The Making of Working-Class Religion by Matthew Pehl

The Making of Working-Class Religion by Matthew Pehl

Author:Matthew Pehl [Pehl, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Labor & Industrial Relations, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9780252098840
Google: PlkdDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 31579695
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00


African Americans, Racial Ideology, and Religious Politics

In the late 1930s, worker religion revolved primarily around issues of unionism and class identity. But by the early 1940s, racial ideology had emerged as perhaps the most crucial piece of this discourse. For those who had built or supported the UAW, fascist religion became inextricably linked with racist and anti-Semitic religion. Contrarily, for right-wing religious leaders who condemned the UAW and its liberal religious allies as communist, communism became virtually synonymous with promiscuous race-mixing. African Americans were, of course, at the heart of these changes and debates, and African American ministers played a decisive role in bringing racial injustice to the forefront of Christian discourse. In particular, Horace White, Malcolm Dade, and Charles Hill hoped to diminish the stereotype of overly emotional and obscuritanist black religiosity, and to more deeply link the cause of black workers with the UAW. By presenting black religion as fully invested in the broader movement of the working class, these clerics linked it with the culture of contemporary liberalism. Such a connection, especially made in the context of the Second World War, permitted the ministers to make an additional contribution to the discourse surrounding the politics of religion: “fascist” religion was really “racist” religion.39

For black ministers of the 1940s, the most important concept linking Christian religion and democratic citizenship was captured in the ubiquitous word Brotherhood (utilized as shorthand to represent the more cumbersome phrase, the “Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man”). Brotherhood was both a religious and a civic concept: an assertion of reciprocity, a belief that, because blacks and whites shared the same Father in heaven, so they shared the same rights on earth. If equality was divinely ordained, neither residential segregation nor employment discrimination could be tolerated. Horace White articulated this view in an especially politicized analysis of the crucifixion during Easter, 1944. Jesus “was a man who had arrived at the point in his thinking and feeling, that he could look upon all men as brothers, and that they were the children of one God.” Charles Hill was even more explicit during Brotherhood Week in 1946, criticizing those who told Detroit’s African Americans to maintain patience, and wait until their rights could be duly doled out.40

In addition to equality, Brotherhood also asserted universalism and non-violence. The ministerial generation coming into prominence in the 1940s hailed integration and rejected Black Nationalism. During the 1943 riot, Hill and other ministers issued a press release urging both black and white ministers “to express a militant determination and a positive spirit of goodwill which will refuse to let Americans be divided by racial lines.” Brotherhood meant celebrating human unity, not ethnic or racial specificity. Fittingly, Hill explained his participation in labor and civil rights circles by saying it “was right to help all of humanity.” And most black churches in Detroit united in recognizing “Brotherhood Week” every February, thus incorporating both the political and theological justifications for equality within the lived experience of church life. Often,



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