Contemporary Authors

• Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2015
• Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI), 2017

1. Turning points in the history of American evangelicalism https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049555 Turning points in the history of American evangelicalism / edited by Heath W. Carter & Laura Rominger Porter. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. pages cm BR1642.U5 T87 2017 ISBN: 9780802871527 (pbk. : alk. paper) 2. Union made : working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago https://lccn.loc.gov/2015000066 Carter, Heath W. Union made : working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago / Heath W. Carter. New York : Oxford University Press, [2015] xi, 277 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm HD6338.2.U52 C553 2015 ISBN: 9780199385959 (cloth : alk. paper)

• The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (Working Class in American History) - February 11, 2016 University of Illinois Press, https://www.amazon.com/Pew-Picket-Line-Christianity-American/dp/025208148X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

• Heath W. Carter - https://heathwcarter.com/

  Welcome to this site, which offers a window into both my research and teaching interests. I am an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University, and during the 2016-17 academic year I am also the William S. Vaughn Visiting Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Should you like to get in touch, do not hesitate to e-mail me at heath.w.carter@vanderbilt.edu.

• Valparaiso University - http://www.valpo.edu/history/about/faculty/heath-carter/

  Heath Carter
  Assistant Professor of History

  Arts and Science Building 367
  219.548.7728
  Heath.Carter@valpo.edu

  Education

  B.A. – Georgetown University (Theology and English), magna cum laude
  M.A. – University of Chicago Divinity School (American religious history)
  M.A. – University of Notre Dame (American history)
  Ph.D. – University of Notre Dame (American history)
  Courses Taught

  The United States: Empire of Liberty?
  American Utopias
  The Long Civil Rights Movement
  The Social Gospel in American Life
  Hip Hop America
  History of Chicago
  Religion in American History
  Age of Anxiety: United States from 1945-Present
  Hands on History: Civil Rights in Our Backyard
  The American Revolution
  Capstone Research Seminar
  Public History Workshop (independent study)
  Core: The Human Experience
  Scholarly Contributions

  Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015)
  The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (University of Illinois, 2016).
  Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017)
  Biography

  Professor Carter joined the Valparaiso faculty in autumn 2012. He teaches a variety of courses on the modern United States and writes about the intersection of Christianity, politics, and reform in American history.

  He is also an active member of the Valparaiso community. In December 2015, Mayor Jon Costas appointed him chair of the city’s Human Relations Council. In addition, Professor Carter is on the boards of both Project Neighbors and the Northwest Indiana African American Alliance.

  Interests

  Histories of Christianity, capitalism, race, and reform in modern United States history.

  Recognitions

  William S. Vaughn Visiting Faculty Fellowship (Vanderbilt University), 2016-2017
  African American Episcopal Historical Research Grant, 2016-2017 (Virginia Theological Seminary)
  Presbyterian Historical Society Research Fellowship, 2016-2017
  University Research Professorship, 2015-2016
  Lake Institute Network of Emerging Scholars, 2015-2016
  McGreal Center Research Fellowship, 2015-2016
  Runner up for the Brewer Prize for best first book (American Society of Church History), 2015
  Nominated for the 2015 Distinguished Teaching Award (Valparaiso University Alumni Association)
  Young Scholar in American Religion, 2014-2016
  Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2011-2012
  Working-Class Studies Association’s Annual C. L. R. James Prize for Best Article, 2011
  Memberships

  American Historical Association
  Organization of American Historians
  American Society of Church History
  Labor and Working-Class History Association
  Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

• Comment - https://www.cardus.ca/comment/contributor/1458/heath-w-carter/

  Heath W. Carter is an associate professor of history at Valparaiso University, the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford, 2015), and the co-editor, most recently, of Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 2017).

• Eric C. Miller - https://ericcmiller.com/2015/10/01/organized-religion-a-conversation-with-heath-w-carter/

  ← Phyllis Schlafly, Liberty, and Women’s LiberationReligious Left – A Conversation with Brantley W. Gasaway →
  Organized Religion – A Conversation with Heath W. Carter
  Posted on October 1, 2015 by Eric
  CarterHeath W. Carter is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University. His book, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, was published this month by Oxford University Press. In it, Carter credits the working people of turn-of-the-century Chicago with the advocacy and gradual success of the Social Gospel.

  ECM: Your book focuses on Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when social Christianity was championed by working people rather than established clergy. In fact, the two groups were often at odds.

  HWC: That’s exactly right. While many think of the Social Gospel as a creation of the middle classes, the book argues that it was in fact working people who fueled its rise in industrializing cities such as Chicago. Throughout the Gilded Age the institutional churches were anything but bastions of progressive reform. Clergy of nearly every denomination eyed the era’s fledgling working-class movements with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm.

  There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for violent suppression of “the mob.”

  The Catholic hierarchy was less prone to such nativist excesses and yet harbored deep reservations of its own about organized labor. Even as the Vatican articulated growing support for unions in encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum, many a prelate worried that they might prove a gateway out of the Church and into the clutches of godless radicalism.

  This tale of churchly opposition to the early labor movement is a relatively familiar one. What’s new in Union Made are the stories of printers, glovemakers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and the like, who insisted that trade unionism was fully compatible with Christian faith.

  More than that, these ordinary believers argued that God was on the side of the worker and that, therefore, those churches which had arrayed themselves against labor had in fact abandoned the true gospel. Intellectually, the clergy were inclined to reject such views out of hand, so workers devised another strategy to get their attention. Leveraging the working classes’ allegiance, they warned that they would have nothing to do with the churches unless the latter changed their collective tune on “the labor question.” Increasingly gripped by anxiety about a potentially catastrophic loss of influence, church leaders finally caved.

  At the turn of the century—a generation after workers had first started preaching and practicing social gospels—denomination after denomination embraced the conservative brand of labor reform promoted by the American Federation of Labor. Social Christianity was union made, indeed.

