The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .”

It didn’t hurt that these messages were being reinforced by the best-selling book of the seventies, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. Politically, end-times prophecy tends to work against social and political movements, reformist or revolutionary. What’s the point of transforming the world if God is going to bring the curtain down on the whole sorry human enterprise? So most of the Jesus Freaks—and the musicians they listened to—focused on saving as many souls as they could before the Rapture.

Stephens: By concentrating on artists who were crossover, or more mainstream performers—like Al Green, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin—you extend what most people might think of as Christian music or Christian rock. I wonder if you might say something about the tensions that existed between those who reached a larger, mainstream market and those who were fairly fixed within the Christian genre.

Stowe: This tension was one of the most intriguing aspects of the Christian pop phenomenon. On the one hand, the Jesus Movement tried to cast a wide net and welcome as diverse a following as possible. On the other hand, its theology was quite orthodox. There was a deep suspicion of alternate spiritualities of the kind that were floating around pop music especially after the Beatles went off to the Maharishi’s ashram at Rishikesh. Many of the decade’s most successful artists, whose music invoked religious and Christian themes—the ones you’ve mentioned, but also Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, even Johnny Cash—weren’t embraced by the Jesus Movement. Jesus freaks pretty much ignored them. From a broader historical perspective, though, it was important to make sense of their relation to the baby boom evangelicals who were cutting their spiritual teeth in those years.

Stephens: Could you describe how you think Christian rock has changed since its early days in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Stowe: It’s become both much more commercially slick and much more musically diverse. In the early days, Christian rock was mostly folk-rock, or just plain folk. Even hard rock was a bit of a stretch. Now one can find every genre of pop music represented in CCM: hardcore, hip-hop, punk, Goth, Norwegian death metal. CCM is now a very large and profitable market genre—outselling jazz and classical combined—so the promotion and production value of the music has gone way up. It’s theology tends to be much more eclectic as well. As I argued in the New York Times last spring, the innocently promiscuous mixing of Christian language in “secular” music doesn’t happen as it did during the early years of Christian rock; the secular/sacred divide seems to have hardened. Although, as is always the case when generalizing about a huge diverse culture form like popular music, important exceptions can be found.

Stephens: What projects are you currently working on?

Stowe: A short book on the varied forms Psalm 137 has taken in North America. That’s the one that begins, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I call it American’s longest-running protest song. Its history stretches from the earliest Pilgrim psalters through adaptation to the American Revolution, abolitionist movement, Harlem Renaissance, civil rights movement, and the widely covered reggae version, “Rivers of Babylon.” It’s a good lens for thinking about the varied social and political uses to which a thirteen-verse Hebrew poem can be put, and the endless inventiveness of music to wrap itself around ideology.

Dochuk Wins Dunning Prize

Paul Harvey

Late breaking news -- I heard *rumor* at the Southern Hist. Association meeting that our friend Darren Dochuk had won yet another award for his book From Bible Belt to Sunbelt -- and remember we did an extensive interview with the author here and here.

Rumor was right: Darren has been awarded the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, named every other year for "the best book on any subject pertaining to the history of the United States." Wow!

Previous winners make a list of "hall of famers" for recent historians -- including Daniel Usner, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Nick Salvatore, Peggy Pascoe, and others. You historians out there will recognize that as an all-star lineup for real.

Between the Dunning Prize and our contributor Deg winning the C. Vann Woodward award from the SHA, it's been a good week for contributors and friends of the blog. I was fortunate to get to hang out with Deg a bit at the SHA (happily for him, while watching UGA beat Florida), and hope to do the same soon with Darren at the AHA in January. Congratulations to all! I might mention that Dochuk was a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso in 2006--07, following an august lineup of historians who made good use of the same postdoc, including John McGreevy, John Fea, and Mike Utzinger. Of course, I held the fellowship 1993-95, but enough time has passed that the ignominy caused by my time there has passed, and Fea, Dochuk, Utzinger, and others have restored honor to the program.

David D. Hall on Why I Became a Historian

[Cross-posted from the HS blog]

Randall Stephens

I first read David D. Hall's work when I was a grad student at the University of Florida. David Hackett taught a wonderful course on Religion and American Culture, which familiarized students with the big themes

in religious history.

Hall's study of the religious world of 17th-century American Puritans challenged my uniformed ideas of what it meant to be a "puritan." His writing on "lived religion," especially intrigued me. He described it as "a shorthand phrase that has long been current in the French tradition of the sociology of religion (la religion veçue) but is relatively novel in the American context." It was "rooted less in sociology than in cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history that have come to the fore in recent years." It involved "the study of 'daily life,' especially among Protestant laity [and a] reflection on 'practice' as the center or focus of the Christian life." (Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice [Princeton University Press, 1997], vii.)

Hall has edited and authored a number of books and articles on American religious history, including: The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Omohundro Institute, 1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990); Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and, most recently, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011).

Hall has had a major impact on the fields of religious history and religious studies in recent decades. As such, he's a great fit for the new HS blog series "Why I Became a Historian." I caught up with him last week at the American religious history group meeting at Boston University. In the video embedded here I ask Hall why he was drawn to history and he responds by describing his early interest in the past, his reading of history at a young age, and his later college and grad school pursuits.

Hall's comments make me wonder if most historians had an early affinity for history through family, location, and a curiosity about all those things that had come before us.

Retribution v. Reform in American Justice: Interview with Jennifer Graber at Religion Dispatches

Paul Harvey

Shortly after the publication of Jennifer Graber's outstanding work The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press), we blogged about it here, and we've also blogged about Jennifer's outstanding recent article in Church History, drawn from her next project about the meanings of war, violence, and religion in the nineteenth-century Indian wars (if you think The Furnace of Affliction is depressing, try reading the article, where the violence of the 19th-century frontier wars comes out in illuminatingly dark detail). The Historical Society blog also has interviewed Graber, posted here back last March. Here is Randall's introduction to the book and interview, which hits at some of the main themes of interest:

"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes, "it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department ofreligious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s

Religion Dispatches has just posted an interview with Jen about The Furnace of Affliction, which makes for great reading. So read it -- here. Here's a little excerpt, which shows how the work upsets all manner of preconceived notions and doesn't make easy or comfortable reading for anybody:

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?

