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

Matthew Pehl has written a gem of a book. In recent years, labor and working-class historians have devoted increasing attention to the role that religion has played in the lives of workers, while religious historians have begun to focus more on the class character of religious traditions. Pehl’s deeply researched, carefully constructed, and beautifully written volume brilliantly illustrates the rich potential of this welcome scholarly convergence. Although the book appears in the University of Illinois Press’s long-running series “The Working Class in American History,” it is every bit as much a work of religious history as one of labor history. Indeed, it melds these approaches seamlessly to produce a work of rare insight.

Pehl offers a religious history of Detroit’s working class during the period from 1910 to 1970, years of enormous social, political, and spiritual change. One could scarcely imagine a better setting for a case study of working-class religious dynamics. Detroit served as a crossroads where immigrant Catholics, white Appalachian evangelicals, and black Baptists, Methodists, and Muslims converged. Home to such influential religious leaders as Charles Coughlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Reverend C. L. Franklin, and Elijah Muhammad, it was also ground zero of industrial unionism and headquarters for the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a union that appealed to its members’ religious commitments.

Pehl argues that the Depression-era Motor City produced a phenomenon he calls “worker religion,” in which “powerful ideas and idioms regarding the social meaning of work reshaped the religious practices of many Catholic, African American, and southern white evangelical workers” (79). During the booming 1920s, he explains, Detroit’s churches tended to be insular and often relied on corporate funding. Although they were meaning-giving institutions, they rarely bucked the city’s power structure or fostered connections beyond the boundaries of their faith, sect, or ethno-racial group. But, in the 1930s, “workers’ political and religious consciousness shifted, broadened, and intertwined as Detroiters responded to the travails of the Great Depression” (67). Figures such as the devoutly Catholic Detroit mayor, Frank Murphy, who went on to serve as Michigan governor and Supreme Court justice, labor priests like Father Clement Kern, who were steeped in Catholic social teaching, independent black preachers like Horace White, who embraced the UAW, and white evangelicals like Lloyd T. Jones, who preached in a Ford-funded church before taking charge of his union local together created “a new political imaginary for working-class congregations, who increasingly came to fuse their religious identities with their civil identities as ‘makers’ of the New Deal” (70).

Worker religion was complex, ephemeral, and embattled, Pehl explains. Each tradition harbored conservative tendencies that resisted worker religion, such as the right-wing fundamentalism of Reverend J. Frank Norris, who led a crusade to rid the city of influences like the radical preacher Reverend Claude Williams. And no sooner had worker religion emerged than the experiences of World War II and the Cold War weakened it. As African Americans arrived seeking war jobs, racial tensions rose and a bloody race riot erupted in 1943. By 1947, resurgent anticommunism put worker religion on the defensive.

What ultimately undermined worker religion, however, was the declining salience of the labor question amid 1950s prosperity accompanied by the rising salience of race as white workers escaped to suburbs while blacks contended with a process of automation that disproportionately eliminated their jobs. “Race-conscious religion transformed worker religion” (185), Pehl argues, and some advocates of worker religion, like Father Kern, shifted seamlessly into racial justice work. But the shared struggles that had created common idioms for whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants in the 1930s no longer drew them together. “Over the course of the 1960s, worker religion seemed increasingly incapable of addressing the problems of racism, sexism, poverty, and urban decline that marked the era” (209). As it lost coherence, no unifying replacement took its place.

This is a poignant and profoundly significant story, told with skill and sensitivity...