Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism and the Evangelical Tradition in America

Today I'm posting Part II of Rachel Wheeler's "Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America Today," presented originally as a paper at a conference and shortened slightly here for blog format. Part I introduced some of Rachel's basic ideas; Part II below draws out the parallels she sees between evangelical thought and locavore practice; Part III, posted on Sunday December 4th, concludes the series. Thanks for Rachel for these provocative explorations!

Part II of Locavangelism in America
by Rachel Wheeler

History and Definitions

I would like to suggest that aspects of the contemporary environmental movement draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has been a powerful force in American culture from the revivals of the First Great Awakening in the 1740s to today when upwards of 40% of Americans identify themselves as “born again.” So just what is evangelicalism? Scholars generally agree on three basic elements of evangelicalism (or four depending on how you divide them up): the importance of the “born again” experience and a personal relationship with Jesus; Biblicism; and the importance of spreading the word. I’ll tackle these one by one, giving a brief explanation of each before considering how various environmentalists and locavores embody these qualities.

The Born Again Experience

The hallmark of evangelical piety – the born again experience – was the defining feature of the First Great Awakening in the colonies, itself part of a larger transatlantic Protestant evangelical awakening. The born again experience essentially speeded up the conversion process that 17^th century New England Puritans had made the basis of church membership. Early Puritan leaders faced the challenge of establishing ecclesiastical structures in a radically different religious and physical environment from what they had known in England. If church membership was not to be a matter of birth to Christian parents, but conferred upon the visible saints of God, then the church needed a means of establishing who was among the elect. Full church membership was thus granted to those who were able to deliver in front of their minister and other church members a compelling account of spiritual journey toward Christ. A pattern soon emerged, termed by Edmund Morgan the “morphology of conversion” marked by the stages of “knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance. . . .

A number of prominent environmentalists were raised in evangelical and fundamentalist traditions: John Muir, often credited as being the grandfather of the American environmental movement in the 19^th century, was raised in a strict Calvinist household; Dave Foreman, who founded the radical environmentalist movement EarthFirst! in 1979, was raised in a fundamentalist church and had once considered becoming a preacher. (Although, I won’t go into it much here, Foreman’s philosophy is fascinating as a sort of Calvinist environmentalist apocalyptic millennialism – Foreman is deeply convinced of human depravity and that our environmental sins are leading us quickly toward an apocalypse in which Mother Nature will meet out justice). . . .

All of these environmentalists, as different as they are, have in common that they renounced the Christian gospel of their upbringing and became ministers of the green gospel. But it is not only those who have evangelicalism in their family tree that become environmental evangelists. Below, I’d like to look at various shades of environmental evangelism, from current and former evangelical Christians and to those with no direct link to evangelicalism.

The lecture by the Mad Vegetarian Cowboy I mentioned at the beginning conforms perfectly to the form, if not the substance, of the evangelical conversion narrative: the Christian content has been vacated and an alternate model of righteous living substituted in its place. I have not been able to find out about Lyman’s religious background, but odds are good that someone raised in ranching country in the 1950s belonged to an evangelical church. Like Lyman, Julia Hill was set on the path toward environmental by a medical disaster. When she was 22, the car she was driving was struck by a drunk driver and she was nearly killed. During her recovery, which took nearly a year, she came to realize, “that my whole life had been out of balance…The crash woke me up to the importance of the moment, and doing whatever I could to make a positive impact on the future.”

Like Lyman, the trauma didn’t prompt an immediate conversion, but set her on the path toward a new life. It would be some years before she found her “Jesus,” but writing in retrospect, she felt she was being called by the one true power, the power of Creation. On a whim Hill headed west, scarcely recovered from the accident, and when she first sets foot in a redwood forest, she feels: “these majestic ancient places.. are the holiest of temples, [and] hous[e] more spirituality than any church…”

She stumbles upon a disorganized activist camp trying to save the ancient forests from the chainsaws. In her depiction, the would-be activists are too caught up in petty bickering to do the work of activism. Hill volunteers and one night becomes more than two years. During that time, Hill is transformed by the tree she comes to call Luna.

Hill’s description of her transformative moment sounds for all the world like a born-again experience, the moment of justification by grace that only comes after being laid low in one’s own sinfulness and helplessness: “I had to be broken until I saw no hope, until I went crazy, until I finally let go. Only then could I be rebuilt; only then could I be filled back up with who I am meant to be. Only then could I become my higher self.” In his Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Dave Foreman sounds like a modern day Gilbert Tennant when he argues for the importance of grace: “breaking free from the gilded chains of civilized banality is not easy. One cannot achieve a state of wilderness grace through books, through intellectualization, through rational argument. Our passion comes from our connection to the Earth and it is only through direct interaction with the wilderness that we can unite our minds and our bodies with the land, realizing that there is no separation.”. . .

Political conservative and Christian author Rod Dreher admits that he used to mock lefty eating habits until a friend offered his family their week’s share from a CSA (explain Community Supported Agriculture) and he was converted by the cauliflower. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin’s conversion was prompted by his purchase of a “Spa Factory Color Sparkle Custom Nail Mix Studio” as a present for his 7 y.o. daughter to bring to a friend’s birthday. It was the height of meaningless consumption, and came in the aftermath of the Christmas season, and in the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown. After the crisis, he and his wife resolved to spend a year living by four rules: local, used, and homemade (the fourth rules was Thailand – they would buy goods from Thailand, which enabled them to keep their coffee).

