The Pew and the Picket Line collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the contributors use in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the church and the shop floor. Their vivid essays show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants established credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism.
Innovative and essential, The Pew and the Picket Line reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism.
Contributors: Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, Ken Fones-Wolf, Erik S. Gellman, Alison Collis Greene, Brett Hendrickson, Dan McKanan, Matthew Pehl, Kerry L. Pimblott, Jarod Roll, Arlene Sánchez-Walsh, and Evelyn Sterne.
""This is a terrific collection. In treating the religious commitments of American working people seriously, it offers a more holistic perspective of these men and women that reflects their very humanity."" --Nick Salvatore, author of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist ""Fully attentive to the historical scholarship and political theory upon which the volume's scholarship builds, Cantwell, Carter, and Drake also take the necessary steps in their historiographical introduction to reopen all questions about how work, race, gender, ethnicity, region, and religion have intersected in the American past, and to suggest provocative new ones. The richly textured historical case studies that follow more than fulfill the agenda the editors set. This is a superb work of collective history by some of the most creative younger historians working on the subject today.""--Robert Orsi, author of The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 18801950 ""The coeditors have assembled a tremendous and diverse team for this volume. Each essay is by itself a significant contribution, and some provide brilliant and pioneering analysis and the introduction is definitely the best historiographical overview, survey, and analysis of scholarship in the field that I have ever read. It sets the standard for the next generation of scholarship.""--Paul Harvey, coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America ""Navigating a wide spectrum of time and workspaces, racial and ethnic expressions, and blue-collar gospels, this brilliantly conceived and superbly executed volume demands that historians shift their gaze from the much examined corporate to under-scrutinized labor side of modern American Christianity and capitalism. Fifty years after its delivery, Herbert Gutman's plea for historians to take seriously the authentic and empowering qualities of working-class belief has finally been addressed, head on, with critical empathy and care, in an accessible manner. This is a timely and significant scholarly intervention."" --Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism
