The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaw563
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoFifty years have passed since the publication of Herbert Gutman's work on Protestantism and the labor movement, which revealed how labor leaders drew on religious values to resist the logic of capital (“Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” American Historical Review, Oct. 1966, pp. 74–101). It has been some twenty-five years since Ken Fones-Wolf applied such questions to Gilded Age and Progressive Era trade union organizations (Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915, 1989). Now a new generation of scholars are examining both religious and labor history in ways that point toward a much more complicated history. The Pew and the Picket Line benefits from a clear and helpful introduction by the editors, who remind readers how religion has been understood by labor economists and historians. The articles make this collection worth scholarly attention, and, even though some are better than others, they build on each other. For instance, Dan McKanan's discussion of the nineteenth-century fiction of George Lippard and Ignatius Donnelly builds on Gutman's themes by revealing the breadth of working-class interest in magic and “esoteric” religion, expanding our understanding of the religious sources of anticapitalist labor organizing. Less expected is Jarod Roll's treatment of miners in the southern Midwest and the way they religiously responded to a dangerous work environment that offered the possibility of lucrative reward. Roll demonstrates that worker interest in Charles Fox Parham's faith healing was grounded in their belief that spiritual power could overcome risk and poverty, and he argues that it transformed Parham's Pentecostal teachings, moving it toward a prosperity gospel.
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