By Paul Buhle
The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement, by Janine Giordano Drake. Oxford University Press, 2023.
The scholarly study of Christian Socialism and Christian anti-socialism, going back only a few generations, has too often been about the ideas and lives of a few leading figures. Large areas of potential study, such as the wide circle of religious socialists around the important journal The World Tomorrow (1918-1934) and the many actual activities of leftwing missionaries, remains too little studied
Indiana University professor Janine Giordano Drake, co-editor of the admirable anthology The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, has taken on the task of grappling with the clerical conservatives and liberals of the 1880s to 1920s who sought to undermine the spread of the socialist movement, which was then at its high tide. She offers a stunning portrait of a society amid great changes.
Giordano Drake comes to the subject as a churchgoer, and my own background in the liberal and less-than-liberal sections of Protestantism makes me appreciate her commitment to understanding what happened. She also comes at the subject as a revisionist of sorts. Recent scholarship has emphasized ways in which the “Social Gospel” emphasis on amelioration of poverty and a greater sense of common citizenship had a real base in sections of the labor movement. Giordano Drake shows us the other side. The Social Gospel emerged as an alternative to “dangerous” socialistic and free-thought ideas. It clasped to itself the labor movement’s anti-socialist elements, fixed in position at the top of the highly exclusionary American Federation of Labor, sharing a dread of anything that smacked of outright anti-capitalist sentiment and threatened its authority.
She offers us, first of all, a broad and fascinating view of secularism, or non-church-going, of much of the contemporary working class. In her scholarship, as in life, the world of Protestants had more volatility than among Catholics, where secularism had hold along with an openness to political radicalism.
How did this happen? Outside of the African American community, the U.S. working class of 1890 was more Catholic than anything else, and unlike Catholic institutions that could provide wide social services, Protestant denominations in big cities attracted few working-class people. Indeed, the spread of literacy along with the worsening of working-class life in the second half of the nineteenth century encouraged a wide skepticism, along with a sort of free-thought view of Jesus as a carpenter, fellow-worker, and no friend of the rich. Protestant churches, most of which owed their physical existence to the support of the wealthy classes, nurtured ministers and church councils keenly attuned to patronage.
The fledgling but not insignificant “labor churches” and quasi-Christian Protestant Socialist prophets like W.D.P. Bliss, George Herron, and Herbert Casson, struggled without such patronage. Thanks perhaps most of all to Eugene V. Debs— portrayed as a modern Christ facing legal crucifixion at the time of his arrest for leading railroad workers in the great Pullman Strike of 1894—the living presence of the Christian Socialist doctrine had at least a public representative.
Debs’s Socialist Party, or rather the non-doctrinaire and Protestant, mostly small town or rural sectors of the party, avidly proselytized for the Cooperative Commonwealth in metaphorical Christian tones. At one point, the Christian Socialist newspaper reputedly had tens of thousands of readers and a small flock of ministers, Black and white alike, in the field preaching the Good News of socialism’s impending arrival.
Catholic and Protestant anti-socialists responded with vigor. Pope Leo’s Rerum novarum (1891), used throughout the twentieth century to justify the legitimacy of unions, actually had a very different purpose: to warn against socialism and offer an alternative. “Worker-priests,” though sometimes disciplined, were, as Giordano Drake notes, most often treated gently by bishops because they legitimized Church doctrines and a Church presence among large sections of the immigrant working class. In communities badly divided before emigration from Europe (German, Czech (“Bohemian”), Italian, and others), leftwingers found only stolid conservatism, usually along with antisemitism, among their clerical opposites.
For a historic moment, “Municipal Socialism” and the reform impulses of liberal churches seemed on the same path. They strove to break through the walls of corruption around civic government, empower representatives of working-class communities to engage with reform-minded politicians, work together for clean water, and so on.
In the end, during the years shortly before the great Red Scare of 1919-22, the arrival of the First World War, the U.S. entry, the repression of the heretofore vast socialist press, the widespread threat of deportations—all these hammered home the message that socialist or anti-capitalist doctrine of any kind was not for Americans. And anyone who disagreed was “disloyal” in one sense or another and could be in serious trouble.
The Gospel of Church is too rich in details and insights to be confined to even a medium-sized review, and readers will find themselves enriched by a careful study. What Giordano Drake makes clear again and again is that, with exceptions, “ministers only stood in solidarity with workers insofar as their presence buttressed ministers’ prestige.” (p.177). With the U.S. entry into the First World War, and with massive repression of real or suspected antiwar opposition, the Federal Council of Churches entered Woodrow Wilson’s White House in grand style. In tune with Wilson’s own leanings, the FCC embraced white supremacy and “Americanism.”
Wartime strikes, spreading rapidly with the shortage of available labor, threatened to throw a wrench into the very idea of the “labor church.” The hugely influential Methodist minister Harry Ward, popular lecturer and author of The Social Creed of the Churches, acknowledging that unions, and even the Industrial Workers of the World, had sought to uplift workers, nevertheless preached that only Christianity itself could bring about redemption from a darkening world.
The Bolshevik Revolution offered clerical anti-socialists the final and decisive fuel that they needed. In the massive postwar rollback of unions, “Christian Businessman” offered the answer: cooperation in place of conflict. Moreover, in the views of some religious thinkers, the home should be a model for the factory: workers had rights, but authority of the household, aka the factory, fell to the patriarch. The Rockefeller Plan, an explicitly non-union employee operation, even supplied a model for the U.S vision of world leadership. “Christian” schools, orphanages, and clinics would continue to promise that socialism and communism offered false answers to poverty and accompanying dislocation.
White Protestant denominations, otherwise mostly headed toward the same oblivion as their European counterparts, successfully solidified a “white Protestantism” as a trust/lobby/conglomerate, using it as the U.S. version of welfare capitalism. To extend the thought, it has become the core of anti-welfare capitalism, until and unless its participants see what Trumpian Christianity is actually doing to their lives.
Giordano Drake ends with the uncomfortable thought that “privately funded ministries remain at the heart of the nation’s social safety net” (p.236). In the short or not-so-short run, the forces around Donald Trump and his clerics have won the day. What will the future hold for socialistic Christians? Wait and see. But read this book carefully to grapple with our problems.
Paul Buhle is editor of the graphic novel Radical Jesus along with many other comics.
Image credit: Oxford University Press