Colin Beavan, the child of a-religious, hippy, liberals has no direct connections with evangelical Christianity, yet his memoir of a year of living lightly on the earth has all the hallmarks of the classic conversion narrative. Beavan announces in the introduction to No Impact Man: “I’m going to tell a story that is more confession, a pre-changing of my ways stocktaking, a prodigal son, mea culpa sort of thing.” He then recounts his sinful ways, in his case, his prideful tendency to see the faults in others but not himself: “It’s true, that I had occasionally tried to make a difference in the world, but I was coming to think my political views had too often been about changing other people and too seldom about changing myself.” On an unnaturally warm January day in New York City, Beavan finds himself aghast at the impact of global warming, the complacency he sees all around him and his sense of helplessness. “Back on that summery day in the middle of winter,” he writes, “I seemed to be hitting bottom.” His epiphany was that he must change himself: “I wasn’t sick of the world, I was sick of myself.”

Beavan came to speak at my university in Indiana last year, and in a lecture hall packed with about 500 students, I had the same feeling I’d had hearing Lyman years earlier: here is a modern day itinerant minister of the environmental gospel. In his chatty, self deprecating hipster way, Beavan exhorted his listeners to change their lives. While Beavan did not invoke a higher power directly, his message implied a faith that individual actions do matter, and that individuals can find the power to do the seemingly impossible. He also implied that the way to righteous living is a matter of common sense apprehension of “truth,” and this raises a second feature of evangelicalism: the belief that there is a source of truth and that it is available to all.

Biblicism/common sense

Famed American religious historians George Marsden and Mark Noll have both explored the fusion of evangelical Christianity with a popularized form of Enlightenment philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in a common sense reading of the bible among evangelicals, and later, fundamentalists: the bible means what it says, and says what it means, and its eternal, enduring truth can be perceived by anyone, not just seminary trained clergy.

This approach to the Bible is readily apparent in the writings of Christian environmentalists, even though conservative Christianity and environmentalism have long been seen as antithetical. For example, Joel Salatin grounds his farming philosophy in his religion: he finds in the Bible a clear account of God’s order of creation, and the charge to humans to steward His creation. In an interview, Salatin explained: “I am a Christian, and I think that the Judeo-Christian ethic calls us to realize that we are stewards of creation – that we are not to just rape it, pillage it, whatever, we are to steward it – and lays down certain principles of growth.” He continued to explain, “When God made [the earth] in Genesis, the plants were to reproduce after their own kind. And genetic modification doesn’t make plants produce after their own kind. So, you know, even to that point, [there is a] template there to live by.” Salatin’s farming philosophy is rooted in his reading of the Bible: farming practices must enhance, not hinder, animals’ and plants’ ability to express their God-given nature. In this view, corn fed beef is heretical, and even sinful.

Don Colbert, a graduate of Oral Roberts University (Pentecostal), and a practicing doctor, draws even more directly on the Bible in encouraging his readers to reform their diets. Colbert begins his 2002 book with the question from the title: What Would Jesus Eat? He expects that his readers as Christians have attempted to model their lives on Jesus’s, but rarely when it comes to food: “we seek to follow Jesus in every other area of our lives, why not in our eating habits?” The bible, believes Colbert, offers a clear path that will lead to physical and spiritual health and so when we eat, we should ask ourselves: “Why am I eating this? And “Would Jesus eat this?” If we ask these questions, he suggests, we will have to face two truths about the way we live: “most of what we eat flows from ill-founded, unwise, and mostly unconscious food choices” and 2) “Most of what we eat in a given day may not be what Jesus would have eaten if He were walking in our shoes.”

Secular environmental evangelists also proclaim a truth that is plain for all to see, often turning to nature itself as source of wisdom and truth. Among contemporary environmentalists, Julia Butterfly Hill expresses this idea most clearly in her resolve: “ I was no longer going to live my life out of fear..I was going to live my life guided from the higher source, the Creation source.” Through her relationship with Luna (the tree), Hill comes to realize: “that what I was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation. Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation’s ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that’s true love.” Hill had accepted Luna as her personal savior and guide for her life.

One could hardly imagine anyone farther apart culturally and ideologically than Don Colbert, a politically conservative Pentecostal, and Michael Pollan, a politically liberal secular Jew, yet in his 2008 book, In Defense of Food, Pollan sounds a note remarkably like Colbert’s. Instead of Jesus, however, Pollan invokes the wisdom of grandmothers: “Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.”[9] Pollan’s prescription?: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”[10] Pollan’s truth is a common-sensical truth.

