Over the last 15 or so years, a rich literature has developed on a once-neglected topic: the interplay between religion and the American working classes. However, this scholarship remains bifurcated. Some works, such as those by Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman, appear in the University of Illinois Press’s “Working Class in American History” series and seem aimed primarily at labor historians. Other works, such as those by Darren Dochuck and Heath Carter, engage with labor themes but are generally categorized as “religious history.” Still others, like Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, straddle economic, cultural, and political histories. It is unclear how effectively these scholarly communities are speaking to each other, but it is notable that both Labor and Religion and American Culture have sponsored special issues on “religion and class” in recent years. In 2016, Janine Giordano Drake co-edited The Pew and the Picket Line, an anthology that made major strides in outlining and defining the state of the field. Now, Drake has published her first monograph, an ambitious history of the tense cultural competition between socialism and Protestantism during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Drake’s The Gospel of Church consists of three major “moves,” or intellectual sections. In her first move, Drake argues that the working classes of the Gilded Age had largely rejected the moral authority of traditional Protestant churches. In the second section, she claims that, in the vacuum created by the weakness of traditional churches, socialism captured the moral imagination of many working-class believers and a fair number of ministers. Christian critics of capitalism like Bouck White, W.D.P. Bliss, and George Herron “cohered around a common opposition to the profit system and a rebellion against denominational churches for their distortion of what they believed to be the true mission of Christianity” (p. 45). The growth and appeal of Christian socialism sparks Drake’s third and most important move: to explain the development of the Social Gospel and the rise of the Federal Council of Churches as an essentially reactionary and defensive move by Protestant ministers eager to monopolize the public discourse surrounding religion and labor.
As the foregoing description might suggest, Drake’s canvas is expansive. Indeed, she is eager to keep her eye not only on socialists and Protestants, but on Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and women as well. In doing so, Drake produces several interesting and useful charts on everything from religious demography to socialist newspapers, and she discusses key figures ranging from Eugene Debs to Woodrow Wilson. This breadth is impressive, but it does sometimes dilute her focus.
In my view, her strongest chapter also has the narrowest cast: the seventh chapter, which offers a close assessment of Charles Stelzle’s New York City Labor Temple between 1912 and about 1920. Stelzle, a Presbyterian minister who saw himself as a missionary to the working class, is not exactly unknown (Ken Fones-Wolf’s study of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, which Stelzle led in cooperation with the American Federation of Labor, laid the foundation for Drake’s work), but he has not received the close attention he has deserved. In Drake’s view, Stelzle was motivated primarily by jealousy of socialist success in redefining the idea of a “Christian commonwealth.” Many of the ethnically and politically diverse workers who met in the Labor Temple founded by Stelzle “thought they were redefining both Christianity and church for the modern era,” one in which traditional denominations might be rendered irrelevant (p. 168). Stelzle, Drake says, “took umbrage” at this notion (p. 170). Soon, “the Labor Temple became the public face of a percolating public debate over the boundaries of American Protestantism” (p. 173). The great strength of this chapter is the tightness of the chronology and window it offers onto daily life in the Temple as it shifted from a liminal space of diverse opinion into an aggressively orthodox missionary space once the U.S. entered World War I.
The seventh chapter also sets up her final two chapters, in which Drake makes some of her sharpest and most pointed arguments about what she sees as the moral shortcomings of the Social Gospel and liberal Protestantism – particularly as they adopted a tone of militant patriotism during World War I and grew accustomed to financial support from the John D. Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegies of the world. These revisionist claims – that the Social Gospel was “an imperious ministerial movement” (p. 178) and that the “development of liberal Christianity was … as much about the unwillingness of clergy to exercise a prophetic voice as it was about their theoretical right to do so” (pp. 176–177) – seem to be the ideas that Drake herself is most passionate about making. Christian Socialism, Drake clearly suggests, was a more authentic religious voice for social justice. By contrast, what mattered most to the liberal clergy responsible for articulating the Social Gospel and building the Federal Council of Churches was monopolizing the cultural authority of traditional churches to speak “for” the workers – without competition from socialist or politically radical Christian traditions, and often at the expense of programs that would have substantially benefitted the working class. Doubtless, some readers will feel that Drake pushes this reading too far. But a strong revisionist tonic is often clarifying, and few readers will leave The Gosepl of Church without their own strong reactions. Being thought-provoking is its own form of success.