There are a couple issues I had to tackle head-on. Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed the increasingly retributive spirit of this country’s prisons. It was imperative to show that while there have always been debates about reformation and retribution, the current environment is an historical anomaly.

For people who had any knowledge of prison history, I wanted to deal with some false notions about Quakers and Calvinists. Some scholars have posited accounts of the early prisons in which kind-hearted Quakers were just lovely to prisoners while bloodthirsty Calvinists wanted inmates to suffer deeply for their crimes. This simply is not the case.

Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and other interested religious reformers shared in a fairly unified approach to prisons and prisoners. They wanted reformative prisons. They wanted inmates to be led through a series of experiences that prompted their redemption. They all disavowed torture and abuse. Really, their only disagreements were about corporal punishment, namely whipping. Some Protestant reformers affirmed the limited use of whipping. But even Quakers who disavowed whipping found other ways to enact discipline on the body, such as gagging. . .

Continue reading here.

End-of-Summer Beach Read for Religious Historians

by Carol Faulkner

Heaven’s Bride: An End-of-Summer Beach Read for Religious Historians (and everyone else) -- except during the hurricane please don't read it at the beach per se.

I just finished Leigh Eric Schmidt’s thoroughly enjoyable Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr and Madwoman. For more about the book Randall posted about the work last year, including an interview with the author here.

In addition to being a great read, Schmidt offers a useful reminder that evangelicalism is only one part of the religious history of America. Though Anthony Comstock, the inspiration behind federal and state laws suppressing vice, and his evangelical allies presented an almost unstoppable force in the late 19^th-century, Craddock associated with a loosely organized group of transatlantic secularists, religious liberals, Quakers, spiritualists, occultists, and yogis, who rejected evangelical domination of American life."

A brief synopsis: Schmidt views Craddock as a leading example of a time when sexual expression and American religion did not necessarily clash. Craddock and her associates advocated more liberated, pleasurable sex in monogamous heterosexual relationships, preferably marriage. Despite little or no direct experience with intercourse, Craddock set up shop as a pre-marital and marriage counselor, advising husbands how to please their wives (like Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes, she separated sex and procreation, advocating a longer sex act with no male ejaculation) and instructing wives how to please their husbands (move their hips during intercourse). Craddock viewed the sex act as a form of worship, an experience of the divine on earth. In her physical and emotional marriage to a spirit husband, she practiced what she preached. Unsurprisingly, Craddock’s mother placed her in an institution. Comstock charged her with obscenity.

Contextualizing Craddock’s personal religious journey “from Methodist holiness to Unitarian individuality right on through spiritualist séances and South Asian traditions,” Schmidt examines the notices for religious services in the Chicago Tribune. In the 1870s, the announcements were predictably Protestant, calling Chicagoans to services at Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Methodist churches. By 1900, as Schmidt observes, “all hell was breaking loose,” with announcements for Jewish, Spiritualist, Christian Scientist, Ethical Culture, and Hindu services. Craddock advertised her own combination of spiritual and sexual education at her Church of Yoga with a Bible talk titled “Man and Woman as They Were, as They Are, as They ought to Be.”

One aspect of Ida Craddock’s thought naturally caught my attention: she viewed Quaker minister and pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott as a foremother, quoting her famous line “Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth” in her death match with Anthony Comstock. This intellectual connection is not as farfetched as it seems. Craddock attended Friends Central School in Philadelphia, founded in part by Mott’s Cherry Street Meeting. Craddock also served as secretary for the American Secular Union, an offshoot of the Free Religious Association, an organization established in 1867. Before her death, Mott traveled to Boston regularly to attend meetings. In 1900, the Free Religious Association memorialized Mott, along with Roger Williams, Hindu reformers Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Octavius Brooks Frothingham , as “Prophets of Liberalism.”

Schmidt expands our understanding of this heady religious period through the life of the fascinating Ida Craddock. In her work with the American Secular Union, Craddock urged members to ally with “Free religionists, Quakers, Progressive Jews and Liberal Christians” against religious intolerance. Though she failed in her efforts to rally these groups, it is important to note that Comstock also viewed them as linked in their committed defense of the rights of accused pornographers, sexologists, and free lovers. Under the guise of religion, he argued, liberal Protestants were “champions of obscenity.”

On Jews and Black Baseball: An Interview With Rebecca Alpert

Art Remillard
I can't say enough good things about Rebecca Alpert's new book, Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (OUP, 2011).  I'll be reviewing it soon for a local radio program.  You can read Professor Alpert's thoughts on the book over at Religion Dispatches, along with an interview.  And then there's my conversation with her below.  Enjoy!

-----------------------------  

AR: Please begin by giving us some background on this project, and particularly how this is both a continuation of your previous scholarship and a new direction.

RA: I have been interested in twentieth century American Jewish history I wrote my dissertation on American reform rabbis from that era many decades ago. Later in my career I became interested in the intersection of sport and religion, and began to write about Jews and baseball. Writing about racial identity and secular Jewish concerns are the newest parts of the puzzle, and these interests all coalesced around I began to discover about the role Jews played in black baseball.

AR: Your book is as much about race and religion as it is about baseball. Would you discuss how you balanced writing about the game and addressing these broader issues?

RA: An historian friend who read the manuscript in draft complained that there was too little baseball in it. Although I do enjoy the game, I was really interested in how Jews related to the world of black baseball mostly from the perspectives of business and entertainment, so I probably erred on the side of focusing on broader issues.

AR: With a topic like this, I imagine that it was difficult locating sources. Was this the case? And could you talk generally about your experiences in the archives and sorting through newspapers?

RA: I began with secondary materials that would mention the tensions between black and Jewish Negro League owners and the role of the communist sportswriters but didn’t go into detail. I was lucky to meet Rabbi Curtis Caldwell who introduced me to the Belleville Grays, the black Jewish team run by his community. From there, I began to read the African American press. Access to digitized versions of Black Historical Newspapers (rather than the dizzying and eye straining microfilm versions) through my university library made all the difference in the world in terms of being able to do this project. I relied heavily on the observations of the many fine newspapermen in the black press who were writing social commentary on the sports pages. Archives that I consulted proved spottier, but there were gems tucked away in many places; not uncommon in archival research. I also cannot overstate the kindness (and curiosity) of the sundry librarians and archivists who came to my aid, either via email or in person.