Spreading the word:

Having found salvation, and a new gospel, the enviro-evangelists all feel compelled to spread the word. Here I’d like to start with the seemingly most un-evangelical of the group: Michael Pollan. Pollan is of Jewish background, but apparently non-practicing. His writing is the epitome of rational discourse, hardly the fire and brimstone of the evangelist. But yet, his works are in fact exhortatory and not entirely unlike that most famed example of fire and brimstone preaching: Jonathan Edwards’ infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon more often despised (or praised) than it is read. Edwards was a careful student of the Enlightenment, and the power of the sermon comes from the clinical, precise dissection of sin and its consequences. Likewise, Michael Pollan’s work dissects our environmental (food) sins and the consequences to individual, communal, global, and environmental health. Pollan’s equivalent to “Sinners in the Hands…” is his “Letter to the Farmer in Chief,” a letter to the newly elected President Obama published in the New York Times in January 2008, in which he argues that arguing that Obama must make “reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration.” If we continue on our current path, Pollan argues, our destruction is assured. And just as Edwards spelled out the precariousness of the sinner’s state, as a spider dangling above the pit of hell, held up only by the slenderest thread of God’s grace, yet deserving of damnation unless the sinner reforms, Pollan describes in great detail the ways that our food choices are clogging arteries, polluting the environment, driving up health care costs, and destabilizing our economy. His program of reform includes everything from supporting farmer’s markets, doing away with agricultural subsidies to big business, establishing a grain reserve, establishing mandatory gardens at primary schools and creating a new School Lunch Corps whose mission would be to change children’s “food culture.”

Joel Salatin, the Christian libertarian capitalist lunatic farmer, was spreading the word of redemption through agriculture long before he was discovered by Pollan. Salatin devotes much of his time to spreading the green gospel. The farm’s website announces: “Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.” . . .

Ragan Sutterfield makes a similar point in his book, Farming as Christian Discipline, “My hope is that Christians will come to see one of their tasks as staking out claims for God's Kingdom by redeeming land from the margins and using that land to create gardens that offer not only good food but also community development and hope.”[12] While Barbara Kingsolver has moved on from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to other writing projects, her website continues to serve as a site of almost religious witness: there is a page filled with reader-submitted pictures of lush gardens and happy children accompanied by testimony of the transformative power of communion with home-grown (or at least locally grown) tomatoes.

Like the temperance and bible tract societies of the nineteenth century the locavangelist movement tends to operate on the conviction that the path to the millennium will be paved by the conversion of individuals: if enough people make the choice for salvation the Kingdom of God will be achieved. And for this, the movement, especially Pollan, have come in for criticism. One reviewer, Laura Shapiro, criticizes Pollan for preaching a doctrine of “individual dietary purity,” which reflects “his religion – the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of food, where only martyrs and lost souls have to shop at Safeway.” According to Shapiro, Pollan alienates the unconverted, because, she write, “he can’t quite bring himself to take us seriously unless we can prove we’ve been born again.” Only time will tell if Shapiro’s critique proves justified, or if the movement gains the momentum and organization to seek systemic change.

Adventures in Christian Retail: A Response -- Part II

by Darren Grem 

As promised, here's my follow-up to my first post in response to Charity Carney's recent "Adventures in Christian Retail." 
Why “Christian” at all?  

So, if we’re going to ask about their experiences, the experiences of those at CC and other Christian businesses, how do we start? The intersection of religion and capitalism is a pretty well-trod one, so we have plenty of guides. Marx, Weber, and dozens of lesser mortals have unpacked religion – especially a Western-derived version of Christianity – in the marketplace. You can certainly read Dr. Carney’s experience at CC with those models and come to fine conclusions. 

With CC and other CC’s, however, I think it’s also instructive to think about historical context before moving on to an analysis of why -- or in what way -- this particular site is “religious” at all. In other words, first focus not on what a CC is doing to mark itself as “Christian” or “religious.” Focus instead on what it cannot do at this particular historical moment. Companies cannot hire/fire/promote/demote employees based on religion as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII. Of course, they can get around this or create a wink-wink, nudge-nudge "cultural gatekeeper" that signals it’s only accepting applications from like-minded job seekers. And, if they are operating stores in areas where, say, 95% of the people in their local community are of some religious group, then there are powerful cultural pressures for folks not to raise a legal stink. Still, at the end of the day, ignoring or doing an end-run around Title VII is taking a risk of the most fearsome four-letter word in corporate America -- tort. 

Yet, many business owners feel compelled to do something. Why is that the case? It depends and ranges widely based on race, gender, political leanings (which are, admittedly, conservative in general), industry, mass vs. niche market, place, type of Christianity, and other factors. But one thing, at least as far as I can tell, does unite their various impulses for bringing Christianity into the workplace and marketplace. For the most part, they share a sense that the workplace and marketplace are spheres of influence and, therefore, places for cultural activism, a way of shaping the world in their own image.  

Indeed, the ideological and cultural fights of the past thirty years have made an impression on many Christian business owners. This is not to say that the cultural issues of previous decades have not, but that the recent ones over race (such as affirmative action), gender (such as abortion or the "feminization of work"), and class (such as the disconnect between work, identity, and community) are the most prominent -- and they have been wrestled with in the midst of drastic restructurings in American capitalism that have left many without a row to hoe, a line to work, or a mouse to click -- or worried about the said row, line, or mouse. As scholars, we like to focus on the "big" arenas, big-name politicians, and, unfortunately, all too often on the biggest blowhards in these fights. But I would argue that the reflective decision by a small business owner -- or an attendant or a cashier or line worker -- to bring "faith," however they conceive of it, to play in their personal crusade in and against whatever the imagine as the dominant culture to be -- that is worthy of attention as well because it illustrates the very work of identity construction, cultural construction, class construction, and political construction. It's the very place where religion hits the road. And, as Dr. Carney's dispatches noted, it's a decision with multiple and often complicated implications. 

