. Rapprochement as much as trench warfare is the natural order in the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-long American experiment, Inazu insists, and it is time that Americans re-internalize that fact.⁵

If Inazu’s is a prescriptive challenge to the culture warring that has plagued American society over the past few generations, scholars can and should engage in a descriptive challenge to that same condition. In their own, unintended way, political and religious historians have perpetuated the culture war motif during the past waves of scholarship, in large part by presuming the political discord that Buchanan and his cohort on the political right harped on in an effort to advance their populist revolution. This is not to say that historians have willingly appropriated the politically charged language of stark difference or sought to perpetuate the battles Buchanan helped instigate, but rather that they have tended to write about recent trajectories in U.S. faith and politics through the lens that Buchanan-styled politicos have provided the American public, that which sees the nation (and the world) as inevitably and inexorably combative and bloody terrains.

Consider the evolving history of American evangelicalism, for instance. During the past fifteen years, historians of evangelicalism have done much to correct previous scholarly misconceptions, which tended to portray the movement as a marginal political force prior to its purported shotgun wedding with Ronald Reagan in 1980. They have tracked evangelical political ambitions and impact back to the early days of the twentieth century; they have unpacked the complex economic and political circumstances at midcentury, in the time between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, which thrust evangelicals into the forefront of public debate over vital domestic and foreign policy concerns; and they have drastically expanded our knowledge of how, during the 1970s’ Age of Evangelicalism, they built on preexisting institutional structures of influence to seize control of the Republican Party and usher it into the post-1980 conservative epoch. Yet, in offering that corrective, historians of evangelicalism have also reinforced the notion that the history of America’s twentieth century—certainly its post-1945 years—can and should be presented as a tale of perpetual and seemingly inevitable struggle between two diametrically opposed classes of fundamentalists and modernists, right-wingers and left-wingers. Recent histories of liberal Protestants and Protestantism have added complexity to that paradigm by mapping out the presence and resilience of cosmopolitan and confidently pluralistic faiths in the late twentieth century, as well as documenting the emergence of the religious nones—spiritual but not religious American believers whose numbers have risen dramatically in recent years. These and other recent histories of non-Protestant religious actors have served to remind us that the American religious and political landscape is far more fluid and complex than any history of an ascending and ascendant right-wing evangelicalism can convey.⁶

Still, much of the history of modern American religion and politics continues to be written in a mode that assumes the dichotomies and accentuates the us-versus-them embattlements of the modern age. Considering the proliferation of first-wave scholarship on Trump and his steadfast evangelical followers, it is likely that the culture war motif will continue to be a dominant one for years to come, and rightly so considering the heat that the president has generated by playing to the worst fears of those across the entire political spectrum. Recent stellar books examining the religious politics of race and gender in the Trump era are but one sign that the embattlements of today are bitter and real and in need of further attention from historians who can contextualize the most recent dispensation of culture-warring politics in the longue durée.⁷

While fully recognizing the stark reality of our ongoing culture wars, and the historians’ imperative to parse out the issues, interests, values, and collective imaginations that divide the nation, this volume seeks to encourage historians also to pursue histories of modern U.S. religion and politics in ways that stretch our narratives and analysis beyond overly static tropes. As a whole, this book’s authors seek to write their histories with a sharp eye for contingencies and temporalities, unintended consequences and counternarratives left unaccounted for and stuck in between the rigid right-left, conservative-liberal binaries that still organize our texts. As a group they agree that political categories are fluid and do not always line up neatly with culture war concerns of the kind highlighted by Pat Buchanan and James Davison Hunter, and that enduring partisan divides can blind us to more complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm.

