The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement

Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the growth of the labor movement with alarm, fearing that socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their ministries to the poor. Janine Giordano Drake's book The Gospel of Church traces the relationships between Protestant ministers and labor unions, finding that they worked hard to assert their cultural authority over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously-unaffiliated working-class communities, but rarely supported the most important demands of labor.

Format: Hardback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 08 November 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Unitarian preacher Bertrand Thompson was alarmed in 1908 by the labor movement's rapid expansion. He claimed that socialism had taken the role of the church. He was correct.

Few of the migrants who traveled to the North and West to work in factories and mines after the Civil War had any ties to conventional Protestant denominations. Instead, workers constructed a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded improved local, state, and federal infrastructure that supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter workdays, and a variety of municipal services. Protestant clergy were concerned that if the labor movement gained speed and cultural influence, socialist policies would replace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. They were even more concerned that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.

Janine Giordano Drake meticulously examines the connections Protestant preachers established with labor unions and working-class neighborhoods in her book The Gospel of the Church. She discovers that Protestant pastors worked hard to establish their cultural dominance over Catholic, Jewish, and religiously unaffiliated working-class groups. Furthermore, they seldom backed labor's most fundamental demands, such as freedom of speech and the right to collective bargaining. Protestant reformers' attempts to assert their power over industrial affairs directly harmed workers' efforts to establish social democracy in the United States, despite their heroic stories of Christian social reform.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197614303