In Heath Carter's new book, we are given images of the first and second homes of Chicago's Second Presbyterian Church in the nineteenth century, and the juxtaposition is startling (16–17). Historians are accustomed to making bloodless observations about the refinement of American Christianity, but Carter's book makes the shift visceral. Readers do not only marvel at the difference between the simple lines and low ceilings of Second Presbyterian's original building and the soaring steeples and stained glass of its second. He takes readers into the pews, where we meet the parishioners in their rude clothes and work boots, imagine them glancing uncomfortably at the gilded railings and expensive art, and follow them back to their far more modest homes, where they struggled to survive. When he retired in 1873, Second Presbyterian's pastor was making $5,000 a year, ten times his pay thirty years before, and five times that of the bricklayers who constructed his building for him, assuming they worked full time six days a week.
In contemporary America, where the gulf between the rich and poor threatens to yawn that wide again, Christianity and conservative politics have become so intertwined that many American believers are convinced that their faith mandates small government. Americans disgusted with economic inequality oddly enough seem to agree. Those in the first group vote accordingly, and those in the second dismiss religion as a tool of the oligarchs, peddled by hypocrites and believed by the gullible. Carter, however, shows us a different route.
His subjects are workers and advocates for workers: bricklayers who complained that protestant churches discouraged unions, anarchists who claimed Christ, journalists and writers who denounced wealthy pastors. Carter's argument is that these people indeed recoiled from the ever more prosperous Christian elite of Chicago, who in turn were growing suspicious of “radicals” and “socialists,” who so often were also foreign migrants. Labor uprisings strained the relationship. When in 1867 workers rose in favor of an eight-hour workday, protestant and Catholic leaders alike offered muted criticism and nebulous bromides about conciliation. They endorsed good treatment for “labor” in the abstract, but grew unsympathetic to particular actions.
In the last few decades of the nineteenth century the threat grew tangible. Immigrants were winning electoral office, self-proclaimed socialists were becoming increasingly visible in city politics, and “angry and insecure church leaders closed rank with their friends in the business community. Their strengthening alliance produced vicious results in the summer of 1877, when restive working class persons took once more to the streets and leading Protestants . . . now cried for blood” (53). The Paris Commune of 1871, the violence at Haymarket Square in 1886, and the Pullman strike of 1893 convinced many protestant leaders that organized labor was driven by foreign anarchists determined to wreck capitalism and Christianity alike. In response, many working class people in Chicago lost their faith in the churches. Attendance plummeted. This “divorce between Labor and the Church,” as one writer called it, inspired anxiety. (97). By 1894, the British observer William Stead reported gloomily that not more than 5% of the working classes could be found in pews on Sunday.
This did not mean, however, that they had abandoned Christianity. The meat of Carter's argument is in his recovery of the working class social gospel. He gets as close as he can to the minds of those workers, excavating from archives, church records, and especially radical newspapers the words of diverse group of men and women all working class or sympathetic to the workers' plight. He finds that Chicago's working class communities had become “hotbeds of alternative Christianities” (75). August Spies, executed in 1887 as a Haymarket anarchist, proclaimed that Christ also had been condemned by “the Jerusalem Board of Trade” for fomenting revolt (74). The anarchist Albert Parsons declared that Christ had taught socialism, and his wife Lucy denounced ministers' indulgence in luxury and wealth. All argued that the pure Christianity of the New Testament was on the side of the working classes.
These ideas circulated widely among the ranks of Chicago's working classes, and began, slowly, to take hold among its ministers as well. With each uprising, a few younger ministers began to express solidarity with the workers' positions. The Baptist minister Henry Perry took workers' complaints seriously enough to compile a survey. The Methodist Jackson Stitt Wilson invited Eugene Debs to speak over his pulpit. The AME minister Reverdy Ransom allied himself with black laborers. More, by 1900 the American Federation of Labor presented a much more respectable voice than did the presumed bomb-throwing European anarchists of prior decades. And thus, by the time the books of Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden began to earn their authors national names in the first decade of the twentieth century, the ground had been tilled and fertilized for American churches to accept something called the social gospel.
To tell this story, Carter makes a valiant effort to focus on the average laborer, and indeed finds some sources to get him there: a survey here, a letter to the editor there. Often, though, he must rely on people who left a great deal of words behind but were more distant from the working classes than we might like, figures like the journalists Andrew Cameron and M.D. Mynkoop, whom Carter calls “labor aristocrats” closer to the middle class than the working classes Carter so emphasizes in their income and lifestyles, regardless of their pro-labor politics (37). Cameron particularly gets a great deal of play. Nonetheless, one leaves the book feeling the thesis has been thoroughly proven. His narrative will be persuasive for Christian Americans unsympathetic with the Republican party and frustrated that the religious right gets all the press, and in his introduction he makes that case. The argument is timely, and Carter knows it.