  ECM: The alignment of theology with class appears pretty stark. You document the growth and ornamentation of church buildings as wealthy industrialists began filling the coffers, as well as the practice of charging “pew rents,” which was new to me. Is it fair to say that these Gilded Age churches had “sold out” to the upper class?

  HWC: That was certainly what many working people argued. There is no question that, as industrial warfare broke out across the late-19th-century United States, the Protestant elite sided almost exclusively with capital. Of course, even that way of putting it makes it sound like the two could be differentiated, when in many cases they could not.

  In the book I discuss how Chicago’s wealthiest citizens predominated on Protestant church boards and vestries. In the early 1870s, for example, the First Congregational Church’s 14-member governing council boasted at least one prominent attorney, two influential physicians, two insurance moguls, two lumber tycoons, and two grain commissioners, one of whom was also the President of the Board of Trade.

  The church paid its pastor, E. P. Goodwin, a $5,000 salary—more than ten times the earnings of the average worker—and there were other fringe benefits besides, including lucrative investment opportunities. One member at First Congregational, who was also a leading man on the Board of Trade, advised Goodwin to invest in his watch company rather than the mines. The pastor did so and received a congratulatory note in advance of a handsome dividend.

  Given such material realities, working-class believers were hardly taken aback when someone like Goodwin vociferously opposed labor. During an 1885 streetcar strike, he vowed from the pulpit, “The police should clear the streets if they leave a corpse at every step.” His words earned “the silk stocking board of trade preacher” much enmity in working-class circles. One critic wrote to the Knights of Labor—borrowing a line from Sam Jones, a famed late-19th-century evangelist— “‘Hell is full of just such Christians as that.’”

  Yet the “sold out” paradigm may oversimplify the dynamics at play in the sense that the alliance between the religious and economic elites was about more than money. They inhabited a shared social world within which it was difficult to imagine labor as anything other than dangerous and threatening.

  Read the whole thing at Religion Dispatches.

• Religion Dispatches - http://religiondispatches.org/workers-once-forced-the-social-gospel-into-churches-can-it-happen-again/

  QUOTED: "The book argues that it was in fact working people who fueled its rise in industrializing cities such as Chicago. Throughout the Gilded Age the institutional churches were anything but bastions of progressive reform. Clergy of nearly every denomination eyed the era’s fledgling working-class movements with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm."
  "There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for violent suppression of 'the mob.'"
  "The Catholic hierarchy was less prone to such nativist excesses and yet harbored deep reservations of its own about organized labor. Even as the Vatican articulated growing support for unions in encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum, many a prelate worried that they might prove a gateway out of the Church and into the clutches of godless radicalism.
  This tale of churchly opposition to the early labor movement is a relatively familiar one. What’s new in Union Made are the stories of printers, glovemakers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and the like, who insisted that trade unionism was fully compatible with Christian faith."

  Eric C. Miller
  October 1, 2015
  Though the early 20th century Social Gospel is commonly associated with liberal clergy such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, the movement has less often been attributed to organized labor. In his excellent new book, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, Valparaiso University historian Heath W. Carter credits working people with the advocacy and gradual success of the social justice faith.

  When RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Carter about his project, he had in mind a number of parallels between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Then as now, inequality was on the rise as the rich became richer and the poor struggled to improve their lives. Then also as now, church attendance rates began to decline as congregants grew disaffected with Church leadership. In both cases, progressive Christians have questioned the Church’s dedication to social justice over and against more political, transitory commitments.

  In what follows, Carter recounts the story of working class Christianity in turn-of-the-century Chicago, with some insights for the prospect of a progressive resurgence here and now.

  Your book focuses on Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when social Christianity was championed by working people rather than established clergy. In fact, the two groups were often at odds.

  That’s exactly right. While many think of the Social Gospel as a creation of the middle classes, the book argues that it was in fact working people who fueled its rise in industrializing cities such as Chicago. Throughout the Gilded Age the institutional churches were anything but bastions of progressive reform. Clergy of nearly every denomination eyed the era’s fledgling working-class movements with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm.

  There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for violent suppression of “the mob.”

  The Catholic hierarchy was less prone to such nativist excesses and yet harbored deep reservations of its own about organized labor. Even as the Vatican articulated growing support for unions in encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum, many a prelate worried that they might prove a gateway out of the Church and into the clutches of godless radicalism.

  This tale of churchly opposition to the early labor movement is a relatively familiar one. What’s new in Union Made are the stories of printers, glovemakers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and the like, who insisted that trade unionism was fully compatible with Christian faith.

  More than that, these ordinary believers argued that God was on the side of the worker and that, therefore, those churches which had arrayed themselves against labor had in fact abandoned the true gospel. Intellectually, the clergy were inclined to reject such views out of hand, so workers devised another strategy to get their attention. Leveraging the working classes’ allegiance, they warned that they would have nothing to do with the churches unless the latter changed their collective tune on “the labor question.” Increasingly gripped by anxiety about a potentially catastrophic loss of influence, church leaders finally caved.

  At the turn of the century—a generation after workers had first started preaching and practicing social gospels—denomination after denomination embraced the conservative brand of labor reform promoted by the American Federation of Labor. Social Christianity was union made, indeed.

  The alignment of theology with class appears pretty stark. You document the growth and ornamentation of church buildings as wealthy industrialists began filling the coffers, as well as the practice of charging “pew rents,” which was new to me. Is it fair to say that these Gilded Age churches had “sold out” to the upper class?

  That was certainly what many working people argued. There is no question that, as industrial warfare broke out across the late-19th-century United States, the Protestant elite sided almost exclusively with capital. Of course, even that way of putting it makes it sound like the two could be differentiated, when in many cases they could not.

  In the book I discuss how Chicago’s wealthiest citizens predominated on Protestant church boards and vestries. In the early 1870s, for example, the First Congregational Church’s 14-member governing council boasted at least one prominent attorney, two influential physicians, two insurance moguls, two lumber tycoons, and two grain commissioners, one of whom was also the President of the Board of Trade.

