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  • Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf
  • Jessica Wilkerson
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2015)

Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf have written an engaging book that explores the post-World War II labour movement in the US south through the lens of religious culture. Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie examines the competing and changing Protestant creeds in the South and how the white working class navigated them. With the sacred as its backdrop, the book offers a new evaluation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (cio) Southern Organizing Campaign.

The authors provide a nuanced description of the religious landscape of the US south from the 1930s through the early 1950s, overturning the myth of a monolithic, ahistorical “southern religion.” The first two chapters examine the religious, political, and social turmoil during the Great Depression and World War II years, which set the stage for the cio’s organizing campaign in the 1940s. The authors argue that a “religious depression” in the 1930s “reshuffled the spiritual makeup of the South.” (37) Charismatic religious activity and restorationist denominations developed and began to transform the religious landscape, appealing especially to working-class southerners, and mainline denominations adopted fundamentalism. Alongside these premillennial religious cultures, post-millenial traditions persisted, especially as southern Methodists moved toward unification with the northern branch of the church and as young radical prophets organized throughout the South. Chapter 3 examines the faith of southern workers. By culling the oral history interviews of dozens of workers, the authors glean how they navigated and enacted spiritual belief. These rich sources underscore the importance of popular religiosity in the lives of working people. As the authors explain, popular religiosity “provided the framework within which working people assessed unions, employers, politics, and conflict.” (6)

Chapters 4 and 5 examine how, as evangelical Christianity surged in the South in the 1940s, two wings of evangelical Protestants – promoters of Christian free enterprise and pro-labour Christians – fought for the devotion of the white working class. Perhaps the most important organization for pro-business Christians was the National Association of Evangelicals (nae), which spread a conservative evangelical, free enterprise message in newspapers, over the radio, and through lobbying efforts. While the nae formed in New England, its messages—including the idea that unions were anti-Christian and communistic—appealed to southern boosters who reaped the benefits when manufacturers relocated in the nonunion South. Yet, pro-business Christianity was not “an uncomplicated tool manipulated by business.” (96) For many conservative evangelicals, liberalism and modernism seemed to threaten religious freedom. If the government could regulate business, the argument went, it could also control religion, leading to a totalitarian, Godless state. For others, models of unionism did not resonate with and sometimes even contradicted religious beliefs that forbid membership in political and social groups. The majority of southern evangelicals agreed that liberalism and modernism – represented by [End Page 310] a bureaucratic government and unions – threatened religious liberty or were signs of approaching end times. Prolabour Christians were a diverse group made up of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Highlander Folk School, and the industrial department of the YWCA. Most important for the cio, their own Christian ambassadors sought to build relationships with southern ministers, who could share pro-labour messages from the pulpit. Although the cio understood the importance of religion in the Southern Organizing Campaign, it faltered in two fundamental ways: first, responding to anticommunism, the cio distanced radical prophets on the left, even though they had the most knowledge about southern religious traditions; second, the cio did not build support among African American ministers (or workers), whose theology was more amenable to collective action. Nonetheless, as the authors show, anti-unionism among individual ministers, churches, and workers was not a foregone conclusion, and the cio’s organizers saw building support among southern ministers as vital to success.

The final two...

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