AR: Complimenting your impressive assortment of primary sources are your interviews with former Negro League players. How do you feel your book benefited from these interviews? Do you have advice for anyone planning to do interviews for their own projects?

RA: While I loved talking to many of the former players (and reading the oral histories other researchers compiled), I found that the players were mostly reluctant to talk about the Jewish owners I was interested in. There are many possible reasons for that reluctance, but I didn’t really want to speculate about that.

As far as advice is concerned, the website of the Oral History Association is very useful in getting started. It’s really important to do your homework--know as much as you can about the person you want to talk to before contacting them. That will help you craft interesting questions which make good answers possible.

AR: You talk extensively about the Jewish entrepreneurs of black baseball, such as Ed Gottlieb, Syd Pollock, and Abe Saperstein. I felt like their motivations were difficult to pigeonhole. Sometimes they seemed to have noble intentions. Other times, profit won the day. Is this accurate? And what conclusions did you reach about the motives of these businessmen of black baseball?

RA: I think that when good intentions and profit were in sync the entrepreneurs were quite noble. But I also tried hard not to impose the ideas about race and racism that we hold today on them anachronistically.

AR: In contrast, it seemed like the Jewish communists writing for The Daily Worker were much more ideologically driven. That is, they drew from both their Jewish and political rhetorical toolboxes to devise arguments favoring baseball’s integration. Is this accurate? And were these writers coming to the conversation from an entirely different place than the businessmen? Or did they share some common ground?

RA: The communists and the businessmen lived in different worlds. I like to think that it was the communists who were expressing Jewish values rather than the businessmen, but both groups’ behaviors were the product of the experience of second generation immigrants. They just expressed different dimensions of that social situation.

AR: I have always admired Hank Greenberg, but do now even more after reading about his relationship with Jackie Robinson, which began after a collision in 1947. Did you gain a deeper appreciation of any particular person? Similarly, was there anyone who you found to be utterly dislikable?

RA: In the course of this work I became fascinated by the life and career of Buster Haywood, who seemed to crop up in all the stories I was telling. He played both for the Belleville Grays (the team of Hebrew Israelites) and the Indianapolis Clowns (owned by Syd Pollock) and was friends with Jackie Robinson. I felt like he accompanied me through the research and writing process, and I ended up writing a separate article about him. Through Buster Haywood I was able to gain some perspective on the difficulties and joys in the life of an ordinary African American player in the era of segregation.

Although the Jewish entrepreneurs often behaved in ways I didn’t always appreciate, I actually found them rather sympathetic characters. I think it’s important not to demonize (or idolize) people you’re writing about.

AR: If I had a time travel machine, I’d go back to 1926 and watch the game between the “Hebrew All-Star Nine” and the Ku Klux Klan that you mention. Are there any games that you wished you could have witnessed too?

RA: I would love to have been at an East-West All-Star game. These games took place in Chicago each summer from the 1930s through the 1950s and featured all of the outstanding Negro League players that I came to admire as I was doing this research. I would have appreciated seeing them in action and also being among the fans who gave them the accolades they deserved.

AR: What do you hope that general readers (i.e., John and Jane Q. Sports Fan) will take away from this book? Likewise, what should American religious historians take from your book?

RA: I hope general readers appreciate the complex role Jews played in segregated baseball. I hope American religious historians see the value of using baseball as a way to understand the intertwining of race and religion in twentieth century America.

Paperback Writers: Just Out in Paper For Your Courses (With One Glaring Exception)

Paul Harvey

Some of our favorite books of the last couple of years which we've featured here at RiAH are coming out in paper now, just in time for use in your school year courses (not yet true of my newest Through the Storm, but your students will treasure the volume so much that they won't mind buying it in hard cover).

First, and Matt Sutton has already covered this, Steven Miller's outstanding biography/analysis Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South is out in paper. Any book liked this much by both Ross Douthat and Randall Stephens is sure to have wide appeal -- that's like appealing to John McCain and Andy Warhol fans at the same time. Steven's book is perfect for modern U.S. history courses, expertly covering issues in religious, social, and political history all at once, and engaging students with a figure that they might assume they know well, but will know much better after reading the book.

Next, Kip Kosek's award-winning Acts of Conscience: Christian

Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is just out in paper with Columbia Univ. Press. It's been a while since we've discussed the book here, so let me just call you back to my lengthy post/discussion of the book here, right when it first came out. A brief excerpt from that previous post:

The savviest of the individuals in this book understood that a principle could become a spectacle, and indeed that it must become a spectacle if it was to draw sufficient public attention to make a difference. It was all well and good to tie in nonviolence with challenges to “capitalism, imperialism, racism, and war”; it was another, and something more effective to make Christian nonviolence a complex strategy as well as a religious conviction.” (50) Long before the kinds of people covered in recent texts, the radicals in this book understood race in global rather than national terms, and understood racial violence as a sub-species of the problem of violence more generally. The racial problem was, for them, “contiguous with the problem of violence.”

Just one more to mention, and this one isn't quite "newly" in paper, but recent enough: Chris Beneke's Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism, a work that made me rethink the entire periodization and conceptualization of pluralism. In "Beyond Toleration, and Beyond Those Yellowed Classroom Notes," I reflected at length on Chris's book and its challenge to my presentation of this material in the classroom.

And finally, I want to yell a little bit at one of my normally favorite presses, Harvard University Press, which has done such a great job with Randall Stephens's The Fire Spreads and Matt Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, both handsomely done up in paperback, very classroom-usable form. So, to Harvard Press, what is UP with no paperback classroom-usable volume of Emma Anderson's magnificently moving book The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Story of a Colonial Native Convert. Shortly after its publication I published an extensive interview with the author, and I expected that the book could become a classroom staple of colonial history. But as long as it's in hardcover at $51, that is not likely to happen. Please, Harvard Press, set the book free -- put it out in paper! Allez! Allez!