  The church paid its pastor, E. P. Goodwin, a $5,000 salary—more than ten times the earnings of the average worker—and there were other fringe benefits besides, including lucrative investment opportunities. One member at First Congregational, who was also a leading man on the Board of Trade, advised Goodwin to invest in his watch company rather than the mines. The pastor did so and received a congratulatory note in advance of a handsome dividend.

  Given such material realities, working-class believers were hardly taken aback when someone like Goodwin vociferously opposed labor. During an 1885 streetcar strike, he vowed from the pulpit, “The police should clear the streets if they leave a corpse at every step.” His words earned “the silk stocking board of trade preacher” much enmity in working-class circles. One critic wrote to the Knights of Labor—borrowing a line from Sam Jones, a famed late-19th-century evangelist— “‘Hell is full of just such Christians as that.’”

  Yet the “sold out” paradigm may oversimplify the dynamics at play in the sense that the alliance between the religious and economic elites was about more than money. They inhabited a shared social world within which it was difficult to imagine labor as anything other than dangerous and threatening.

  And many workers agreed?

  Indeed. It would be a mistake to think that all working-class people supported the trade union movement, let alone that all embraced a pro-labor vein of Christian faith. Many did not.

  I delve into this theme in depth in chapter 3, which traces the religious response to the 1877 railroad riots. In Chicago, the upheaval culminated on Friday, 27 July, with police firing repeatedly into a crowd of thousands of workers at the viaduct near Halsted and 16th Streets.

  That Sunday, Protestant sanctuaries across the city rang with endorsements of law enforcement’s violent suppression of “the mob.” At one Methodist church the minister declared, “One of the worst features of the riot is, it did not cost enough human lives…Something like twenty fell under that first volley; it were better if it had been 200. It would have taught those lawless beings the cost of human lives, that it cost them something to defy the law.”

  While such rhetoric may seem shocking to us, it was commonplace at the time. But something in the news reports did take me aback: namely, that throughout this sermon, “the people turned to each other with looks of approval; and occasionally a movement of that sort commonly described in brackets by the intelligent reporter as ‘sensation,’ swayed them.”

  Who were these people, I wondered, who reveled in such calls for violent retribution? As it turns out, many of those in the church’s pews were workers: people like James Dickson, a teamster, and Anna Quayle, a milliner. They were, on the whole, more likely than the strikers in the streets to be of English or American stock, and more likely as well to be highly-skilled artisans.

  These workers had not lost faith in the industrial order and did not believe their interests would be well served by the labor movement. They cast their lot instead with their social and religious betters. There were strong incentives to do so.

  As the aforementioned Rev. Goodwin once wrote, “Let any two men equally unknown make application to any firm wishing to hire, and who doubts that, other reasons being balanced, if one was certainly known to rent a pew in a church and to be regularly in it, and the other as regularly to stay away, the church goer would get the situation.” Goodwin went on, “and so it pays to go to church, pays, I mean, in actual dollars and cents.”

  Those who did lose faith in the industrial order eventually also lost faith in the church—but never in Christianity. Their persistent commitments both to faith and to unions precipitated the churches’ eventual embrace of social Christianity after the turn of the century.

  Yes, even as Chicago’s class-conscious workers navigated an oppositional relationship to the institutional churches, they never wavered in their conviction that God was on their side. As the turn of the century approached, this belief steeled a growing wave of working-class religious activism.

  In the spring of 1894, for example, Chicago’s Trades and Labor Assembly founded a church of its own—a congregation by and for the worker. Though short-lived, the Modern Church underscored ordinary believers’ dissatisfaction with the existing religious options. As one of its leading members put it, “[the church] has strayed from the paths marked out for it by its twelve immortal walking delegates, under the supervision of the Grand Master Mechanic of the universe.”

  Later that same year the Pullman Strike catalyzed a new wave of working-class religious resistance. Many Catholics stopped their subscriptions to the archdiocesan newspaper out of frustration with the editor’s refusal to side more decisively with the American Railway Union. At churches across the city’s South Side, meanwhile, Protestant churchgoers rose up against “scab ministers.”

  Nowhere was the backlash more severe than at Pullman Presbyterian Church. When the minister there railed against the strike—declaring at one point, “there is a maxim that half a loaf is better than no bread, and in my judgment the employees were getting two-thirds of a loaf”—working people walked out. By the time the dust had settled the church had lost nearly twenty percent of its members. Notably, all but a handful immediately re-affiliated with other congregations, making clear that they were not abandoning the larger church but rather this particular one, which had become too closely identified with capital.

  The proliferation of such incidents had clergy of every denomination on edge. Why were working people so alienated from the church? This was the subject of an 1899 article in the American Journal of Sociology. The author—a Baptist minister based out of Chicago’s South Side—interviewed workers, asking what could be done to win them back. Their words varied but their answer was resoundingly clear: “Apply the Sermon on the Mount”; “Preach Christianity instead of theology”; “Let the pastor have a personal relationship with the needs of labor. Be our champion.”

  As they assimilated such data, many church leaders came to see the answer to the churches’ workingman problem and to the nation’s industrial crisis as one and the same: champion conservative labor reform.

  We are now living in what some have called a “New Gilded Age,” defined by stark inequality and class resentments. In your view, what are the prospects for a new social Christianity? Can working people do it again?

  Great questions. This notion of a “new Gilded Age” has caught on and not without reason, given the extent of labor’s struggles, not to mention the already historic and still growing chasm between rich and poor in the contemporary United States. But in the book I argue that the analogy only goes so far.

  The late-nineteenth century witnessed roiling debates over the morality of capitalism. To be sure, some Americans in that period assumed that “the market” was a force of nature, as resistant to change as the laws of gravity. But countless others argued that the (mal)distribution of resources in their midst was immoral. Some went so far as to contend that industrial capitalism—at least as it was taking shape in cities like Chicago—was altogether incompatible with Christianity.

