Library resources For IAS themes

Despite constitutional limitations, the points of contact between religion and politics have deeply affected all aspects of American political development since the founding of the United States. Within partisan politics, federal institutions, and movement activism, religion and politics have rarely been truly separate; rather, they are two forms of cultural expression that are continually coevolving and reconfiguring in the face of social change. Faithful Republic explores the dynamics between religion and politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many other aspects of American political history, addressing divorce, civil rights, liberalism and conservatism, domestic policy, and economics. Together, the essays blend church history and lived religion to fashion an innovative kind of political history, demonstrating the pervasiveness of religion throughout American political life.

The enlarged European Union faces the greatest challenge in its history. It seems that the older forces that animated European integration are no longer able to provide political cohesion. What can hold Europe together in the future? Does Europe's common culture offer a new source of solidarity? What moral concepts, what traditions, what goals are capable of bringing together the Union's diverse inhabitants in a common democratic polity? The issue of Europe's religions is of particular interest in this context. What is the role of religion in the integration processes within and between European societies? Having learned from their tragic experiences, Europe's democratic societies have sought over the last two centuries to oust religion from the political sphere. It was not for nothing that it was viewed as a source of contention, rather than unity. This is certainly still often the case today. However, it may be that European religions also have the potential to bring the people of Europe closer together, instead of dividing them further. The contributions to the present volume take a close look at this issue. Particular attention is paid to the role of Islam in the European public sphere. The book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America's workers. In this innovative volume, Matthew Pehl 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. Pehl embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As he 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 Thirties on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, Pehl 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.

This revised award-winning Yale dissertation brings to life the distinct but intersecting worlds of black and white Americans during the Depression. A collapsing cotton economy, alternating floods and droughts, and racial stratification meant that hard times came early and stayed late in Memphis and the Delta. By 1929, the region teetered on the brink of crisis and churches could no longer carry the burden. Change came quickly and relentlessly during the 1930s, and this upheaval carved new contours in the religious landscape. The ethnic and theological diversity of Memphis and the Delta included an array of black and white Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians typical to the South, a number of Pentecostal and holiness denominations, a small but disproportionately influential Jewish community, a thriving minority of black and white Catholics, and a homegrown denomination, the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). The region embodied broader national trends in American religion during the 1930s, both despite and because of its particularities. From the poorest sharecropper in Arkansas to the wealthiest philanthropist in New York, Depression-era Americans re-envisioned the relationship between church and state and reevaluated the responsibilities of each for the welfare of the nation and its people. This groundbreaking historical study focuses on the effects of the Great Depression on American religious life, exploring the shifts in power among American religious bodies and the everyday lives of American citizens as a result of the Great Depression.