The Gospel of the Working Class: Gellman/Roll Interview, Part III

By Heath Carter

The final installment of my interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll: _________________________

HC: What factors best explain why some were attracted to this radical gospel and others were not? Are there underlying unities within the diverse spectrum of persons that populate your narrative?

EG: Embracing this radical gospel was not the easy path. It meant risking your livelihood and defying the dominant cultural norms of Jim Crow, not to mention class and gender assumptions about who had the right to lead and wield power in America. Many people who embraced this gospel did so during the 1930s when deprivation had become so widespread that people had the ability, as a result of dire circumstances, to radically reorient their cultural identity. Thus, working people and poor people, who often were cast out or dismissed by liberals and middle-class professionals, often listened to this radical gospel. But many people in the working class also listened to Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and hundreds of other right-wing religious preachers of their day, because their explanations of the injustice in the world had simple solutions. Embracing fascist ideas, including the hatred of other races, was easier than the alternative of interracial and militant organizing against the American mainstream. Meanwhile, others embraced what Whitfield denounced as “sky pilot” and “pie-in-the-sky” type preachers who did not orient them for action but provided them with personal and emotional styles of worship.

JR: One aspect of the research that really stood out was the power both Whitfield and Williams possessed as speakers, the way that the Spirit seemed to move through the words they spoke, at least in the sense that they moved hearts and minds in their direction. They each had a remarkable ability to convince those who heard them preach, whether the hearer was a coal miner, a sharecropper, a factory worker, or a sympathetic liberal. They also did well with those who opposed them, if they could get in earshot. Williams converted a number of Ku Klux Klan members to work alongside blacks, while Whitfield commonly moved secular or nationalist African Americans to his side. The power of their speech, when delivered in person, also impressed a range of more well known people, including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Ellison, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Some were leery of this ability and likened it to demagoguery, perhaps not without cause. Williams used his oratorical skills to propel the STFU membership to vote to join the CIO against the wishes of some union leaders. Whitfield, on the other hand, could inspire rank-and-file union members to take wildcat action during the war despite the no-strike directives handed down by his bosses in the CIO.

Williams even had this effect on historians who met him in the 1960s. Donald Grubbs, for example, interviewed him in the course of the research that would become his book on the STFU and the New Deal. He was not sure there was any point, since he considered Williams to be an unreliable self-server (a view he got from talking to H. L. Mitchell, the STFU leader, who fell out with Williams in the late 1930s). But during the course of the interview Williams worked his magic on Grubbs, who left with no doubt about the preacher’s religious conviction. Moreover, he came away certain that Williams was far more important than he had ever given him credit for and that historians had to take his view of the southern labor movement seriously if they were to understand it properly.

Sadly no recordings exist of Whitfield and Williams preaching in their prime, so we can’t really know what they sounded like in full flood. There is a recording of Williams talking to civil rights activists in the 1960s, and one can get a sense of the power that the then aged preacher must have had in his heyday.

Both were such impressive writers and speakers that we wanted the book to provide space for each to speak, or at least for the reader to get a good sense of their voices in the pulpit. We decided to do this with two interchapters that each delivers a sermon, one by Williams and one by Whitfield, with as little interjection from us as possible. I think they work really well in the course of the narrative, because they break our biographical story and give the reader direct contact with extended texts as delivered by each preacher, hopefully with some feeling for the historical scene, of what it might have been like to be there. We wanted the reader to have the opportunity to hear the working class gospel straight from its two greatest evangelists.

HC: Your story is centered geographically in the South but also ventures out to Detroit, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. To what extent is this a southern story versus a national one? Are there elements of it that you take to be more broadly representative?

JR: We’ve framed the story as one of “southern prophets” taking their message into New Deal America. Whitfield and Williams both argued that the nation’s problems originated in the South and had to be addressed there before the US itself could be saved. So, it is both a southern story and a national one. The two preachers came to this political view in part because of their religious training. Williams and his wife Joyce began their careers as Presbyterians who felt called to take the gospel into hostile terrain, to serve as missionaries in their native South. In fact Joyce had studied to be a missionary at Bethel College in Tennessee, where she first met Claude. Whitfield, on the other hand, entered the ministry because of his experience as a student at Okolona Industrial School in Mississippi. Wallace Battle, the leader of the school, trained his students in a spirit of civic service, which bid them to use their privileges as educated southern blacks to lead their families and neighbors to better lives. Whitfield came away from this with a strong sense that God intended for him to serve as a Moses for his people. Whitfield followed this charge when he moved with his family to Arkansas and then to the new lands opening up in Missouri in the early 1920s. There he melded his spirit of service with religious leadership in the Garvey movement. When both Whitfield and Williams joined together to take their gospel to the nation at large, they were both acting in a way consistent with the sense of calling that had brought each of them into the ministry in the first place.

EG: Great question. This story fits with the historiography of many scholars of the twentieth century who make cogent arguments that the South has a huge influence on the rest of America. Also, our book confirms that this era was one of migration from rural enclaves to urban ones. But I would hope our narrative complicates both of those ideas. The workers in this story seem to migrate in circles rather than from North to South, from rural to urban. And while rural cultural traits brought by workers into urban areas help explain why the radical gospel of Williams and Whitfield, based on rural experiences, often succeeded in binding workers together, urban influences – especially CIO locals, radical political parties, and black-led protest groups like the National Negro Congress – fostered new ideas about protest politics. So the literal and ideological movement of urban/rural and North/South cross-pollinated in the 1930s and 1940s more than I had expected.

HC: In your conclusion you say that “the pathogenic, divisive aspects of American life that Williams and Whitefield fought against, at great odds and with terrible risks, are still around us: inequality, poverty, and the reactionary interpretation of evangelical Christianity.” In your assessment, what are the legacies of the radical religious organizing tradition you describe? To what extent is it still alive today?

