The Making of Working-Class Religion by Matthew Pehl (review)

Matthew Pehl's The Making of Working-Class Religion is a welcome contribution to the emerging literature on religion, class, and labour that has been gaining momentum over the last decade or so. The title's obvious allusion to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class signals both the author's worker-centred focus, and that his analysis of something he calls "worker religion" is thoroughly grounded in the particular time and place with which his study is concerned. In this case, the place is Detroit, and the time is the 20th century. Pehl makes a strong case at the outset, interesting in itself, that Detroit is not only an important city in the history of industrial labour, but also one of the most religiously significant cities in the United States in the 20th century. And it was here, in the midst of a religiously diverse industrial city, that Pehl explores the ways that working people forged new relationships between their religious faith (Christianity in this case) and their class identity.

Worker religion, as Pehl constructs it, is not a universal or perennial religion. It is rather a religious formation that emerged in the very particular setting of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, and likely somewhat differently in cities other than Detroit. Critical to Pehl's formulation is what historian Michael Denning has called the "laboring" of American culture in the 1930s. In the context of the Great Depression and a crisis in capitalist labour, the United States turned its attention to issues of work not only in economic and political circles but in mass media and popular culture as well. Labour was the zeitgeist. And against this background, organized religion also prioritized issues of work and labour (though in ambivalent ways), even as Detroit's workers were producing forms of religion that reconciled their industrial experiences with their traditional faith and constructed identity and meaning on both an individual and community level.

One of the refreshing contributions of Pehl's book is its focus on working-class religion as consciousness, drawing on E.P. Thompson's treatment of class consciousness as lived experience. For Pehl, working-class religion is "built from the shared experiences, relationships, and value systems that people 'made' in the search for meaning." (6) Religion as consciousness is dynamic, always embedded in unfolding social and material relationships. It is also, therefore, always ambivalent, in tension with tradition and contemporary circumstances. While in some sense "consciousness" might suggest that religion is a purely intellectual thing, Pehl says that "rather than representing any systematic theology, working-class religious consciousness might be better described as a network of idioms, the proper use of which permitted believers access to spiritual resources and supernatural patrons." (26)

Over the course of six chapters, Pehl traces the development and change of this network of idioms over time in Detroit from 1910 through to the 1960s. Pehl's primary wager, and I think it pays off, is to explore the shared class consciousness of workers across three quite different communities in Detroit that might be treated separately by other authors: Roman Catholics, who were largely European immigrants; African American Protestants, many of whom migrated to Detroit from the South; and white evangelical Protestants who also migrated from the South (especially in and after the 1930s). Despite the great differences between these groups, they shared a similar – though, as Pehl shows, sometimes ambivalent – class identity that cut across denominational, doctrinal, and racial categories. Each chapter of the book treats all three of these groups, separating them out to discuss their particular concerns, pursuits, and changes over time, but also showing how they shared, in their own ways, a worker religion. The changing dynamics of race and gender, and the nature and meaning of work and worker identity eventually led to the decline of worker religion in the post-World War II years and into the 1960s. Pehl deserves credit for his attention to the...