Janine Giordano Drake

The Gospel of Church (eBook, PDF)

How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. September 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780197614310
• Artikelnr.: 68699003

Autorenporträt

Janine Giordano Drake is Clinical Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University and the History Liaison to the Advance College Project. She is co-editor of The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class.

Inhaltsangabe

* 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