Few topics seem more natural and, sadly, timelier than American religion in bad economic times, our own or the economic depression of the 1930s. The essays by Heather Curtis, Jonathan Ebel, and Alison Greene point up how little we know about religion in the 1930s and, by implication, how little religion has informed policy during our own economic downturn. Perhaps our own crisis is still too new or we are distracted by the “Christian nation” debate or the latest clerical sex scandal. Whatever the cause, Curtis, Ebel, and Greene demonstrate that in the 1930s religion and economic dislocation produced remarkable religious challenges and transformations whose similarities as well as differences underlined their sometimes fateful intersection.
Economic depression might be thought a very natural support to religion. It is a commonplace, if poorly tested, that men and women turn to religion in difficult times, as in death, sickness, personal crises, or political crises. International examples include popular Polish support for its Roman Catholic leaders in opposing post–World War II Communism and popular German embrace of the Nazis' religiously informed anti-Semitism denounced by few Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed religious leaders. In the United States, the deep personal suffering experienced in the Great Depression challenged American optimism individually and collectively; organized religion everywhere discovered that economic catastrophe brooked little spiritual exceptionalism.
Of course, discussions of American religion and the Great Depression stand on one very notable rock, the 1959 American Society of Church History presidential address that became Robert Handy's 1960 Church History article, “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935.” Handy's small essay exemplified the best in American scholarship, trenchant in approach, clever in research, and complex in assessment. Handy argued that the analysis of economic depression and religion needed to begin before 1929 and that many complexities strained clear assessments of cause and effect between them. As in so many human and natural matters, much work and sophisticated thought were required to make sense of things. No cheap grace here.Footnote 1
The good news is that Curtis, Ebel, and Greene all forward fascinating research and energetic sophistication in rethinking religion in the Great Depression. In a delightful discovery highlighting the fruits of broad research, Curtis explains how the depression often uplifted “Pentecostal theology and missionary practice,” even if the uplift could not always be sustained. In a terrific discovery highlighting the fruits of terrific research, Curtis quotes the imaginative pentecostal evangelist William Booth-Clibborn exclaiming, “Depression without the DE and I spells PRESS ON!” This kind of sophomorically clever homespun promoted missionary ventures amidst the worldwide economic collapse and, at least in believers' minds, only proved the truth of pentecostal apocalypticism. True, economic realities impacted pentecostal efforts. But pentecostals remained remarkably persistent in seeing opportunity in the 1930s more often than they saw difficulties, a seemingly counterintuitive pattern for a people anxiously anticipating the end of the world.
Ebel's study of religion in California, especially in its central valley, brings forth three different dialogues that reflected the ways women and men struggled to interpret their circumstances. A “Gospel of Cosmic Catastrophism” placed almost all action in God's hands; a “Gospel of Christian Collectivism” turned faith in a leftist direction emphasizing sanctified social action more than individual conversion; and a “Gospel of Righteous Poverty” sanctified poverty and the lives of those who endured it. Perhaps in all three styles, not just those who imbibed the righteous poverty theme, one can see the relevance of the touching metaphor Grace Fuller employed in one of the many sermons she wrote for her husband Charles, the Los Angeles radio evangelist: “In every cup of bitterness that God offers us or permits Satan to offer us, there is a sweetness that we could have in no other way.”
Alison Greene describes a remarkable shift from church to state as New Deal social welfare programs sidelined traditional Protestant congregational aid in a Memphis Delta area brutalized by unprecedented economic blight. Her actors are armed Arkansas farmers demanding food, rural emigrants flooding Memphis's multi-faith “Community Chest,” which could not fill every empty urban mouth, and clergy who believed economic and social bankruptcy would produce revivals, one Mississippi Methodist bravely declaring that “Man's extremity is God's opportunity.” But like the morally sensitive Farm Security Administration managers that Ebel describes in Kern County, California, Greene also finds surprising Memphis Delta responses to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1935 request asking rabbis, priests, and ministers around the nation for their views on Social Security and the Works Progress Administration and for their general “counsel and advice.” Many Memphis Delta clergy answered Roosevelt positively, and one saw FDR's social programs as a “Divine Revelation,” far from the view commonly attributed to Protestant clergy in the 1930s.Footnote 2
Ebel focuses on rural California, Greene on the rural–urban symbiosis in the devastated Memphis Delta region, and Curtis on pentecostal proselytizing in overwhelmingly rural worlds overseas, and each reminds us of the need to expect and explain the unexpected. Their insights also reinforce the value of historical case studies illuminating broad interpretative problems. These are not just isolated papers about pentecostalism, evangelicalism, or the Memphis Delta region but studies that explore the remarkably different ways material circumstances and theological beliefs create the amazingly variegated convictions that shape our often unexpected history.
Do they help us see the Great Depression as a major site for adaptation and creativity in modern American history, in this case in the seemingly unlikely area of religion? Possibly. Merged, say, with Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest, Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again, Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, Kenneth J. Heinemann's A Catholic New Deal, and Beth Wenger's New York Jews and the Great Depression, they could form the core of a now nonexistent lecture in an American religious history survey or even in the modern U.S. history survey course. Exploring these complexities would help students and historians alike better explain the remarkable persistence of religious proclivities in a century so many thought would see the triumph of secularism.Footnote 3
They also demonstrate the enduring value of Robert Handy's 1960 Church History essay and encourage historians to employ the Great Depression as a historical laboratory for religion. Handy's sophistication and subtlety pointed to the fascinating possibilities the Great Depression offered to historians, even as it concentrated on broad trends and largely mainline religious groups. Curtis, Ebel, and Greene point up the real value of precise examinations of big questions and testify to the reality that men and women experience national and global events in intimate local settings. The pentecostal missionaries sent abroad amidst national economic catastrophe, the government established California migrant labor camps whose managers expressed surprising spiritual idealism, and the Memphis Delta clergy and laity who saw religion and social welfare transformed amidst flood, drought, and deflated markets all tell us how religion adapted, reshaped, and regrouped in a time that, by most accounts, should have spurred rampant secularization.
If the religious and social multiplicities that swirled around the Great Depression's stark economic uncertainties created an unintended laboratory for historical study, do we not have warrant for even larger questions? Did crushing economic collapse, with its gut-wrenching loss of confidence, combine with America's unprecedented religious diversity and the absence of a dominant state-supported religion to advance a symbiotic relationship between religion and secularity that unexpectedly benefited both? Did the inability of many denominations to master the nation's broad and deep economic collapse begin the erosion of denominational loyalty and the post–World War II growth of cross-denominational cultural-political religious identities that accelerated after 1945, as described in Robert Wuthnow's The Restructuring of American Religion? In what real ways did the character of the Great Depression deepen the American penchant to create new religions and reshape old ones?Footnote 4
At the least, Curtis, Ebel, and Greene demonstrate that the era of the Great Depression stands open for exciting religious history because in so many places and so many ways, their historical actors uplift the seemingly persistent human habit of drawing meaning from whatever circumstance is present, not least profound economic dislocation.