  Working people forced these issues in the first Gilded Age and could do so again, but from what I can tell—and I should add that, as a historian, I am no expert in the business of making predictions—we’re a long way from a repeat of their late-nineteenth-century insurgency.

  There are a number of historical explanations for this. Certainly the Cold War baptism of “free enterprise” as a distinctively Christian way of doing business worked to erode social Christianity’s hold at the grassroots. The surging prosperity gospel of our own times has done further damage.

  All this being said, there are some favorable trends. The resources available to working people via Christianity are, if anything, more robust today than they were a century ago. The biblical case for organized labor remains intact. Meanwhile, the tradition is more clearly on their side.

  In the first Gilded Age, official church statements of support for organized labor were scarce. Today, many denominations have such statements and they could be used to hold clergy and laity alike accountable in the midst of labor disputes. Given that rates of religious affiliation vastly outstrip support for unions among Americans today, there is ample room for such accountability.

  One other constant bears mention here: because church life in America operates on a voluntary basis, Christian leaders are necessarily sensitive to changes in their membership rolls, which have immediate implications for their congregations’ bottom lines. This sensitivity can render religious communities susceptible to passing fads. But it can also make them more responsive to reform movements calling the churches to a more faithful witness in the world.

  Working people engineered one of those in the late-nineteenth century and it is not beyond their ability to do so again.

QUOTED: "Carter's book does not entirely transform the Hopkins and May paradigm–it develops along similar chronological lines,
focuses on the same issue of industrial capitalism, and has the inherent limitation of focusing on one city–but Union Made significantly advances
the conversation. As for whatever limitations the one-city approach brings, in Carter's hands it also proves to be a source of strength."
"Christians sympathetic to progressive economic views and labor activists praying for a labor movement revival will be inspired by Carter's
account of Bible-believing workers criticizing an unjust economic order. This may not be the book to make a big splash outside the academy–
Carter's careful historical arguments, developed under the mentorship of Mark Noll, are a bit too specialized and too confined to Chicago–but
Carter is already at work on a more sweeping and ambitious account of the American social gospel."