Ok, so, given those historical considerations, how might we interpret what’s going on religiously at CC or other companies? What's a company that wants to be “Christian” to do?

It can create an unmistakably “Christian” internal culture. But there are legal risks involved with that, at noted above.  

It can encourage or allow a “soft culture” of Christianity in the company. I think this is where the “Christian muzak” that Dr. Carney heard comes in. I’ve been to many CC's and seen it in countless other forms. Evangelistic tracts sitting next to the candy rack. An ichthys on the registers or on stationary. Bible verses on the bottom of Big Gulps. Tattoos on a tattoo artist (my favorite). It

all seems to work off the same impetus -- toss a little Christianity into the pot as spiritual spice, thereby making the company just a little "different." To attenuate charges of sectarianism or intolerance, especially if its not selling goods or services“by Christians for Christians,” a company can be somewhat flexible with its language, imagery, rituals, and terms of consent. I think of it as custom-fitting a Christian business for a “spiritual but not religious”America. Playing “Imagine” in the midst of a CCM-tilting playlist is another way to do this. So is putting “God’s Glory Auto Sales” up instead of “JesusChrist is the Only Savior of MANkind’s Auto Sales." 

It can also encourage an operationally“Christian”culture in the company, one that accords to whatever managers and workers are willing to accept as “Christian.” This is extremely difficult to observe and generalize about, even though it is certainly the part that sympathetic observers of Christian business like to talk about. In much of the Christian business/self-help/leadership literature (which is a growing genre), this is everywhere and it's usually framed in us vs. them terms, sometimes with culture war flourishes, sometimes not. In short, it's the infusion of "faith at work" that creates the presumed “difference” that Christian business owners see between themselves and their “secular” competitors, especially in how“moral” or “ethical” their business practices are. Higher wages, better customer service, "Christian" leadership, "character"-based decisions not to cheat an unknowing customer – these are all practices that can fall under this category and advance the evangelical-style "world changing" that CC's often cast themselves as partaking in. As Dr. Carney notes, this also opens the company up to charges of hypocrisy on religious grounds. Someone might say, “I’m a Christian. To my mind, Christians don’t do what you're doing to folks. You’re doing that to folks. Are you really Christian?” I've already written about when or where such questions might be appropriate to ask. But as scholars, I think one of the more interesting lines of inquiry might be why those religiously-based criticisms do or don’t often stick to Christian companies (or companies in general). I’m sure those conducting research into the history of anti-corporate Christianity right now might have something to say about that. (See Heath Carter's post as well as Janine Giordano Drake's forthcoming dissertation.)  

It can use “Christian” in branding, promotion, and networking. Some companies explicitly advertise themselves as “Christian." Maybe they put it in their ads, mission statements, or name (e.g., ServiceMaster, as in "Service Thy Master"). Others do it through corporate policies like – as Dr. Carney notes –closing on Sunday. This certainly advertises to customers who might share the company's religious affiliation or sensibilities. In the past, this has also been a way of creating anti-secularist solidarity between Christian businesses and consumers, as witnessed by the uptick in "Christian" business directories in the 1970s and 1980s. The placement of company franchises in church-saturated or notably dual parent, heterosexual, evangelical environs can also create links between a company’s brand and a “base” of Christian consumers. Joining Christian business owners or workers in non-profit, non-competitive associations (e.g., Fellowship of Christian Companies International) can do the same, encouraging sacred "fellowship" and the creation of social capital between members of the same business class or niche market.  

It can incorporate “Christianity” or “Christian”tenets in its social engagements, CSR, philanthropic endeavors, and political interests. Not every Christian company does this, but many do. It takes various forms – sponsoring “character-building” camps for kids, donating to Christian service or missionary agencies, giving money to local Christian charities, giving personal wealth to like-minded candidates. Publicly-traded companies, of course, generally hold back on using corporate profits or encouraging religious donations by executives, for obvious reasons. For that reason, a decent number (probably about half) of businesses with Christian owners or managers are privately-owned, thereby freeing them up to be freer with their money (or with their “stewardship”as they often call it). Trust me –political donations are down the list. For these folks, at least, there’s not much ROI in theocracy.

All of this should give the sense that what Dr. Carney observed did not happen by accident. If we are to take religion seriously in the marketplace, we need to think seriously about what folks are deciding to bring into the workplace, when and why they are deciding to do that, and how and why certain manifestations of religion appear there. This can be highly specific and custom-made, particular to a given store in a given area in a given state at a given point of time. It might even be limited to a given shift.