EG: One reason we wrote the book is to highlight the historic, progressive nature of Americans who had a strong religious faith. This provides a usable past to build upon for our present era when so many Americans, especially in liberal circles, ignore or condemn religious people, especially evangelical Christians, as an inherently conservative and ignorant group whose faith distracts from issues like growing economic inequality. Moreover, middle-class Americans have mocked them for holding irrational beliefs drawn from the Bible. But, drawing on this book’s protagonists as historical examples, we sometimes need pure faith to break through the hegemony of the present, of what appears as the rational status quo. Williams and Whitfield would have made the devoutly religious, whatever their political persuasion, their first priority by attempting to reorient their religious commitment to the radical gospel as their historical inheritance. This gospel, they believed, had the ideological power to break down divisions among the poor and organize them into an aggressive force in American life to expand American democracy and diminish racism, sexism, and especially economic exploitation.

JR: In the sense of explicit legacies, there isn’t much left of what Whitfield and Williams worked on in their lives. A common reaction among historians and other people we talk to about this story is surprise, perhaps mild shock, because most people have never heard about them before. That erasure was the result of several factors, including the Red Scare, but most importantly the surging power of conservative Christians in the last forty years or so. From the perspective of events in the early 1940s, however, it probably would have seemed a surprise that things have come down has they have. Take for example J. Frank Norris, one of the PIAR’s great foes in wartime Detroit. After the riot in the city in 1943, Williams effectively tarred Norris as a supporter of racial division, even violence, as the enemy of working Americans, and more generally as preacher disloyal to the nation in the fight against fascism. At the time it seemed like Williams and the PIAR might win that battle. But if you look for Norris online now, you will find that he’s treated as a respectable, even canonical, theologian in some circles. You will find books and websites devoted to this writings and his ideas. Aside from this book, you will not find similar appraisals of Williams’s work even though his vision of a working-class, Christian majority preempted the conservative Moral Majority by forty years.

If Williams and Whitfield haven’t left an explicit mark on today’s political culture, their influence can certainly be found if you know where to look, or listen. The music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, for example, were shaped directly by Williams and the PIAR. Williams is in part responsible for the song, “We Shall Overcome,” for instance. Has that been more powerful than Norris’s legacy through Jerry Falwell?

EG: Whitfield’s efforts foreshadowed the tactics of the civil rights movement when he led the 1939 roadside demonstration in Missouri and then trained the younger generation of civil rights activists in St. Louis after the war. Both preachers, and their key allies like Harry Koger, Myles Horton, Winifred Chappell, and William DeBerry authored new methods of organizing workers that historians have come to call civil rights unionism. This form of organizing tapped a working-class culture that reached well beyond the field or factory. And the Williamses remained active into the 1960s and 1970s. He and Joyce made it their mission to open their house in Alabama to young activists for conversations about protest politics and movement organizing, past and present.

While the specific historical record of this cast of characters may have been elided, religious-based progressive activism has not disappeared. I have had the opportunity to know community organizers, unionists, and other activists through specific campaigns in Chicago over the past decade, and have learned that many of them came to these positions based on religious backgrounds, or indeed, an embrace of a gospel of the working class. These religious beliefs are not necessarily conspicuous but often sustain these activists. More explicitly, Kim Bobo and others at Interfaith Worker Justice serve as a prime example of this radical gospel’s legacy, even if their voices might get muted on the national stage in favor of mega-church ministers and televangelists.

JR: The story of Whitfield and Williams, as well as the thousands who rallied to their call, point to the more general conclusion that powerful religious denominations are most vulnerable when they no longer meet the needs of their members, and this tends to happen at a moment when those denominations are basking in worldly power and prestige, when they seem all-conquering. It happened to the Episcopalians, it happened to the Methodists, and it can happen to the Pentecostal and Baptist mega-churches. I came away from this project convinced more than ever before that religious faith is fundamentally radical in its implications for human behavior and action and that it always carries explosive potential—for good and bad, of course. Who knows what rebellions are out there simmering among believers discontented with their religious leaders? Who knows what they might be saying right now, and who knows what they might do? This book project has shown us that we need listen closely to these believers and better understand them as a potential force in American culture.

The Gospel of the Working Class: Gellman/Roll Interview, Part II

By Heath Carter

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HC: You discuss in one footnote how historians of the New Deal era have “focused on the conservative or reactionary religious thought of preachers like Father Charles Coughlin or Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith.” In what ways and to what extent does the recovery of your cast of characters - the Owen Whitfields and Claude Williams of the world – revise our stories about this period?

EG: The focus on the religious right during the 1930s and 1940s has given the false impression that people during this era who prioritized religion embraced reactionary politics and fascist ideas. Uncovering this cast of progressive characters who fought for the poor and for civil rights shows how faith did not just represent a distraction or diversion from the path of New Deal liberalism or the struggles of Popular Front activists to expand America’s democratic promise. Interestingly, however, the path blazed by Whitfield, Williams and their colleagues also provides a challenging critique to many of the false assumptions New Deal liberals had in terms of class, race, and gender. For example, when Williams dealt with the so-called migrant problem of white and black southerners to Detroit during the World War II era, he analyzed it from a very different angle; Williams saw these migrants much less as the problem than the solution because he believed they had more potential to embrace a radical social gospel than their liberal counterparts who sought primarily to quell riots and preserve the racial status quo.

JR: For me, one of the most important and surprising facets of this story is that Whitfield, Williams and the people who joined them in the People’s Institute of Applied Religion and other groups were part of an extremely volatile and creative intellectual world available to common people in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically to some readers, in the South and among southern migrants across America. This intellectual world had progressive, conservative and other strains, often all mixed up, and usually at the radical edge of whatever direction they tended. We already know a lot about the radical and reactionary political movements that operated in this period, but I think those stories are usually delineated in terms of ideas coming in from the outside and from the top down. I think that this book, as well as our other books, Spirit of Rebellion and Death Blow to Jim Crow, shed new light on the ways that ordinary thinkers and activists at the grassroots generated powerful new ideas and put them into action—we both build on the work of Robin Kelley and Paul Harvey, in particular, in doing this.