A working-class gospel
Paul Emory Putz
Books & Culture.
22.4 (July-August 2016): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text: 
Union Made
Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago
HEATH W. CARTER * OXFORD UNIV. PRESS, 2015 * 296 PP. * $35
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Few American religious history topics possess the social gospel's privileged place. A term to be memorized within the American history survey,
claiming a seat at the scholar's "good religion" table, its prominence should make it a prime target for scholars to problematize. In key ways,
however, the basic outline of the social gospel's development remains rooted in the 1940s narrative laid out by Charles Hopkins, Henry May, and
others. They expounded the story that still holds sway, of a vanguard of middleclass pastors, professors, and reformers responding from 1880 to
1920 to industrialization and urbanization by calling on America's churches to apply Christian principles of cooperation and compassion to the
social and economic order. By 1908, the social gospel had institutional support through the Federal Council of Churches in Christ, and although
its postmillennial optimism suffered a setback from the Great War, it nevertheless carried on in seminaries, fashionable pulpits, and various
denominational agencies.
To be sure, scholars since the 1940s have added an ever-expanding cast of characters to the list of social gospelers, including women, African
Americans, agrarians, and businessmen. Some have found precedents in antebellum abolitionism, while others have highlighted the social
gospel's connection to popular consumer culture. This diversity has made the term "social Christianity" more tenable for some than "social
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 2/9
gospel" to represent the wide panoply of Christian reform responses to industrial capitalism, although the two are quite often used
interchangeably.
Broadening the boundaries of social Christianity even further, Heath Carter's Union Made--the final version of a manuscript I was able to read at
an early stage--adds working-class men and women to the mix. Carter also provides a new version of the historical process through which social
Christianity arose. Using Gilded Age Chicago as his site of analysis, Carter argues that well before middle-class social gospelers had awakened to
the moral crisis of industrial capitalism, wage earners "hammered out social gospels in union meetings, socialist publications, and anarchist
demonstrations." These same working-class folks turned to their Bibles as they pressured church leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, to support
labor's cause. The social gospel documented by Hopkins and May is, in Carter's telling, a middle-class "moderate accommodation of workingclass
religious dissent." While his arguments have precedent in Ken Fones-Wolf's 1989 study, Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in
Industrial Philadelphia, 1865-1915 (Temple Univ. Press), that book had a more fundamental concern: treating working-class expressions of
Christianity seriously, a novelty at the time. Carter brings a laser-like focus to the social gospel implications, and unlike Fones-Wolf, who has
working-class social Christianity emerging parallel to middle-class social Christianity, Carter has working-class social Christianity emerging first.
Carter begins his narrative with a picture of antebellum harmony, a time when Chicago resided on the frontier, ministers lived in poverty
alongside wage-earners, and simple frame buildings were good enough to be called a church: "A common faith in the dignity and destiny of free
labor united the city's rich and poor Christians, who did not yet understand themselves to be, respectively, upper- and working-class."
Then industrial capitalism changed everything. Wealthy industrialists and merchants used everexpanding riches to pay for magnificent church
buildings and recruit refined clergy. Neighborhoods and church pews began to segregate based on wealth. In the years immediately following the
Civil War, the bonds that linked Christian ministers and workers began to fray. In response, working-class believers like Andrew Cameron, a
Scottish printer who founded the Workingman's Advocate in 1864, created what Carter deems "Chicago's first social gospel." With Bibles in
hand, a cadre of "labor aristocrats"--mostly skilled, English-speaking workers--criticized the new industrial order and the churches' complicity in
it. Importantly, they articulated their moral critique a full decade before social gospeler Washington Gladden ever took pen to paper in the
pioneering Working People and Their Employers (1876).
These first expressions of a working-class social gospel came from a rather narrow constituency. But as labor organized and as class conflict
erupted with more frequency, whether in Chicago's 1867 general strike, the Railroad Strike of 1877, or the 1886 Haymarket affair, the labor
movement became a "hotbed of alternative Christianities." Carter is quite clear that labor was no monolith. The Central Labor Union had a more
radical edge, with considerable anarchist influence. The Trades and Labor Assembly represented a conservative and native-born brand of labor
reform, one more attached to Protestantism's established churches. Somewhere in between stood the Knights of Labor, who exploded in growth in
the mid-1880s. Despite the divisions within the labor movement, Carter finds a general pattern: all brought a biblically based moral challenge to
Christian churches' close connection with the city's industrial elite, and all promoted a "more egalitarian reading of the gospel, in which Jesus, a
carpenter, stood in judgment over industrial modernity."
Not all wage earners joined the labor movement or supported social Christianity. In one section, Carter digs into the membership rolls of a
Methodist church whose pastor rained holy fire down upon the rabblerousers of the 1877 labor upheaval. Upwards of 240 wage earners perished
in the violence, but in front of a sizeable blue-collar constituency the Methodist pastor lamented that the death toll was so low. Surprisingly,
workers abided the incendiary statements of their pastor--Carter surmises that they united with their minister around a shared Anglo-Protestant
identity. They knew that when their pastor denounced working-class radicals, he had in mind the foreign-born "mob" rather than respectable
laborers who spoke English and avoided the saloon and the union.
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 3/9
Carter's careful exploration of the complex responses from pulpit, press, and pew allows him to get to the heart of Christian leaders' opposition to
labor. The issue, put simply, was unionism. For all their praise of the dignity of the laborer and their attempts to maintain rapport with wage
earners (attempts that met with some success), when push came to shove ministers from across the theological spectrum lined up on the side of
the employers and in defense of the morality of industrial capitalism. If an exception to this pattern could be found before the 1890s it would have
been from the Catholic churches. But even there heightened fear that radicalism might infiltrate labor unions balanced out Catholic priests' closer
relationship with and greater sympathy for foreign-born laborers.
Church leaders could shrug off labor leaders' attempts to "Christianize" Christianity so long as their pews were not devoid of wage earners. But
this seemed less certain by 1894. Carter shows that in one Chicago church, 20 percent of the members, nearly all working-class, departed during
the Pullman Strike as a direct result of their minister's obnoxious praise of industrialist George Pullman. Most churches did not have a workingclass
walkout on the same scale, but perception motivated equally well. Despite an increase in urban Protestant church membership at the turn of
the 20th century, reports at the time from muckraking journalists and church reformers warned of the working man's full-scale estrangement from
the church. Vigorously "amened" by labor activists, these reports led church leaders to pay more attention to working-class voices, picking up on
social gospel ideas that had been articulated by labor leaders since the 1860s. With new denominational programs built to address "the social
question" and church leaders' guarded support for the conservative labor platform of the American Federation of Labor, by 1908 the middle-class
social gospel had arrived.
Carter has a knack for placing his big argument-recasting the history of social Christianity--at the intersection of a variety of subdisciplines.
Among historians of American religion, scholars of the social gospel will be joined by a burgeoning group looking at "religion and labor" or
"religion and capitalism." Carter's book does not entirely transform the Hopkins and May paradigm--it develops along similar chronological lines,
focuses on the same issue of industrial capitalism, and has the inherent limitation of focusing on one city--but Union Made significantly advances
the conversation. As for whatever limitations the one-city approach brings, in Carter's hands it also proves to be a source of strength.
Neighborhoods, church buildings, and on-the-ground interactions all become part of his argument, giving flesh and blood to the theological
articulations of labor activists and church leaders.
Christians sympathetic to progressive economic views and labor activists praying for a labor movement revival will be inspired by Carter's
account of Bible-believing workers criticizing an unjust economic order. This may not be the book to make a big splash outside the academy--
Carter's careful historical arguments, developed under the mentorship of Mark Noll, are a bit too specialized and too confined to Chicago--but
Carter is already at work on a more sweeping and ambitious account of the American social gospel. I suspect this will not be the last time his
name graces these pages.
Paul Emory Putz is a graduate student in history at Baylor University.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Putz, Paul Emory. "A working-class gospel." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2016, p. 16+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472267001&it=r&asid=3596bbe2777fa8cf93ed65bc2c61011b. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472267001

---

QUOTED: "Carter forges his history for both scholars and general readers through a fascinating historical journey of two characters struggling at odds and
evens who eventually forged a strong but brief movement, a movement that played a role in the New Deal and later twentieth-century struggles."
"In our current days of contract laborers, part-time employment, temp workers, loss of benefits, union decertification, growing income inequality and pushes for higher
minimum wages, let the reader beware: This character study will challenge you, in any faith tradition, to take action."

