The Gospel of Church How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement

Free Download Janine Giordano Drake, "The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement"
English | ISBN: 0197614302 | 2023 | 328 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 19 MB
In 1908, Unitarian pastor Bertrand Thompson observed the momentous growth of the labor movement with alarm. "Socialism," he wrote, "has become a distinct substitute" for the church. He was not wrong.

In the generation after the Civil War, few of the migrants who moved North and West to take jobs in factories and mines had any association with traditional Protestant denominations. In the place of church, workers built a labor movement around a shared commitment to a Christian commonwealth. They demanded an expanded local, state and federal infrastructure which supported collective bargaining for better pay, shorter work-days, and an array of municipal services. Protestant clergy worried that if the labor movement kept growing in momentum and cultural influence, socialist policies would displace the need for churches and their many ministries to the poor. Even worse, they feared that the labor movement would render the largest Protestant denominations a relic of the nineteenth century.
In
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