We should also recognize that, for as much as the appearance of religion in the marketplace is intentional, it is not always as well-thought out by our subjects as we might think or expect. Best-laid incentive-chasing does not explain it all, no matter what the Freakonomicists say. This does not mean that our subjects are not religiously self-reflective or collectively so. It certainly does not mean that they are dumb. To be sure, those running Dr. Carney’s CC might be behind the times in terms of tag-gun pricing and finger-counting bookkeeping. But many of CC’s counterparts are not Luddites, primarily because they have never been or can’t afford to be.  Many founded hi-tech companies or work for engineering firms. A few run or work for design firms and programming shops; others depend on government contracts and more than a few work for the DOD. As Darren Dochuk is currently researching, a lot of them founded or work for extractive companies– hardly a profession for the empty headed. Others created retail chains and work for large-scale corporations that depend on “just in time” coordination, top-shelf mathematical models,and multivariate problem-solving. All that, in my opinion, is more instructive and important to consider than the low-fi traditionalism observed at CC. Evangelicals have been often noted for their technological prowess in media production from the printed page to the Internet age. I wonder if that they’ve been even more technologically-inclined and savvy in corporate America, a place that evangelicals have been comfortable working in and through for much of the twentieth century and especially for the past fifty years.

And yet, to be sure, just because they can get a precision, laser-cut sprocket delivered to Toledo by Tuesday does not mean that they dotting every "i' and crossing every "t" when they pull or push religion into the marketplace. There are incongruities caused by religion's presence in the marketplace that fit oddly even within our received models of how it should work -- and sometimes quite oddly with how our subjects imagine a given religious practice should work. 

Take, for instance, Sunday closing. Sunday closing is incongruous with the very capitalism it's embedded within. Capitalism does not close on Sunday. The goods that are on CC’s shelves might have been made by Christians in another time zone, where it was actually Sunday there but Saturday here. The cargo ships and tractor trailers transporting these goods to the loading dock behind the store did not stop running on Sunday. As Dr. Carney reports, folks worked on Sunday putting those goods on the shelves because of the pressures and demands of their boss, who is certainly aware of the pushes and pulls of the system. The only point in the capitalist system that can be closed on Sunday at CC is the consumptive point– the doors letting customers in and the people behind the cash register checking them out. And all that is primarily because it is in retail. Can you imagine a Christian hotel closing on Sunday? A Christian electric company? Or worse yet, a Christian coffee company? 

Sunday closing is, therefore, an odd thing. But I think it's at those points of incongruity and inconsistency are where the richest analysis can and should happen, at the very points too many journalists, scholars, and many others like to leave uncomplicated, poke fun, or dismiss. It's at those points when religious sites like CC push us to consider the in-betweens of culture and capitalism in contemporary life, as well as push us to think hard about those who work every day in the midst of those in-betweens. 

Thanks again to Dr. Carney for telling us all about her time at CC and inviting us to think about it. And, in case you're dying to know, "CC" is a pseudonym for [intentionally left blank].

Occupy: "Fundamentally Christian"?

By Heath Carter

In an op-ed in today's Independent British writer Tom Hodgkinson calls the OccupyLSX protest "fundamentally Christian." This comes a day after the Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral offered his blessing, marking the latest turn-of-events in a dramatic negotiation between the protesters - encamped on the Cathedrals grounds since Oct. 15th - and the Anglican Church. More on that in a moment...

First, we jump back to this side of the pond, where labor scored a major victory in Ohio last week with the resounding defeat of "Issue 2," which would have dramatically scaled back public employees' collective bargaining rights. As in Wisconsin earlier this year, many mainline ministers buoyed the unions' cause. The pastor at Columbus' First Congregational Church - Washington Gladden's one-time pulpit - cited his fabled forebear in a September Plain Dealer editorial that called for the clergy to join the fight against the law. The Ohio Conference of Catholic Bishops remained officially neutral throughout - arguing that faithful believers might reasonably disagree - though a number of priests and a well-known Dayton University theologian joined prominent Jewish and Muslim leaders in opposing Issue 2. More striking than all this: the absence of a public, religiously-motivated argument on the other side. A May poll found that a remarkable 51% of evangelicals sympathized with the unions on "Issue 2" and it appears their support may have held all the way through to election day. Don't get me wrong - one would surely find many religious persons in the 39% that voted for the measure. But it's noteworthy that, in this fight at least, labor's friends invoked God more often than its enemies.

A parallel trend seems to be developing across the nation with respect to the Occupy movement. To be sure, there are naysayers. Last month a blogger at Christianity Today argued that the protests are misguided, and that believers should cut-back on their personal consumption before they go banging down Wall Street's door. Pat Robertson has found a way to blame Occupy on Obama, accusing the president of "inciting the people to revolt." Meanwhile, Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy - founded by Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, et al - has characterized Occupy's redistributive mission as "a utopian dream, not based on the Gospels, always monstrous when attempted, and premised more on resentment than godly generosity."