Telling the story of Whitfield and Williams in the same narrative seemed like a great way to expand on this historiographical project: both came from poor families in the rural South, the kind of upbringing that most histories of the period equate with despondency, backwardness, and intellectual helplessness. Yet, they went on, with the benefit of a little southern schooling, to hone a religious interpretation of America’s plight in the Great Depression that earned them the attention of the White House, the FBI, and the heads of major international labor unions. Along the way they each imbibed and reformulated ideas from Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of education, the Social Gospel, communism, inter-racialism, socialism, the ecumenical movement, and Pentecostal and holiness revival, in addition to their own respective Presbyterian and Baptist backgrounds. Crucially, they first encountered each of these various ideas and movements in the context of the rural and small-town South, not in New York or Moscow. What we tried to draw out in this book is how these ideas circulated in relative abundance among ordinary people in cotton fields, backwoods settlements, mining camps, and one-horse towns across the South, among blacks and whites who interpreted and adapted these ideas to suit their needs whatever their religious identification might be. The cast of characters in this book was a remarkable group of what we might call, after Steven Feierman, organic intellectuals, but they were not unique among their peers. I hope that conclusion opens up a number of potential avenues for further inquiry, and encourages historians to reconsider their stock assumptions about southern working-class life, social and intellectual, in this period.

HC: Elaborate on the significance of the book’s title. In what sense was this strain of Protestantism – radical especially on matters of class and race – in fact “the gospel of the working class”? In your estimation, how extensive was its reach amongst ordinary Southerners during this period?

JR: We hoped that the title would pick up on several threads in the book—threads often in tension with one another. Part of the “gospel” is the faith Whitfield and Williams had in the faith of the working-class, as well as their belief that class issues were the fundamental truths that underlay southern and American problems. Whitfield and Williams were faith-driven idealists who believed that the religious devotion of laboring whites and blacks had the power to make the kingdom of heaven on earth—to overturn racism, poverty, and gender discrimination in the United States. They saw these problems, sins really, rooted first and foremost in the South and believed that the bedrock Christian faith of ordinary southerners provided a kind of natural antidote, honed in response to these base evils for generations. Of course they accused mainstream denominational churches of facilitating these evils, mainly because these churches were vested in the established order that thrived on southern iniquities. They wanted to put that grassroots faith into action, through unions, the government, churches, or the individual preachers and prophets who they trained in the PIAR. So, in one respect, their gospel was a faith in class-based politics leavened with what they considered a true Christian conviction. The title also plays on the way Whitfield and Williams preached this “gospel” to the working classes in an effort to get them to realize their moral power, even duty, in an immoral world. They wanted to convert people to their version of the good news. In both senses of the title, this is the “gospel of the working class” from the perspective of the two preachers, and it is not hard to imagine it led to all sorts of interesting twists and turns, innovations and errors, but always propelled by an idealistic faith. That both men risked their lives, their livelihoods, and the well being of their families during several decades of service to that faith gives some indication of the strength of their idealism.

That is not to say that the “gospel of the working class” was solely in the heads of Whitfield and Williams. Thousands of white and black southerners (and other Americans) shared their gospel in this period. Both preachers were from the working class themselves and came to this religious interpretation through many years of grueling spiritual searching for some way to reconcile what they considered to be God’s promise to the righteous with the brutal living and working conditions that crushed their neighbors, their families, and even themselves. That search took them into domestic mission work and a range of political alternatives, all aimed at making their faith powerful and consequential in their lives and the lives of others. I think this aspect of the story points to the importance of biography as a way of mapping this religious search. Christians across the South were on the same quest in these years, looking for grace and salvation in a range of places that included the various political groups that Whitfield and Williams found, as well as Pentecostal and holiness churches, before religiously committed working people joined groups like the Share Croppers’ Union, the STFU, or the CIO. Of course, some poor people found their answers in reactionary groups. For Whitfield and Williams this spiritual search led them to create the PIAR to work independently of all other organizations and to empower a roving band of prophets to attempt to channel the faith of working people into collective action--from cotton fields to cities like Memphis, Winston-Salem, Chicago, and, most famously, Detroit.

In terms of their reception, it is remarkable to me that Whitfield and Williams proved so popular for so long—neither ever had much money or much outside support, but neither of them ever failed to excite people wherever they went. People in the tens of thousands listened to them and acted based on what they said and this more than anything demonstrates for me the extent to which their preaching did tap into something real, whether you call it the gospel of the working class or not. Poor people heard the ring of truth in what these two preachers said, often going against their own upbringing, against the law, against the teaching of their regular church homes, against the secular leaders of their unions, and sometimes against plain good sense to follow Whitfield and Williams. Popular support sustained them, and worried the authorities, often the police, church leaders, or their own superiors in labor unions, all at the same time. They definitely had something that poor people wanted to hear.

EG: One surprise in conducting the research on this book for me was how deeply American workers in the era of the Depression and war felt their religious faith. Many union leaders in the narrative failed to appreciate this faith, but at the grassroots, workers often oriented themselves through their relationship to God. Beginning in the Great Depression, Williams, Whitfield and a host of other working-class preachers came to comprehend and spread a gospel of the working class defined by a focus on healing the earth, showing faith through productive work, and engaging in action when access to work and autonomy for their families disappeared. In so doing, they joined with other workers in a faith that crossed racial, geographic, and gender lines. But that does not imply this gospel was the only working-class one. The religious activists in this book sought to convert working-class people who believed in a faith that oriented them to other-worldly concerns or, in the case of many radical political and union leaders, a lack of faith because they saw it as a diversion from political activism. Second, these preachers came to distrust the institutional church and middle class religious figures that they saw as straying from the work of Jesus as he had lived on earth. Williams and Whitfield believed that working with the poor always came before your church’s financial standing or reputation. This explains why their message reached so many of the disinherited and poor people during the 1930s and 1940s, but also why they eventually had to start their own organization—the People’s Institute of Applied Religion--because the labor movement, political parties, and other civic and civil rights groups came in conflict with their tendency to prioritize a larger people’s religious movement over short term institutional objectives.

HC: Your protagonists talk about the institutional churches in the South as being aligned with “the owning class” and “the bosses.” To what extent did this rhetoric map on to reality in your period? If in fact the region’s religious institutions were in cahoots with capital, how did they manage to maintain such a strong foothold amongst the people?

