Janine Giordano Drake – författare

In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong.In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.In The Gospel of Church, Janine Giordano Drake carefully traces the relationships which Protestant ministers built with labor unions and working class communities. She finds that Protestant ministers worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities. Moreover, they rarely supported the most important demands of labor, including freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Despite their heroic narratives of Christian social reform, Protestant reformers' efforts to assert their authority over industrial affairs directly undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States.

The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism. Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Evelyn Sterne, and Arlene Sanchez Walsh.