More eye-catching than Tooley's heated rhetoric, though, is the varied list of Protestant leaders he indicts for supporting the movement. These include the predictable mainliners - Episcopals, Presbyterians, UCCers, Methodists - as well as evangelical left stand-by Jim Wallis (see his declaration of support here). But Tooley also brings several less familiar (to the general public) and yet no-less-influential evangelical voices under judgment, including emerging church guru Brian McLaren and "new monastic" Shane Claiborne. In doing so, he inadvertently suggests the kind of progressive groundswell that E.J. Dionne heralded nearly four years ago. Lending further credence here is the fact that, beyond the aforementioned, it is difficult to find much in the way of an articulate religious opposition to Occupy. Meanwhile, it is not only the movement's supporters that claim God is on its side (Tooley fails even to mention Interfaith Worker Justice). So do many of the protesters themselves. Consider the case of Baptist minister William G. Britton - who staked out a spot in Zuccotti Park, holding a sign that read, "'Occupy Til I Come' - Jesus" - as well as the others mentioned by NY Times' columnist Mark Oppenheimer last Friday. I will admit that when Dionne published Souled Out back in 2008, I was amongst the skeptics, but maybe he was on to something after all.

Now back to the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. If you haven't been following this story, you've been missing out. There's a longer summary here, but I'll attempt to sum it up: on October 16th, the day after the protesters first hunkered down in the church's shadow, the Canon Chancellor - the Reverend Dr. Giles Fraser - welcomed them. But then the very next day the Cathedral's Dean and Chapter began to express concerns about the protest's impact on the church's daily life. On October 21st St. Paul's closed - for the first time since WWII - due to worries about security and by the 25th the bishop of London was calling for the Occupiers to leave. On the 27th, Fraser - the protesters' champion - resigned, even as a former Archbishop of Canterbury published a scathing editorial in the Daily Telegraph condemning the Cathedral's closure as a failure to promote "gospel values." The Cathedral reopened on the 28th, even as the Dean and Chapter threatened to pursue legal action if the protesters did not leave. The blowback proved so severe that, on the 31st, the Dean, too, resigned. With things seemingly spiraling out of control, current Archbishop Rowan Williams intervened, issuing a statement supporting the spirit of Occupy (here are links to this and more). The situation has stabilized somewhat since the Cathedral's decision not to pursue legal action, though tensions persist, with protesters chafing against poor treatment and critics worrying that the church's ties to the economic elite will preclude any real partnership with the movement.

Amidst all the hullabaloo, archbishops past and present have not been the only ones to pronounce God's favor upon OccupyLSX. Last week Terry Eagleton wrote in the Guardian that the protesters are "true followers of Jesus." Yesterday the Canon walked among the protesters and prayed a blessing over them, a remarkable turn-about from where things stood two weeks ago. Then today Hodgkinson publishes his piece claiming the movement is "fundamentally Christian."

Move over, Gilded Age - the present moment is bursting with intrigue when it comes to the relationship between religion and class.

Awards and Prizes for our Bloggers and Friends: The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Paul Harvey

On my way soon to the Southern Historical Association this coming weekend in Baltimore, where I will have the distinct pleasure (if my plane isn't delayed, if God wills it) of giving a tremendous award to one of our blog contributors, Darren Grem (Deg), who has been named one of the co-winners of this year's C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, given to the best dissertation in Southern History in any given year. Deg's dissertation is entitled "The Blessings of Business: Corporate America and the Rise of Conservative Evangelicalism." As one of the judges for this year's contest, I had the rare opportunity to survey a large number of dissertations in the field that came out in 2010 (and you wonder where my summer went), and was happy to see southern history in such great shape. There were a LOT of deserving contenders and any number of them could have been named winners -- indeed, I anticipate many will win prizes given out by other professional associations.

A description of Deg's dissertation may be found here. Since most folks reading this won't be at the awards ceremony Friday, here's part of what I will read on behalf of the selection committee:

Dr. Grem’s dissertation “follows the money” of American evangelicalism through the twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between corporate capitalism, southern entrepreneurs, and the rise of evangelical institutions. Individual chapters trace the innovations in funding and Christian entrepreneurship from figures as diverse as Billy Graham, R. G. LeTourneau, the founder of Chic-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, and evangelists such as Billy Graham and the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The result is a rich and complex analysis which places corporate capitalism squarely within the world of southern evangelicals through the twentieth century, much like C. Vann Woodward himself did with the world of the “Redeemers” and the New South movement. It’s one of the finest and most important works in American religious, intellectual, and economic history that I’ve read in a considerable time, and the fact that it combines all three of those fields I’m sure is one of the things that made it so attractive to Oxford University Press.

Just a couple of other notes here. First, congratulations to blog friend Alison Greene, whose dissertation "No Depression in Heaven: Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, 1929-1941," was one of the three finalists for the prize, and her work will soon be an oustanding book.

And, I might add, if you survey the list of recent winners of the C. Vann Woodward dissertation prize, you'll find the makings of some of the most important works in southern history published in recent years. Three in particular I'll note. The 2003 winner was our blog contributor and my co-author and co-editor Edward J. Blum, whose dissertation became the landmark work Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism. In 2004 the selection committee picked Chandra Manning's dissertation, which a few years later became a book that has become a staple of my classroom, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. Then in 2007, Bethany Moreton won the prize for her groundbreaking work that has since become the book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Makings of Christian Free Enterprise (Bethany then went on to be one of Deg's mentors at UGA, so the baton has been passed). In short, the C. Vann Woodward prize, both for the recipients as well as for the remarkable list of works that have been named as finalists for the award, has served to bring attention to books that have fundamentally shaped the field of southern history -- and it's no coincidence that religion has been central to a sizable number of the finalists and winners of the award since its establishment.