EG: They came to believe that the institutional church, especially its mainstream denominations, had become morally bankrupt. There’s a great moment in the book where Williams goes to Harry Fosdick’s massive Riverside Church in New York City. Williams, as a young minister, had been profoundly influenced by Fosdick’s writings about how to make Christianity more accessible to modern life. But having been radicalized by his activism in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and other southern protests by the mid-1930s, Williams rebuked what he heard in Fosdick’s church. He condemned the sermon as a liberal pat on the back to parishioners rather than a call for action against the alarming spread of fascism, in the South as much as the rest of the world. As Whitfield comments as a result of his conversion, the true gospel does not send you home happy or content, it sends you home fighting mad.

That said, their readiness to reject the institutional church, especially after the mid-1930s, sometimes hindered their work. In Detroit, for example, one of their allies, Henry D. Jones, got upset at Williams’s radicalism, not for its content, but for his lack of political tact. Just when the PIAR was expanding in the Motor City on the basis of support and alliances with institutional churches and leading ministers, Williams condemned liberals in the church rather than attempting to foster these alliances and slowly bring them along to his more radical mission. Ultimately this anti-institutional stance led to a larger question: how can any group of people build and sustain a movement without building an organization? The leaders of the PIAR confronted this problem in the 1940s and I would say it’s one of the reasons they failed to spread their message farther than they did, or establish it with any permanence in the longer term. If you always privilege action over organizing for the future, you make your movement institutionally unstable. Beginning in the late 1940s, political attacks during the Red Scare period made the PIAR a quick casualty because its leaders had established few institutional resources to fight back. As an independent entity that wasn’t really much of an organized entity, it also proved too easy for allies to abandon when the political winds turned.

JR: In some ways the rhetoric mapped quite closely to the reality of the period. Williams first went to Detroit at the behest of the Presbyterian Church, which wanted him to reach out to southern migrants to the city before they fell under the sway of conservative, right-wing preachers like Gerald L. K. Smith and J. Frank Norris, who started what became the World Baptist Fellowship and was very influential on people like John Birch and Jerry Falwell. In Detroit Williams and the PIAR were battling head-to-head with arch ideological foes, all of them on both sides claiming to be the true Christians. More broadly, both Whitfield and Williams considered the institutional church to be too comfortable with worldly power, whether money, property or prestige. For them, the word of God itself was liberating and anything that stood in the way of the application of the word was obstructing the will of God. It did not matter if it was a preacher or a church polity, it had to be defied. That’s one reason they always gravitated toward Pentecostal, holiness and other breakaway churches. These rebellious groups also despised the power of institutional churches (even though some were busy building their own institutions) because they inhibited the ability of ordinary believers to connect directly with the divine. Whitfield and Williams both came of age alongside this great early twentieth century revolt in American Christianity and both were shaped by it intellectually. It was natural for them to turn to these sets of believers later in their career.

The Gospel of the Working Class: An Interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll, Part I

By Heath Carter



Today I'm posting the first of three installments of an interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll regarding their new book, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America. Parts two and three will follow tomorrow and Friday, respectively.



Last week Paul Harvey posted some of his thoughts on the book. If his high praise wasn't enough to convince you to pick up your own copy, then maybe Pete Seeger's endorsement will do the trick: "This is the story of heroic people, black and white, who tried to democratize the southeastern states of the USA in the years before Dr. King and the Warren Court." Here's more acclaim from the book's U. of Illinois press site:



"A must read for today: two activists, one black, one white, organize America's laboring poor through a powerful social gospel to confront racism and economic injustice in the Great Depression and World War II era."--Reverend Calvin S. Morris, Executive Director, Community Renewal Society



"This outstanding and impressively researched study reveals the tremendous significance of Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield, two major figures in the efforts to organize southern black and white workers. Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll also show the significance of religion in southern working class history. There have been other studies of various religious figures who worked for social justice in the South during this era, but this is the finest one that I have read."--Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, author of American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta



"A remarkable, nuanced account. Gellman and Roll have accessed the lives and learning of these two activists, combining excellent writing and analysis to bring clarity and inspiration to the story. Rarely do historians write with such insight and passion. This is an exciting text for anyone interested in labor, southern, and civil rights history. It ties things together in a way that no other book has done yet."--Michael K. Honey, author of Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers and Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign



Now, without further delay, on to the interview.

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HC: In the acknowledgements you indicate that the book represents “truly a fifty-fifty collaboration.” How did you go about this collaboration? Also, can you shed some light on the nature of your “not infrequent debates over interpretation”?

JR: We began our collaboration as graduate students with a project that resulted in an article on Owen Whitfield in the Journal of Southern History. We had both encountered the work and career of Whitfield in the course of our research on our respective dissertations and thought that we could do something new and important by joining forces. That project proved rewarding, both in terms of our ability to work together and the way the resulting article spoke to a range of historiographical issues. But I think that we both felt that we had to leave so much important research on the cutting-room floor to get the manuscript into the shape of an article that an expanded version of the project seemed like a logical next step. We were very confident in the material, especially since the Whitfield article had received an enthusiastic response just as we were both trying to finish our dissertations, but also felt that the story could do even more in terms of its scholarly and popular impact if we included the career of Claude Williams in the narrative. In the Whitfield article we had worked to craft a story that broke through the scholarly partitions that we felt kept various subfields in modern American history, such as religion, labor, faith, class, rural and urban, distinct and separate in ways that did not reflect the actual history of people like Whitfield. By looking at Whitfield and Williams in tandem we thought we could go further and combine fundamental stories of race and region that are often told separately—white or black, North or South--into a single historical narrative alongside our earlier focus on labor and religion in rural and urban areas. After a couple of years in which we both finished our dissertations and settled into jobs, we decided to try to collaborate on this more ambitious book project, even though neither of us was sure of what a co-authored, joint biography might look like as a historical narrative.

