Erik Gellman and Jarold Roll remind historians to take religious ideas and institutions seriously when studying working-class movements. While few labour scholars would dismiss such an insight, most would not make it the foundation for their research. These authors do, and they successfully show the centrality of biblically-based notions of community and justice in their study of interracial activism among southern agricultural workers during the New Deal. Focusing on the intersecting careers of Claude Williams, a white Presbyterian minister from Tennessee, and Owen Whitfield, an African-American farmer and preacher from rural Mississippi, Gellman and Roll offer a fascinating story of labour organising and politicking that cuts across racial lines. When seeking to improve the working conditions of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and farm workers, these two southern men of God found common ground by turning to their faith, which ‘provided the moral conviction and courage necessary to confront the physical degradation of God's children in poverty’ (p. 3). Their vision for a better society was ‘an ecumenical one that combined strands of fundamentalism, liberalism, and Marxism’ (p. 3). Their energies eventually led them to form the People's Institute for Applied Religion, a Social Gospel-type institution designed to integrate Jesus' call for a just society with contemporary struggles for improved wages and working conditions, housing and aid from the federal government. Modelling their meetings as old-time revivals and borrowing preaching styles and music from the burgeoning Holiness-Pentecostal movement, they ‘hoped to stitch factory workers into CIO unions and achieve power through unity, the promise of Pentecost’ (p. 113). And by all accounts, Williams and Whitfield were successful, at least for a while. They energised labour unions with a stream of new recruits, both Black and White, and won concessions from planters and employers. Many of their achievements, however, were short-lived. The rising tide of postwar conservatism and anti-communism quickly dampened popular enthusiasm and political support for southern unionism. Williams also lost the support of important religious and union leaders angry over his hard-charging leadership style while Whitfield battled family tensions, making it nearly impossible for them to continue their partnership. Not all was lost, though, as Gellman and Roll suggest that the interracial activism of the New Deal laid part of the groundwork for the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. While a fine case study of the intersection of religion and labour during the New Deal, this book leaves some questions not fully answered. How did the preachers tap the organisational resources of Black sacred life – the newspapers, conferences, aid society and fraternal groups – to spread and validate their message? Indeed, the use of these resources by Martin Luther King and his leaders lay at the heart of their civil rights victories. What internal tensions developed among Christian unionists, particularly between denominational and charismatic worshippers, that may have limited the lasting success of the movement? Still, this is an important book that reminds readers of the significance of religion to the study of labour history.