Just a quite note of irony, as befits the modern founder of the field and the author of The Irony of Southern History: C. Vann Woodward was, of course, one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, and all students of American history will be familiar with landmark works such as Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward's focus, as was true of his generation more largely, was usually economic and political history; no one will ever best his scathing portrayal of the "Redeemers" in Origins. Woodward knew little, and probably (as far as I know) cared less for religious history, which is given a reasonable but somewhat perfunctory treatment in Origins. That makes it ironic in many ways how many of the recent winners of the award named after him feature religion centrally in their work; it speaks also to a larger transformation of the field of American history too, I think.

And the same note of congratulations for my partner in crime Philip Goff, whose Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI remains central to the enterprise of American religious history in so many ways. Phil's Center has just received a sizable grant from the Lilly Endowment for a three-year project on "The Bible in American Life," which has many aspects to it and will culminate in a national conference in 2014. Read all about it here. So shout out to Phil for yet another success for the Center.

Adventures in “Christian” Retail

by Charity R. Carney

Disclaimer: This is a teaser. I’m working on a larger piece about experiencing employment at a Christian retail chain this summer. I took on the job because 1) we needed the money and 2) I was curious. I have been documenting my day-to-day life there as a full-time employee and am working up a full-length piece with an academic emphasis and analysis of marketing with religion, the gender politics of the place, as well as how they handle money and workers’ rights. Enjoy.

Update: Part II is of this series is now up here. Part III, the finale, is here. Extended responses informed from his own academic work on capitalism and American Christianity, from Darren Grem, are here and here.

I worked retail this summer. “Christian”-run retail. When I walked into the interview for the position at the local store that is part of a national chain (we’ll call it “Christian Chain” or “CC”), the manager was a bit baffled by the Ph.D. sitting in front of him. “Honestly,” I assured him (and meant it), “I want to work here and my family needs the income.” I (naively) believed that CC, a company that nationally proclaims its Christian values and give generously to conservative Christian causes/movements, would provide a good work environment and would reveal to me how Christian employers manage the workplace. It would give me insight into the world of Christian retail. And it has. Plenty of insight. So here’s a taste of what I witnessed in terms of the corporate model CC follows. The larger piece will include issues of sexism/sexual harassment and employee’s work schedules/worker’s rights but, like I said, teaser.

On money and mythology at CC: This company handles its resources in the most Luddite and inefficient way possible. There is one computer in the store where I worked. It was locked away in the back room and was used only to make/print out weekly schedules. All ordering is done by hand using a pencil and three-ring binders and a complicated system of “base” numbers and “minimum” orders. The poor soul who works in the back room has to then take all of the binders from each department and enter them into the one (aged) computer before a deadline in order for stock to come in.

There are no SKUs--no barcodes--no scanning devices. Thus the hand-written ordering. This is where the mythology comes in. I inquired about the lack of computers in the store and the ancient cash registers that required each item to be manually punched in and discounts to be manually entered as well. I was told that the cash registers WERE NEW. The explanation varied based on who responded to my questions. Some employees (especially those higher up) explained that it was just CC’s way. That it had maintained the same system since its birth (over 20 years ago) and that CC does not change. I found this idea interesting for several reasons. It requires more work from employees, thus costing the business more money. It is a business after all and so shouldn’t it be concerned with profits and losses? But it may also connect to the idea that workers should have sweat on their brow constantly in order to truly earn their wages. The Protestant ethic, so to speak. Work for work’s sake.

Several other (lower-paid) employees told me that the lack of barcodes was CC policy because barcodes represent the mark of the beast. Wha?! I know, this seems far-fetched. But this is a widely held belief amongst employees and thus should not be discounted. Some are dissatisfied with this reasoning but accept it, again, as being CC’s way so it cannot be questioned. (More on this in the longer article.)

Another strongly held belief is that the company does not have barcodes because then it does not have to have uniform pricing. Sales, then, do not have to be reflected at the register unless the customer notices that they are not receiving the discount and asks for it. A few employees see the lack of technology as a ploy for the company to make extra money.

There is an odd dichotomy at work at CC: they are focused on saving money (they are very concerned with hours and wages and do not move an employee to full-time unless they really need them and the employee makes enough demands) but they use a system that ultimately costs them money because it requires employees to work double or triple the hours at a task that in other stores is not nearly as involved and grueling.

Ultimately, what I’d like to consider in a larger format is what does it mean to be a Christian-run corporation in the modern marketplace? CC has held on to antiquated ideas regarding its particular brand of commerce, and the reasoning for that steadfastness varies based on what myth or history an employee chooses to subscribe. Also, the Christian values on which the chain claims to rely are not reflected in its treatment of employees or the employee’s treatment of each other. This begs the question: how much are “Christian” businesses relying on the image of being Christian without truly employing (or even hinting at employing) Christian ethics in their stores. This I will explore in more detail in the article with a discussion of sexual politics at CC and the overextension of employees to the point of completely disregarding their rights. Good times.