5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 4/9
Works in progress
Gary L. Chamberlain
America.
214.12 (Apr. 4, 2016): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2016 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text: 
UNION MADE
Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago
By Heath W. Carter
Oxford University Press. 296p $35
"Poverty exists... because the toiler does not receive a just and equitable proportion of the wealth which he produces." These are not the words of
2015 presidential contender Bernie Sanders, but the 1867 cry of Andrew Cameron, member of the Chicago Typographical Union, rallying
Chicago workers after the general strike of that year. Cameron went on to articulate one of the main themes of Heath W. Carter's story, Union
Made, in this harsh criticism of Chicago's churches: Poverty exists "because the Church, through the paid toadies of employers, has denounced
every attempt on the part of the working classes to assert their rights and remove the curse which has bound them hand and foot, and has
prostituted the high and holy calling of a minister of Christ to the level of a village pettifogger."
Ten years later, the Rev. Simon McChesney, pastor of Park Avenue Methodist, fell in with Cameron's criticism when he argued against
immigration, "Europe has been emptying her criminal classes upon our shores." The Rev. Norman Ravlin at the Free-Will Baptist Church carries
on in describing those working classes and organized unions as mobs of "communist offscourings," "disorderly classes," "roughs and thieves,"
"lowest rabble" and "vicious element." Substitute "Mexico" for "Europe" in Rev. McChesney's remark above, and we are transported to the
nativism of Donald Trump and other presidential candidates in 2016.
In this brief but incisive historical analysis, Heath W. Carter traces the tumultuous struggles among labor, capital and the Christian churches in the
microcosm of ever-expanding Chicago from the mid-19th century to the early 20th. The focus is Carter's exploration of the rise of "social
Christianity." Most studies of the rise of the "social gospel," which flowered in the early 20th century, feature such dynamic middle-class
Protestant theologians and leaders as Walter Rauschenbusch, Richard T. Ely, Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden and others. That movement did
indeed involve the churches in the practical issues of the day by applying the Gospel message of Jesus to the causes of economic inequality and
poverty, alcoholism, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, poor schools and the danger of war.
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 5/9
Carter's important contribution, however, involves turning the usual understanding of this dynamic movement, which died out in the early 20th
century, on its head through examination of key roles of workers and unions in spite of the opposition and only occasional support of churches.
Carter shows that ordinary believers fashioned the first social gospel: "But I do contend that working people played a much more essential role in
this story than they have typically been accorded." His telling of that story reads like a long character study, from the antebellum days of slavery
to the tumultuous decades of the late 1800s, peppered by strikes, labor unrest, the Gilded Age of capitalism and the cozy relationships between
mainline Protestant and Catholic leaders and the wealth lords of capital in Chicago.
Through extensive research (the notes alone cover 67 pages) of tracts, pamphlets, newspapers, labor magazines, church organs and published
sermons, Carter is able to document the working-class origins of social Christianity. He fully explores "the documentary record" often ignored by
others in their discussions of Protestant and Catholic leaders, noting that "the field [of labor and church histories] is in the midst of a major
transition." Carter's short text is a key contribution to that transition.
As churches became more prosperous in the post-bellum period and into the Gilded Age (a term coined by Mark Twain to satirize the serious
social problems "gilded" over by a thin layer of wealth), pastors and clergy were finding greater comfort in the arms and bosoms of the wealthy,
with their sizable church donations. By the late 1870s and beyond, workers were forced in the spirit of a hardening industrial capitalism to farm
out their "labor" as "free laborers." Indeed throughout this period the main objection of church leaders to labor unions was that every man should
be free to sell his labor without interference according to a "contract" between the individual worker and industry.
At the same time, Carter's research reveals the anxiety of church leaders. Workers were moving away from churches to that archenemy, socialism.
Indeed socialist leaders such as Eugene Debs and Mother Jones saw the connection between Jesus' simple words challenging the rich and the
plight of labor in Chicago and in the rest of the country.
Carter ends his tale of church and labor with a statement, a challenge and a question. The statement is simply that "now, in the early decades of
the twenty-first century, American capitalism appears once more poised to overwhelm American democracy"--possibly a reference to the decline
of unions and their subjugation by corporations. The challenge involves the future: "It remains to be seen whether present-day believers will
quietly abide this state of affairs"; or as the question is put:" Whether it will at some point call forth a generation of prophets comparable to those
that visited Gilded Age Chicago."
Carter forges his history for both scholars and general readers through a fascinating historical journey of two characters struggling at odds and
evens who eventually forged a strong but brief movement, a movement that played a role in the New Deal and later 20th-century struggles. One
wishes he had listed the cast of characters involved--the particular churches, unions and corporations--in a preamble for easy reference. But
importantly Carter shows in this brief, localized, historical setting how this possibility of social engagement emerged. In our current days of
contract laborers, part-time employment, temp workers, loss of benefits, union decertification, growing income inequality and pushes for higher
minimum wages, let the reader beware: This character study will challenge you, in any faith tradition, to take action.
GARY L. CHAMBERLAIN is professor emeritus of Christian ethics in the theology and religious studies department and environmental studies
program of Seattle University, Seattle, Wash.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Chamberlain, Gary L. "Works in progress." America, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450363479&it=r&asid=23dbd64b83afe2423210cc555b7d5b42. Accessed 14 May
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 6/9
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450363479

