paid subscriber content: how the religious left became the religious right
spoiler: it was capitalism all along
Hi, friends! I didn’t want to let this month end without sharing some content with the folks who are investing in me financially. So this is paid subscriber content! That said, there are a couple of sources I drew from; if you’re not in a position to become a paid subscriber, I want to heartily recommend a few resources on the subject I’m covering today:
Kruse, K. M. (2015). One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Basic Books.
Herzog, J. P. (2011). The spiritual-industrial complex: America’s religious battle against communism in the early Cold War. Oxford University Press.
And if you have a high tolerance for cursing, irreverance, and a slightly anti-religion narrative, the podcast that got me interested in this subject is:
I promised this summer that I would share some of what I’m learning in school. This semester, I took a course on the history and philosophy of social welfare (since my policy degree is in the School of Social Policy and Practice at UPenn, which is also the school where social workers and teachers of social work are trained). We were asked to delve into any subject related to social welfare (spoiler: there are a million ways to define social welfare), and research the history of a policy, program, or intervention as well as how that history shapes our current context and our recommendations for changing it.
My colleagues wrote about everything from homelessness policies and their impact on single men, to assimilation pressures on Asian Americans, to the intersection of climate change and displacement of rural populations to urban centers in Indonesia. (My cohort are awesome.)
I wanted to delve into my relatively recent discovery that during the first half of the twentieth century, the most influential arm of religion in US politics, the mainline Protestant church, actively partnered with labor to pass pro-worker policies, with the partnership of many Catholic and Jewish organizations. How did we go from that being the dominant voice of religion in public life to the anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-integration Evangelicals becoming the dominant religious influence in politics today.
I had theories. I had a little research. I knew a bit about Nixon and about the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.
I did not see the corporate manufacturers’ lobby being the missing piece of the puzzle…or really, the whole puzzle.
I’ve been working in religious left organizing almost my entire adult life, and I didn’t know about this. The folks I worked with to fight the Christian Coalition didn’t know about this. The faith-and-labor folks I’ve been working with for years didn’t know about this.
HOW DID WE NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?!
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