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars provides room for these types of fresh analyses in four ways. First, and most basically where methodology is concerned, it attempts to work beyond—indeed, to bridge—partisan divides within the field of U.S. history, for instance those that tend to separate the scholarship of religious and political historians. The past twenty-year cycle of religious history has generated much energy and excitement and opened up a vast array of new approaches to measuring the sacred (and the secular) in modern American life. Whether consciously or not, scholars of religion have answered—decisively—Jon Butler’s 2004 clarion call for them to rescue it from the scholarly margins and weave it into the mainstream narratives of U.S. history. Yet many of the insights and interventions of recent religious historiography have gone unnoticed by political historians, whose gazes have typically fallen on matters in Washington or at the Pentagon and the inner workings of the state at home and abroad. This is unfortunate, as it is difficult to identify a subset of modern U.S. history that has been more animated and important in the past twenty years than political history. Whether through grassroots studies of metropolitan and regional politics, attention to political lobbying and inner-beltway trends, or broader surveys of U.S. politics and political culture in international contexts, political historians of every stripe and subfield have reconceptualized modern American history as a whole. The outgrowth of a conference that invited prominent political and religious historians to step out of their genres to dialogue with one another, this volume represents their written attempts to offer fresh illustration drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods; compare notes on how best to connect faith and politics in unchartered analytical terrain; and help each other better tell the story not just of twentieth-century religion and politics, but of twentieth-century America itself.⁸

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars, secondly, represents a quest by these historians to look beyond the usual suspects (be they Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell or Edith Schaeffer, Phyllis Schlafly, and Beverly LaHaye) who populate (and dominate) culture war narratives to reveal the life stories and unheralded political careers of other vital historical actors. Joining the culture warriors as key actors in America’s track record of faith-based political mobilization, in this regard, are syndicalists, social gospellers, peacekeepers, humanitarians, conservationists, and a majority of hesitant Americans in the middle who have practiced a quieter political spirit of reform over the past century and labored for religious pluralism as well as their own notions of truth and custodial responsibilities in modern society. These include labor activists—some radical, others cautious—who, as Janine Giordano Drake recounts, navigated the tenuous labor politics of the early twentieth century by espousing a social gospel that propped up the interests of workers without negating the need for private Christian devotion. They include communalists and agrarian dissenters in the 1930s who, as Joseph Kip Kosek shows, acted out of deeply religious principles and fashioned anticapitalist doctrines that assumed both conservative and liberal intentions by championing an economy anchored in the land and a society organized around decentralized communities of independent producers. As Josef Sorett details, the ranks of a wider and more diverse body of religious-minded political activists also include Black intellectuals who, through their support of and work with Phylon, the academic periodical established by W. E. B. Du Bois at midcentury, nurtured a civil rights awareness and commitment to democratic justice that bridged the social sciences and popular culture, academy and grassroots, and domestic and global purviews, and sought racial and economic reform through reliance on a liberal, pluralistic, internationalist Protestant confidence. And these ranks also encompass the likes of Mormon conservationists, who, as Patrick Mason explains, applied a theology of dominion passed down to them by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to embrace the fulness of the earth in a way that espoused environmental care without downplaying or negating an anthropomorphic emphasis on human privilege and conservative social and economic values. To be sure, there are many other spirits of reform that politically animated American religious citizens and communities, including those whose faith traditions functioned well beyond the parameters of Mormonism and Christianity, but in recovering at least a handful of these largely untold stories, these historians encourage us to broaden the canopy of inclusion when trying to render a more comprehensive record of modern American faith and politics in action.