---

5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 7/9
Evil emperor?
Heath W. Carter
Books & Culture.
22.4 (July-August 2016): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text: 
The Reagan Era
A History of the 1980s
DOUG ROSSINOW * COLUMBIA UNIV. PRESS, 2015 * 392 PP. $35
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan vowed that a nuclear freeze agreement with the Soviet Union would leave the United States
vulnerable to "the aggressive impulses of an evil empire." The world would not soon forget this incendiary turn of phrase, which secured the "evil
empire speech" an enduring place in the annals of the 20th century. But in later years few would remember that Reagan had turned to the nuclear
issue only in closing. The address was focused in the main on the work his administration was doing to counteract the dangers of "a modern-day
secularism" that opposed prayer in public schools and supported a woman's right to choose. The overall theme was perhaps sensible enough,
given that Reagan delivered the speech at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).
While such particulars would soon be lost to many, they were entered into evangelical lore. When the Gipper died some 21 years later,
Christianity Today cited his decision to include the NAE in the historic occasion as evidence that "Ronald Wilson Reagan and evangelicals
became inseparable." The piece went on to argue, "After giving him the presidency, conservative Protestants shaped Reagan's policies, and in turn
Reagan's presidency shaped American evangelicalism." The NAE continues to tell a similar story. The organization's own institutional history
declares that, during the Reagan years, "The NAE, increasingly consulted about administration appointments and policy, seized opportunities to
influence government further and enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House."
In The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s, Doug Rossinow argues that such memories of a special relationship between Reagan and evangelicals
have little basis in history. More important, the book drives home that, had such close ties actually existed, they would--or at least should--be
cause for overwhelming shame. Indeed, in Rossinow's rendition of the Reagan era, the closest thing to an evil empire is the United States.
Reagan's rise sounded the death knell of an older political order. New Deal liberalism reigned triumphant through the middle decades of the 20th
century, and when in 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson vanquished Barry Goldwater--winning by a larger percentage of the popular vote than any
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 8/9
candidate since James Monroe--one could hardly blame the casual observer for wondering whether American conservatism had much of a future.
But what we now know is that, throughout the heyday of the Great Society, the defining political movement of the last generation was already
gathering strength at the grassroots. This "silent majority" would power Richard Nixon to victory in 1968, only to recede, ever so briefly, in the
wake of the notorious Watergate scandal. Conservatives regained their footing amidst the economic downturn and Iran hostage crisis of the late
1970s, and in the 1980 election, they once more seized the momentum, as Reagan trounced the sitting president, Jimmy Carter, carrying 44 states.
The result was widely interpreted as a mandate, and the new administration set out immediately to capitalize upon it. Rossinow extrapolates from
Reagan's policies three governing doctrines, which together formed the core of "Reaganism": 1) "an insistence that unfettered capitalism is both
socially beneficial and morally good"; 2) "a fierce patriotism that waves the flag, demands global supremacy, and brooks no criticism of the
United States"; and 3) "a vision of society as an arena where individuals win or lose because of their own talents and efforts." As Reagan brought
these convictions to life, he reshaped the American state--largely, Rossinow argues, to the detriment of both country and world.
Domestically, Reagan's defining achievement was a dramatic reduction of tax rates, designed to be a windfall for the wealthiest. His
administration justified the move with reference to "supply side economics," which posited that everyone benefited when the rich got richer, as
prosperity would inexorably "trickle down" from top to bottom. But Rossinow asserts that the cuts were motivated more by an upside-down
conception of justice: "Reaganites viewed the privileged, not the underprivileged, as society's victims. The rich were exploited by the liberal
state." The supply side approach would have been fiscally questionable even had Reagan not doubled down on military spending. As it was, he
sought to close the widening gap between revenues and expenditures by shrinking the social safety net. Reagan slashed the budget for the
National School Lunch Program by 40 percent, for example, leaving schools no choice but to serve qualifying children less food. Nutritional
content plummeted as well: under the new regime ketchup could be counted as a vegetable and cookies as bread. Longtime Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan later reflected that even some "mainstream Republicans were conflicted" about such cuts, which "seemed contrary to
Judeo-Christian values." But, he averred, "Not Reagan." Greenspan's assessment dovetails perfectly with Rossinow's own portrait of the president
as someone who was not especially committed to Christian values in the first place. He pandered to evangelicals but did not champion their
agenda; at times, he directly undermined it. Rossinow writes, "When he nominated Sandra Day O'Connor, a pro-choice, pro-ERA Republican
from Arizona, to the Supreme Court in July 1981, religious conservatives felt they had been kicked in the teeth." Reagan was more predictable
when it came to civil rights. Throughout his tenure as governor of California he had denounced welfare programs and anti-discrimination laws.
By the time he had finished delivering pro-states' rights and anti-affirmative action stump speeches in the run up to the 1980 election, he was well
on his way to becoming what Rossinow calls "the most successful white backlash politician in American history." The cruel irony that Reagan--
who loved Thomas Paine's dictum that "government even in its best state is but a necessary evil"- presided over the birth of a lumbering carceral
state was not lost on those citizens of color who suffered disproportionately at its hands.
Rossinow paints an equally grim picture on the international front. Reagan may have won the Cold War, but he did so in a most dangerous
fashion. In the process of unnecessarily antagonizing Soviet leaders with threats of a missile defense system that existed only in the world of
make-believe, he pushed the entire globe back toward the brink of nuclear holocaust. Rossinow recites what is by now a well-known litany of
Reagan's other Cold War sins. In Latin America, the United States backed dictatorships that, over the course of the 1980s, mercilessly slaughtered
hundreds of thousands of civilians. When necessary, the administration rationalized such sinister activities by drawing a flimsy distinction
between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regime. When possible, Reagan and his lieutenants preferred to circumvent public debate altogether, as
Rossinow emphasizes in his lengthy account of the notorious Iran-Contra scandal.
If Rossinow's analysis sounds relentlessly critical, that's because it is. By the time one arrives at the end of the book, his parting shot--that "
[Reagan] was not, despite his admirers' seemingly limitless praise, a great man"--is a foregone conclusion. Rossinow does acknowledge that
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494783759582 9/9
Reagan was a winner, who successfully steered the ship of state in the direction he believed it should go. On this point Rossinow echoes Barack
Obama, who controversially argued in the 2008 Democratic primary that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you
know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not." But Obama went on to offer what Rossinow does not, namely, a convincing
account of how Reagan managed to rally the public to his side: "he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we
want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."
By contrast, Rossinow's Reagan is so heartless as to seem unelectable, let alone re-electable, and yet one cannot help but leave the book
wondering whether the majority of Americans got what they deserved. While The Reagan Era is more about Reagan than it is about the era,
Rossinow does depart occasionally from the realm of high politics, and what he finds is nothing short of reprehensible: a people driven by greed
and haunted by fear of those different from themselves. Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, would ride to victory in 1988 with a barrage of
ads featuring an African American man who committed a violent crime while on a government-approved prison furlough. One campaign official's
comment--"it's a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist"--captured the profound cynicism of the moment.
Rossinow's title promises more than the book delivers. No history of the 1980s could be complete without an extended discussion of the decade's
technological advances, which would go on to revolutionize the texture of everyday life, and yet these are mentioned only in passing. Also
missing is suspense. Rossinow chooses not to discuss countervailing trends and hopeful undercurrents, and so there is little sense in his
unremittingly dark account that things might have played out differently.
But his story is no less important for being incomplete. Rossinow dispels the Reagan of myth and in so doing generates an opportunity for
Americans to take more sober stock of their recent past. Should this reckoning lead to true repentance, it just might contribute to a brighter future.
Heath W. Carter is assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University and the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social
Christianity in Chicago Oxford, 2015).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Carter, Heath W. "Evil emperor?" Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2016, p. 16+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472267002&it=r&asid=d8886319ec0ad59b9d3369af54abab08. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472267002

Putz, Paul Emory. "A working-class gospel." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2016, p. 16+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472267001&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Chamberlain, Gary L. "Works in progress." America, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450363479&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Carter, Heath W. "Evil emperor?" Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2016, p. 16+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472267002&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017.