Exorcising America's Demons: Reflections on Possession and Class

Kelly Baker

This summer, I decided to test out some of my new research interests in the paranormal, monsters, horror, and religion on my poor-unsuspecting-can't-I-just-graduate-already? students. We read Joseph Laycock's "The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the Context of Secularization" to discuss how an artifact of popular culture emerged as folk religion/piety. Laycock smartly uses the reaction to the film by movie-goers, the press, and religious movements and individuals to problematize narratives of secularization. He poses the question: Why there is a supernatural turn at the supposed height of secularization theory? What follows then is a profile of Blatty, the reception of the film, and discussions about the American practice of exorcism. Laycock documents the "very conscious fear of demons and the supernatural" (5) that emerges as well as the increasing interest/belief in the paranormal.

Much like other works on religion and horror, Laycock attempts to get to the root of cultural fear and the fervent belief in the paranormal. Why do Americans purport belief in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural agents? What does our research look like if we apply Robert Orsi's "abundant empiricism" to this supernaturalism? Or apply Orsi's critique of religion-as-belief to the studies of the paranormal? How are Americans enacting, embodying, and engaging the paranormal?

While the students were reading about The Exorcist, I was reading sociologist Michael Cuneo's American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (2001). Though this book is now a decade old, the interest in exorcism might not be as obvious, but lurks still in American culture. Cuneo's fascinating book examines the origins of American exorcisms in the 1970s and the increase in popularity of the practice after the release of The Exorcist. He interviews Catholic exorcists, Protestant deliverance ministries, and lay exorcists, and he attends deliverance services in which demons of lust, procrastination, and pride are expelled. Moreover, Cuneo aptly assesses the romanticization of the priest/exorcist as hero in both the religious and popular imagination. In film and pulpy fiction, priests save the day by taxing their bodies and souls in attempts to rid people of demons. The masculine hero might even sacrifice himself to save a poor demon possessed girl. While I was reading I pondered the fascination with demons, the unsatisfying nature of Cuneo's (among others) "the devil made me do it" defense. American Exorcism was at its best in the heady descriptions of deliverance services and in the interviews with practicing exorcists. The cacophony of possessed souls screaming curses and moaning, the physicality of possession with (high) arching bodies and contortion, and the often calm assurance of those who battled with demons make for a rich tale of what deliverance and exorcism *feel* like. The fluidity of possessed and deliverer becomes apparent too: sometimes one must deliver others from demons, and sometimes one must be delivered. The possessed gnash, moan, and writhe on the floor, and then, get up and calmly deliver others. The change-up signals the fluidity of roles as well as a clear understanding possession is not a static state of being.

For me, Cuneo as interlocutor proved to be an interesting commentary on ethnographic practice and the relationship one has with subjects. Clearly, some of Cuneo's conversants wanted him to be delivered/exorcised too. Observation was not enough for them; they craved his participation as legitimacy of their action. To participate would signal the reality of possession, and his refusal unnerved some. In his descriptions of the services and his role as observer, it is clear the complexity of the scholar's position. The question that Cuneo doesn't answer purposefully is the question of authenticity: Are demons "real"? Do demonic forces exist? Cuneo admits that this question is the one he encounters the most, and it is a strategic move to not answer the question of whether possession or demons are *real* but rather to report the reality of demons for the possessed, the deliverance ministries, and the exorcists. Rather than debunk the presence of supernatural, this interlocutor attempts to document this extraordinary religious expression. These are clearly "abundant events"; social networks and relationships abound. Exorcism is surely real.

A larger question lingers: Why do demons become popular and present in a period of wealth and so-called secularization in the U.S.? Cuneo wonders about the presence of demons in suburbia and the practice of deliverance and exorcism among middle class white Protestants and Catholics. Much of the book is an attempt to showcase how mainstream this supernaturalism is by emphasizing who expels demons and who wants to be exorcised/delivered. Cuneo describes polo shirts, khakis, twin sets, understated jewelry, good purses and loafers that leader and members of these ministries wear. Their hair is coiffed and maintained. They are generally polite, when not demon possessed. They work at banks and in schools. They are white collar and firmly middle class.

At first, I nodded accordingly as any good reader should, but as I continued to read I wondered how class status becomes configured as a legitimator of religious experience. Are demons less real when the working class reports them? Is skepticism acceptable when the lower classes, the impoverished, report the supernatural? Why does class status authenticate demons (or not)? This seems to reflect earlier trends in religious studies scholarship, deprivation theories and familiar class stereotypes attached to religious adherence, that Sean McCloud aptly documents in Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religions & Religious Studies (2007), which I blogged on long, long ago. McCloud notes, "Those who wield less social, cultural, and economic power usually also have less control over how they are represented. Historically, working-class and minority groups and individuals have been imagined in ways that satisfied the desires and fantasies of dominant classes" (21). Religious movements of these groups, then, faced derision, skepticism, and critique both because of class status but also because of the class sentiments/stereotypes of the scholars discussing them. While reading American Exorcism, it became clear that there was something at stake in showcasing the mainstream nature of exorcism/deliverance and its deep atttachments to the American middle class. Documenting the middle class presence in exorcism functions to legitimate its presence and practice. Of course, the question of authenticity doesn't matter because (white) middle class Americans are involved. Favored class status authenticates, and thus exorcism is real because of its class status.

[Cross-posted at www.kellyjbaker.com]

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

__________________

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.