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

Historians have mined Detroit’s documentary record to great effect, finding in Motor City a window onto any number of momentous trends in American life, ranging from industrialization and unionization to the rise of working-class conservatism. But as Matthew Pehl’s new book, The Making of Working-Class Religion, underscores, archival treasures aplenty remain to be unearthed.

Pehl’s book casts twentieth-century Detroit in new light, as a center of religious creativity and conflict, a place where faith—for all of its ambiguous sociopolitical implications—was seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of not just private but also public life. His story picks up in the 1910s, when diverse streams of migrants, including European Catholics, white Protestants, and African Americans, were pouring into the city’s neighborhoods and factories. Pehl deftly shows how, for all of that diversity, there were also many commonalities in religious experiences. Christian beliefs, practices, and institutions, Pehl argues, offered working people “a sense of tradition and peoplehood, while simultaneously providing a source of richness and meaning for individual lives” (54). Of course, many of the problems confronting these new residents were not individual but rather systemic in nature. Pehl suggests that the Social Gospel, a movement that he sees as “firmly rooted in the educated middle class,” failed to address fundamental questions of economic justice (64). It was left to working people to forge solutions of their own. Following Lizabeth Cohen and Michael Denning, he argues that starting in the 1930s they did just that, making “worker religion,” a category Pehl uses to describe the “new formulations of religious consciousness” that workers embraced and promoted in these years (79). He backs this claim with prodigious evidence. His treatment of the New Deal era is chock-full of vivid illustrations of how working-class Catholics, African Americans, and white Protestants alike powered waves of prolabor religious innovation. We learn, for example, about the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, which packed an outsized punch, given that at its height in the early 1940s it boasted only twenty-five hundred members. We also learn about black ministers such as Horace White, Malcolm Dade, and Charles A. Hill, who boosted the cause of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and industrial unionism more broadly; and about Lloyd T. Jones, a southern evangelical and erstwhile “Ford preacher” who went on to become president of UAW Local 2. Along the way Pehl leaves no doubt that religion could cut both ways. He elaborates on the antiunion campaigns of Catholic priest Charles Coughlin and fundamentalist preacher J. Frank Norris, among many others.

Worker religion continued to thrive in the years surrounding World War II, but by the end of the 1950s it was losing steam. Pehl attributes this decline to growing affluence, to the onset of the Cold War, and especially to the rising salience of race in public conversation. “The idealized images of Jesus as an archetypal working man . . . no longer served the same cultural need,” he explains. “Raced as white, gendered as aggressively masculine, and invoked as a symbol of universalistic, democratic virtues, Christ the Worker was born in an era of economic depression and ideologically driven wars between nation-states” (181). In the era of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, worker religion, with its thoroughgoing emphasis on class, did not suddenly evaporate. Rather, it slowly gave way to new religious paradigms foregrounding race.

Pehl’s book fits within and is a welcome addition to the growing literature on working-class religion in the modern United States. His research is rich and he rightly points out that, both in terms of its periodization and its integrative focus on three different streams of working-class faith, his treatment is distinctive—and much needed. At the same time, the exact nature of his historiographical intervention ends up being somewhat muddled. Pehl’s is not, as the title purports, a story about the making of working...