• New Books Network
  http://newbooksnetwork.com/heath-w-carter-union-made-working-people-and-the-rise-of-social-christianity-in-chicago-oxford-university-press-2015/
  Word count: 351

  QUOTED: "Union Made ... offers a bold interpretation of the origins of the American Social Gospel by highlighting the role of labor in both articulating key ideas and activism."

  HEATH W. CARTER

  Union Made
  Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago

  UNIVERSITY PRESS 2015
  December 26, 2015 Lilian Calles Barger

  Heath W. Carter‘s new book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a bold interpretation of the origins of the American Social Gospel by highlighting the role of labor in both articulating key ideas and activism. He begins in antebellum Chicago with its modest frontier churches in which different classes came together as equals. The prosperity of the post-Civil War era redefined the relationship between labor, capital and the churches bringing new class divisions. Opulent churches of the well-to-do and highly compensated clergy were increasingly compromised in their appeal to the captains of industry. Viewing poverty as a personal failing, while success a measure of divine approval, drew working class resentment. It was in this gilded age that labor activist, with no support from leading seminaries or pulpits, advocated for themselves with appeals to the bible and theological innovation. The battle was between competing interpretations of Christianity in which a radical Jesus stood with the poor. Trade unionists advocated for the eight-hour workday, Sunday rest, just wages, and the abolishing of church pew rentals. Labor criticism, strikes, and demonstrations, brought anxiety to church leadership who were losing the loyalty of wage earners they had long enjoyed. They attempted a strategy to divide the labor movement by denouncing socialist and communist and approving of “sensible” wage earners. Continued pressure from below instigated reluctant middle-class church leaders to address the labor question in what became known as the Social Gospel. Carter has provided a corrective to how we think about the origins of the Social Gospel away from a middle-class progressive initiative to labor as advocates of their own interest.

  Heath W. Carter is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University.

• The American Historical Review
  https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/121/4/1285/2581664/Heath-W-Carter-Union-Made-Working-People-and-the
  Word count: 208

  Heath W. Carter. Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago.
  Heath W. Carter . Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xi, 277. $35.00.
  William A. Mirola
  Am Hist Rev (2016) 121 (4): 1285-1286. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1285
  Published: 03 October 2016
  Cite
  Permissions
  Share
  Heath W. Carter’s Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago joins the recent upsurge in social histories exploring the intersection of faith and attitudes about the nature of work, industrial reform, and capitalism among America’s working classes, past and present. Carter acknowledges the complex ways in which the faith traditions of Chicago’s workers provided an interpretive lens through which they made sense of the industrial upheavals in Chicago during the late nineteenth century. Workers’ social Christianity was more than just a set of abstract beliefs, it was a tool for challenging the juggernaut of industrial capitalism as well as the complacency of Protestant and Catholic clergy who, on the one hand, worried about the increasing alienation of workers from their churches, while on the other hand, resisted even the most tepid of workers’ demands for industrial...

• The Page 99 Test
  http://page99test.blogspot.com/2015/10/heath-w-carters-union-made.html
  Word count: 565

  QUOTED: "The book argues that working people keyed the rise of social Christianity, catalyzing a remarkable early-twentieth-century turnabout in which the churches, after decades of vehement opposition, finally embraced organized labor."

  Heath W. Carter's "Union Made"
  Heath W. Carter is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University, where he teaches courses on modern United States history.

  Carter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, and reported the following:
  From Page 99:
  The same Tribune article…included also a summary of English labor leader Ben Tillet’s stern speech, which heaped ridicule upon “parsons [who] denounce the Prince of Wales for playing baccarat [while] they shut their eyes to the operations of the sweaters and heartless capitalists who rob the laborers of body and soul.” The news from New York and Newcastle-on-Tyne, Minneapolis and Milwaukee, and countless other places was much the same: “the laboring classes are drifting away from the church,” as one Methodist preacher at a conference in Omaha put it.
  As it turns out, Union Made was made for the page 99 test. The book argues that working people keyed the rise of social Christianity, catalyzing a remarkable early-twentieth-century turnabout in which the churches, after decades of vehement opposition, finally embraced organized labor. This brief excerpt captures two of the fundamental dynamics driving the story. First comes the quote from Ben Tillet, which captures the essence of working people’s critique of the churches: namely, that they were preoccupied with minor matters such as card games and gambling, while they remained deafeningly silent – or, worse, outright hostile – to trade unions and their insistence that the gravest moral issue of the day was the plight of the worker. Indeed, lay believers like Tillet preached and practiced social gospels long before most middle-class ministers did.

  Second was the clergy’s fear that “the laboring classes are drifting away.” It was this mounting anxiety, more than any other single factor, which prompted church leaders of nearly every denomination to reconsider their views on the labor movement. How did they come to see embracing trade unionism as the way forward? Because for a generation workers had been telling them it was. They began by warning that they would leave the churches if they did not support trade unions and before long they began to follow through. To much fanfare, labor founded a church of its own in 1894 Chicago – one which made no distinction between the mechanic and the millionaire. Later that same year, when the city’s clergy, almost to a person, criticized the Pullman Strike, they found themselves confronted by angry parishioners, some of whom voted with their feet and stormed right out of sanctuary doors. Experiences such as these prompted many a minister to see the answer to the nation’s industrial crisis and the church’s membership crisis as one and the same: champion the brand of conservative labor reform touted by the American Federation of Labor (as opposed to, say, the radical brand of the Industrial Workers of the World – or Wobblies – who got their start in Chicago in 1905). In other words, the middle-class Social Gospel you can read about in textbooks was, in its own surprising way, also union made.
  Visit Heath W. Carter's website.

  --Marshal Zeringue

• Sage Journals
  http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0034637315610122i
  Word count: 10

  Please use link the access PDF of Review.

Word Count