This volume attempts to look beyond reified culture war binaries and offer fresh analysis in a third way: by revealing other polarities of tension running through American religious and political life and, in particular, coursing through charged political debates over church, state, and civil society as well as the faith-based political activism of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all charted in the second and third sections of this book. As a whole, the chapters in these sections emphasize that our reading of religion and politics in the twentieth-century past must make room for the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that dictated the ways average citizens approached their immediate environments with a desire to reconstruct them. As Michelle Nickerson, Josef Sorett, and Kathleen Cummings illustrate, there is much yet to learn about the way in which religious individuals and groups situate themselves simultaneously in multiple identities and align themselves with sometimes contradictory-sounding ideologies and spots on the culture wars spectrum. Catholic radical and/or radical Catholic? Black conservative and/ or Black power? Liberal and/or neoliberal? These and other related queries highlight the complex terrains on which religious and political actors grappled with competing claims on them: between patriotism, for instance, and conscientious objection; between the desire to uplift Black Christianity on its own terms and the urge to assimilate it in an imagined Cold War liberal order. And, as the historians herein show, that Cold War liberal order was hardly as unifying or unified as its champions liked to purport. Liberal Protestantism itself, one of the generative forces of the so-called liberal consensus, was highly fragmented at this time, its ecclesiology and churchliness defined very differently by its Black and white constituents, and its internal debates and contestations morally charged and complex, and often painfully endured. All this suggest that historians need to be prepared to measure a vast range of personal interests and allegiances when accounting for the religious and political mobilization of citizens in the Cold War moment.

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars seeks to move current historiographical conversations forward in yet a fourth way, by underscoring the contingencies, ironies, and surprising commitments and outcomes at the heart of American religion and politics’s recent past. As Wendy Wall, Kathleen Cummings, and other contributors to this volume point out, for instance, Jews, Protestants, and Catholics may have banded together in appreciation of a broad-minded civil religion during the 1950s and 1960s, then political liberalism or conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s—an age of fracture, as historian Daniel Rodgers puts it—but they often did so for different reasons, and not always (hardly ever, perhaps) in unison. It is imperative, therefore, that historians look past rigid culture war binaries of the kind Buchanan exaggerated to appreciate the immediate circumstances and available choices that informed these religious and political actors as they navigated knotty political terrains. The scholars in this volume take that command seriously.⁹

On that same score, the historians at work in these pages also remind us that bipartisanship has characterized U.S. politics as much as the rigid polarization with which we are more familiar—even though such bipartisanship has also often quickly (more quickly than ever in recent decades) given way to rancorous partisan maneuvering. Andrew Preston’s study of liberal and conservative activism on behalf of international human rights reinforces this. In U.S. diplomatic history, he emphasizes, religious liberty—now a particularly hot flash-point issue for Protestant and Catholic conservatives—has a rich, bipartisan, and complicated tradition that both precedes and transcends the recent culture wars. A longer historical view of this issue shows that it was the exclusive preserve of neither conservatives or liberals, Democrats or Republicans, and that it has deep roots within a remarkably broad range of American Protestant internationalist thought.

Other authors in this volume extend this type of multivalent analysis in other directions. While Mark Brilliant unearths both the progressive and populist roots of the modern school-voucher system (a system often equated with religious conservative impulses), Matthew Sutton shows how concerns over national security, spying, and the involvement of missionaries in both arenas was cause for concern among Protestant doves and hawks—progressives and evangelicals—alike in the 1970s, a decade that saw the government’s use of religious agents in foreign surveillance operations come under legal attack. At the same time, during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, coalition and consensus building across partisan lines also stalled at key junctures and, amid the rise of the Reagan revolution, transformed religious actors into different (somewhat unpredictably) political agents. A core constituency of civil rights, Democratic, liberal activism during the 1950s and 1960s, many Latinos, for instance, found themselves shifting course after the 1960s. Kate Bowler and Benjamin Francis-Fallon map the complex religious, economic, and political dynamics that brought them into the Republican fold (with Richard Nixon’s Latino strategy paving the way and Latino megachurch pastors following the lead). With Pat Buchanan and his 1992 culture wars speech serving as a launch for his chapter, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, meanwhile, notes the role that environmentalism (and anti-environmentalism) played in animating the religious right. As witnessed in the evolving political life of Richard John Neuhaus, while many conservative Christians initially voiced sympathy for a conservationist ethic, by the 1980s they not only opposed an environmental movement feared to have been radicalized by the left, but also demonized it as the epitome of America’s secular drift. The irony, here, is that in dismissing environmentalists in such totalizing fashion, Neuhaus overlooked the anxieties he shared with them—about individualism and liberal humanism, for instance, and the loss of authenticity and authority in American life.

