Religion, once dismissed by labor historians as inhibiting working-class consciousness, is being rehabilitated. Work by Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, Jarod Roll, and Heath Carter have demonstrated that religion is like any other cultural phenomenon: capable of both inspiring and retarding political mobilization. The Making of Working-Class Religion by historian Matthew Pehl makes several important contributions to this literature. Set in Detroit, it elucidates an important, but understudied, hub of American religious life. And where most studies have focussed on the nineteenth century, it focusses on the supposedly secular mid-twentieth century. In addition, the story it tells is necessarily integrated: European Catholic immigrants, African American Protestants, and white southern evangelicals were the city's three largest working-class constituencies.

Equally valuable is the way that the book conceptualizes religion and class as co-constitutive discursive formations, not static “things.” Indeed, the echo of E. P. Thompson in its title is not incidental: both the working class and its religion were “made” by working men and women. Pehl does not obscure the many contradictions of this cultural construction project. Yet, he argues, we can discern the “outlines of a common religious consciousness” (8) created by their work experiences, “a new set of religious idioms” he christens “worker religion” (9).

Newcomers to Detroit, drawn by its burgeoning auto factories in the early twentieth century, brought their religion in tow. Adherents created meaning and forged communal bonds through their convictions about the nature of work and family, belief that relationships with supernatural beings were possible, and practices filled with emotional expressiveness. Though derided as a retrograde faith by middle-class Social Gospellers, it had strong resonances with the religious convictions held by conservative Christians of decidedly bourgeois, business-friendly backgrounds. But whatever initial similarities existed, working-class believers transformed these religious idioms into a new “worker religion” in the 1930s and 1940s.

Pehl amasses substantial evidence of worker religion and its influence. Detroit's popular mayor, the devout Catholic Frank Murphy, helped create a new political imaginary capable of uniting religious identities with the pro-labor politics of New Deal liberalism. Ministers like Charles A. Hill played a key role in rallying African American workers to the union cause. Presbyterian minister Claude Williams did the same among white southern evangelicals. The authoritarian appeals of Father Coughlin and the rabid antiunion tirades of southern evangelical J. Frank Norris swayed some. Yet 40 percent of United Auto Worker union members were practicing Christians during its formative years, suggesting the power of these new religious idioms.

In the 1950s and 1960s worker religion waned and race displaced class as the center of religious discourse. It framed antipoverty campaigns, drove the civil rights movement, and inspired the reactionary responses to both. As worker-oriented idioms atrophied, older beliefs resurfaced, including “personal, pragmatic relationships with supernatural figures” (174).

Why did worker religion decline and “race consciousness” grow? Pehl might have mapped these dynamics more clearly. Little is said about the most important factors affecting both class identity and race relations after World War II. From Thomas Sugrue's classic work, we know that government policies helped make white workers into homeowners in segregated suburbs. The assembly-line work that migrated with white workers out of the city center may have been as monotonous as ever, but, thanks to the UAW, they now had historically high levels of disposable income and leisure time. No wonder consumption ultimately displaced work as their primary basis for identity. But, of course, it was a very different story for nonwhite workers. Especially in Detroit, class had become racialized.

Thus white autoworkers increasingly understood themselves as consumers. They traded the old idioms of worker religion for a consuming faith that recent studies have shown was pioneered by pro-business evangelicals a half-century before. It was true that “race displaced class” (184) as new class formations in the 1950s gave racial identities new salience. But we should not ignore the more direct cause for the decline of worker religion: the rise of modern consumer identities.

Still, The Making of Working-Class Religion is essential reading. Modeling an effective way to integrate class and religious consciousness, it makes a substantial contribution to the study of religion and labor in the United States. One hopes Pehl's approach will be widely imitated. Though it is not the whole story of working-class religion in the mid-twentieth century, it is an indispensable part.