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The Making of Working-Class Religion

Online ISBN:
9780252098840
Print ISBN:
9780252040429
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

The Making of Working-Class Religion

Matthew Pehl
Matthew Pehl
Augustana College
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Published:
1 September 2016
Online ISBN:
9780252098840
Print ISBN:
9780252040429
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America's workers. This innovative volume focuses on Detroit to examine the religious consciousness constructed by the city's working-class Catholics, African American Protestants, and southern-born white evangelicals and Pentecostals between 1910 and 1969. The book embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As the book shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture's secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late 1930s on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, the book shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city.

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