As its title suggests, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South takes religious belief seriously. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf frame faith as a critical component in the construction of the southern working class. Challenging the top-down model of modern American religion put forth in recent work by Darren Dochuk, Bethany Moreton, Kevin Kruse, and others, the authors push beyond a focus on denominational divides, preachers’ publications, and other manifestations of formal faith to explore the lived religious experiences of working people—or “popular religiosity”—through newspapers, union records, and oral histories. Presenting a more complicated and dynamic picture of popular southern faith, they argue that the disruptions of the Depression and World War II created space for advocates of a more radical and socially engaged Protestantism, which thrived alongside (and in contest with) its more conservative counterparts until it was undone by the dawn of the Cold War.

The book's seven chapters chart the transformations of the southern religious landscape during the 1930s and 1940s. The first two chapters analyze the social and economic implications of the Depression and wartime mobilization, highlighting how the “religious depression” accelerated longer-term crises in mainstream Protestantism and fed the growth of new denominational offshoots. While these shifts ultimately laid the foundation for the rise of conservative evangelicals in the years after World War II, the authors show that progress was fairly limited through the 1930s. Rather, it was the more radical “prophetic front” that thrived during the Depression, marked by a commitment to a wide range of social justice struggles. The third chapter focuses on the response of southern white workers to the socioeconomic and religious changes, charting how the relocation to mill and industrial towns and, somewhat later, the rise of the automobile dramatically expanded the range of options available to southern workers. The spiritual leveling of the church took on new meaning and significance in the wake of the Depression and amid rapid industrial growth. Workers could rise to prominent positions within their congregations, taking on some of the decision-making and managerial authority denied them at the workplace.

The diverse southern religious landscape offered opportunities as well as obstacles for union organizers, as the second half of the book shows. The fourth chapter serves as a hinge, treating the construction of a Christian free-enterprise ideology as both an organic and an instrumental collaboration between business and evangelical organizations. Fones-Wolf and Fones-Wolf highlight the ways in which the growth of a religiously infused, free-market anti-unionism coincided with a much broader revitalization of postwar Christianity, evident in new publications, radio broadcasts, new evangelical colleges and universities, and the Youth for Christ movement. At the workplace, the most obvious manifestation of Christian free enterprise was the industrial chaplaincy movement—discussed at length by the authors in “Managers and Ministers,” a spring 2015 article in Business History Review—wherein business tried to inject evangelical principles into the productive process as an alternative to potentially divisive unions. Across the denominational spectrum, mainline churches retreated from earlier endorsements of collective bargaining, seeing mounting industrial conflict as a symptom of spiritual crisis.

Labor activists similarly fused religious and social values, as the book's fifth chapter demonstrates, but they did so in a much more fractured and increasingly inhospitable landscape. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) drew sincerely but inexpertly on the region's progressive religious traditions. Initially ignorant of the centrality of evangelical faith to the southern working class, the CIO realized its importance soon after launching the southern organizing campaign in 1946. While Operation Dixie did seek to incorporate faith into its appeals, it did so in ways that sometimes worked at cross-purposes with the broader initiative. Charged with religious outreach, for example, the CIO's community relations department was dominated by northern liberals whose modernism and ecumenism was incompatible with the rising tide of southern evangelicalism. This misreading alienated southern clergy, whose own difficult position is considered in chapter 6. Despite the increasingly conservative direction of many southern churches, the authors demonstrate, there were potential allies in the pulpits, sympathetic to unions and willing to risk the wrath of employer backlash even in the early postwar era. As the final chapter shows, many of the union's most capable staff and organizers were the most committed to the fusion of faith-centered organizing and racial justice. Ultimately unable to overcome employer opposition, an increasingly hostile political climate, and rigid racial divides, they nevertheless created pockets of non-Communist labor and religious activists, who would play important roles in the Black Freedom struggle.

If southern evangelicalism was not inherently hostile to union-organizing drives, it was hypersensitive to modernism, outside forces, and above all, secularism. It was thus particularly susceptible to changes in the postwar social and political climate. What space the Depression had created for a potent, popular southern faith responsive to issues of social and economic justice, the Cold War closed. In this sense, the book's explanation of the failure of Operation Dixie hits familiar notes, albeit in a far more complicated arrangement. The CIO's decision to distance itself from the “prophetic front” was necessary but ultimately counterproductive, casting off the unions’ most effective potential allies in an effort to make the campaign more respectable to those who would not accept it anyway. Whatever its content a few years earlier, the southern evangelicalism of the early postwar era was far more fertile for critics of labor than its supporters. While the authors pay due attention to the strategic missteps of the CIO's campaign, including the damning decision to hold the black church and black workers at arm's length, the reader gets the sense that the opportunity was lost by 1946.

But one need not share the authors’ optimistic portrayal of Operation Dixie's potential to find the book invaluable. Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South is an incredibly rich, intensely researched, and impeccably told account of the intersection of labor and religion in modern America. While not a work of business history, it has much to tell business historians. The strength of southern evangelical faith has long been regarded as a naturally conservative force among white workers, but the authors demonstrate that it was not always or inevitably so.