EG: It certainly helped in framing this project that we were both also working at the same time on revising our dissertations into books. Jarod had a vast understanding of the interplay between work and faith in the rural world inhabited by Williams and Whitfield in the early twentieth century, since he was completing what became his award-winning book, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. Meanwhile, I was finishing a reappraisal of urban protest politics in the 1930s and 1940s, the topic of my forthcoming book on the National Negro Congress, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. We decided early on that we wanted as much of the book as possible to truly combine our accounts of the lives of Whitfield and Williams, rather than alternate chapters. In the first chapter, we treat their early lives from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s as separate narratives to parallel the Jim Crow society that kept them apart, and the chapters thereafter present a unified chronological account that focuses mostly on their collaboration in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the 1930s and in the CIO in the 1940s, particularly their joint effort in the People’s Institute of Applied Religion.

When it came time to write, we divided sections of the chapters according to our research strengths, but by the time we got through passing drafts back and forth, I could no longer discern who wrote what first. Although we did not sit down side-by-side to write it, by the end we had both worked extensively with every line in the book. In practice this meant that we each had the power to cut or rework what the other had written all the way through. Nothing was really off-limits, which required trust to allow for blunt criticism and substantial revision.

As an exception to this process, we did sit down at the very end to finish key parts together. During a final research trip to the Reuther archives at Wayne State University in Detroit, we looked at a few more sources and checked references by day and drafted pieces of the introduction at night in a motel in nearby Dearborn. And on the trip from Detroit back to Chicago, we came up with a few more key points, which Jarod fortunately was able to draft on his laptop while I drove the car.

JR: In terms of our debates over interpretation, I think that’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of this collaboration. When confronted with a vast array of primary sources, the historian often analyzes them not in dialogue with others but in his or her own mind. By making this isolated process into an open, shared one, we forced ourselves to be sharper in the ways we read materials. When I made the case for a particular reading of a historical moment or source, I had to articulate a cogent argument to convince Erik and vice versa. To settle most of our debates we relied in the end on the expertise we each brought to the project, getting back to the importance of trust that Erik mentioned. Making sure that our various interpretations added up to a coherent analysis was harder to do and took several rounds of drafting and revision to get right.

Equally important, I think, was the way we reminded each other throughout to not make the book overly academic, which really meant preventing one another from excessively grinding our favorite historiographical axes. We tried to write a book that an undergraduate student can come away from with a more complex understanding of religious faith and protest politics in Great Depression and World War II-era America, and the ways that story fits into a longer historical trajectory from Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights Movement.

HC: In the introduction you say, “Historians of labor have traditionally seen religion, and especially religious discontent, as a manifestation of some more tangible set of class relationships.” In contrast, you want to highlight “the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements.” What direction do you see the field moving on this front? To what extent has your work as well as that of other scholars – including, for example, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, and Alison Greene – persuaded labor and working-class historians that religion is more than epiphenomenal?

EG: I think we are in a fruitful period of revisionist scholarship when it comes to religious ideology in American history. Over the past two decades, many scholars undertook studies of religion to understand how religious evangelicals have so effectively organized since the 1970s to become one of the most prominent conservative political forces in America. While this work proved essential to understanding late twentieth century American history, it elided the importance of faith in many progressive social movements in the United States, especially during the New Deal and World War II-era where the scholarship privileged class politics, unionism, and political sectarianism as ideologies divorced from religious faith. Even historians of civil rights of the 1960s, who mention this earlier period and the rural church as being important to the black freedom struggle, do so in a sentence or paragraph in a larger study about the black middle-class and urban church as the religious engine of the movement.

JR: There is a vibrant group of scholars working on the relationship between labor and religion, including Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, Richard Callahan, John Hayes, Janine Giordano Drake, Joe Creech, Alison Collis Greene, as well as our esteemed interviewer, Heath Carter, that is producing very exciting ground-breaking work, some of it published recently, some of it on the way. This group actually represents two different, independent historiographical movements approaching similar questions from very different perspectives. In the first group are historians of American religion who are interested broadly in questions of poverty and working-class faith, as well as the role of working-class faith in labor organizations. In the most general sense, scholars like Creech, Hayes, Greene, and Carter are critical of American religious historiography for paying too little attention to the religion of poor people, both in and out of denominational churches. Their research is concerned first and foremost with church communities, denominational bodies, and debates about theological ideas among and between clerics and the laity in relation to questions of class, poverty, and the politics thereof.

The work of this group of scholars is essential to the efforts of the second group in this movement, historians of labor trying to emphasize the religious aspects of working-class politics and action. This group is concerned primarily with historiographical questions surrounding the fates of labor unions and movements, popular organizing traditions, and recovering working-class intellectual worlds. I think that those of us, including me and Erik, in this group probably have the harder hill to climb in terms of shifting the field overall because many labor historians are, usually for ideological reasons, deeply suspicious if not outright hostile to religion and faith as concepts. A lot of this has to do with recent politics, particularly the role of evangelical Christians in conservative movements: religion, the dismissal goes, is the terrain of the Right and a distraction from more important material concerns. That interpretation is obviously too simplistic and too neatly tailored to recent political developments to be the last word. But the work of correcting this tendency in the field has only begun.

What we have tried to do in this book is show how Whitfield, Williams, and their peers found in their Christian faith a powerful means to address the most fundamental American problems of their time: poverty and racism. That they sought to put their faith into action through labor unions and other organizations associated with the political Left is an important part of the story, but it is not the only important part. We did not intend this book to challenge the dictum that evangelical Christianity is conservative by arguing the opposite, that it is progressive. I think we both agree that it is neither conservative nor progressive, politically speaking. What we want to show, rather, is that religious faith was central to the lives of ordinary Americans in this period, that religious belief provided a common ground where men and women, African American and white, rural or urban, could identify with one another in something like common cause. Most of all, we hope the book shows how rich religion is as intellectual history, particular as a realm in which working-class people have accessed, created and developed powerful new ideas that changed the way they lived and acted in the world. The story of Whitfield and Williams is fundamentally about the tremendous power of faith above and beyond institutional church homes. Their faith led them to challenge church authorities (Williams was a Cumberland Presbyterian, Whitfield a Baptist), work together in defiance of the Jim Crow color line, and risk their own lives and the welfare of their families to make the world a little more agreeable to God. In short, we take religious ideas seriously and hope that more of our colleagues in the field of labor history do the same. We don’t think you can credibly emphasize working-class agency and at the same time dismiss the beliefs and faiths of the working class as epiphenomena. It can’t be both ways.