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars draws to its conclusion in the most appropriate way with a chapter by James Kloppenberg. In his study of progressive politics and religious faith through the ages and up to the papacy of Pope Francis and presidency of Barack Obama (with concluding thoughts on the current presidency), Kloppenberg brilliantly unpacks the range of theological and intellectual impulses that have consistently enlivened consoling, conciliatory, and reformist movements both on the moderate political left and within American Catholicism. As he convincingly shows, these strands of progressive Christian faith run deep in history, and within the Catholic Church they have flourished throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the post-Vatican II period. If one wants to better understand Obama and his politics, Kloppenberg asserts, we would do well to appreciate his instruction in and experience with Catholic social teachings and embrace of a broader social gospel of human uplift and reform. Yet Kloppenberg’s chapter also reminds us that the progressive mindset, disposition, and set of sympathies within Christendom—a function of caritas, the commitment to charity and love of humankind—has, since the very beginning of Christianity and most acutely since the Reformation, been countered and contested by those whose steadfast commitment to logos, an unwavering belief in the unassailability of divine authority and traditional Christian dogma, have made them resistant to any sign of humanism or secular drift. So it is, Kloppenberg writes, that recurrent battles over theology, metaphysics, ethics, and political theory both within and beyond church walls have constituted a continuing struggle to understand and live up to the ideals of what we now call the Judeo-Christian tradition. The history of democracy itself, he adds, "is a series of culture wars between the living spirit of caritas and its degradation and deformation into absolute dogmas of various kinds. Those who believe that such deeply rooted culture wars can end, he concludes, are trapped in wishful thinking; such crosscutting pressures have always been present in all religious traditions, and their persistence and the intensity with which they divide communities of faith is a perennial feature of our history unlikely to end any time soon." A sobering thought, and one that Kloppenberg offers with sad acknowledgment that in our current political state, such crosscutting pressures and warring will not simply persist but likely continue to escalate, with tragic outcomes for American faith and democracy. Only a renewed embrace of caritas and its core virtues by citizens of all religious (and nonreligious) persuasion, he suggests, will quell the storm.

By tracing the long history of battle within and beyond church circles, Kloppenberg thus highlights the tantalizingly ambiguous title of this volume. As underscored throughout this brief introduction, the authors represented here are hardly trapped in wishful thinking that the culture wars can or will go away; nor do they (other than Kloppenberg, that is) offer any advice as to how our society might escape its current plight. Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars is, rather, an attempt to reveal, map out, and account for the dynamic pluralism of religious belief, practice, and politics that has long operated beyond and in between the rigid binaries we typically associate with our current moment. To be sure, the essays included here are but a snapshot of the full diversity and dynamism of faith and politics in modern America; a more thorough accounting needs to include the beliefs, practices, and politics of people whose faith commitments are not so heavily tethered to Western Christianity and whose religious identities are shaped by membership in other global faith communities, be it Islam or Buddhism, for instance. Still, the hope is that this volume will encourage readers to think anew about the complexities and contingencies of modern U.S. religion and politics and shine fresh light on oft-forgotten or overlooked issues, interests, and convictions that have driven people of faith to action in a lively and combative public sphere. If there is a prescriptive aim to this volume, it is simply to show that an escape from today’s heated moral combat, if any exists, will be realized only after scholars and citizens grapple with the full range of faith’s hold on this country.

Notes

1. Pat Buchanan, Address to the Republican National Convention, August 17, 1992, available at http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture-war-speech-speech-text/, last accessed February 22, 2017.

2. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

3. Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

4. Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

5. John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

6. On the evangelical age and long history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism, see key representative works such as Steven Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the finer theological and political divisions within evangelicalism, see, for instance, Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Representations of the new history of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism include Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) and After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

7. See, for instance, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020); Gerardo Marti, American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); and Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020).

8. Jon Butler, Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History, Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004): 1357–1378.

9. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).

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