Abstract
The religious left has a long, rich, and continuous history in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Although the power of the religious right in recent times is far better known, the religious left is anything but new. From the 1870s to the 1980s and beyond, Americans of diverse backgrounds and religious faiths worked to transform their society to make it conform to their faith-based visions of righteousness, peace, equality, liberation from oppressive structures and traditions, and social unity. The religious left has been a basic component of both American radicalism and American civic religion throughout modern American history. This volume draws on emerging scholarship to rectify the neglect of this religious left tradition.
For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in
the house of my God
than live in the tents of wickedness.
Psalm 84: 4–10
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Notes
- 1.
Laurie Goodstein, “Religious Liberals Sat Out of Politics for 40 Years. Now They Want in the Game,” New York Times, June 10, 2017. Other important accounts were: Scott Malone, “‘Religious left’ emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era,” Reuters, March 27, 2017; Julie Zauzmer, “People are looking for a ‘Religious Left.’ This little-known network of clergy has been organizing it,” Washington Post, April 26, 2017; and Holly Meyer, “You know the religious right. Here’s the religious left (and it’s fired up),” USA Today Network, April 15, 2017.
- 2.
Laurie Goodstein, “What a Leader of the Religious Left Admires about the Religious Right,” New York Times, June 12, 2017.
- 3.
For a sampling of the newest and most exciting research in this area, see: Matthew Avery Sutton and Darren Dochuk, eds., Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and R. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister, eds., Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
- 4.
Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004): 1357–78. Butler was describing the role of religion overall in narratives of modern America.
- 5.
Sutton and Dochuk, Faith in the New Millennium, 2.
- 6.
Too often missing, but not completely. The major efforts at synthetic narratives of the American religious left are Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992) and Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011).
- 7.
Goodstein, “Religious Liberals Sat Out.”
- 8.
On the history of the America religious right, see: Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010); Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in Modern Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 9.
For examples of recent scholarship on the history of Catholic conservatism, see: Stacie Taranto, Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); and Todd Scribner, A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neoconservative Catholics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015).
- 10.
On Protestantism’s influence on modern American liberalism, see: David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). See also: Mark A. Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper: George McGovern and Progressive Christianity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017); Cara Lea Burnidge, A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Michael G. Thompson, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States Between the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015); Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 11.
Here we refer to two otherwise outstanding syntheses: Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); and Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Among the many monographs that detail the histories of Communist and Marxist-inspired leftist movements in the modern United States, almost all narrate the course of the atheist left. Noteworthy examples include: Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919–1957 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism in the United States: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1984); Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997); Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Communism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialism in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left (London: Verso, 2013).
- 12.
For strong treatments of the religious left that present this history more as an essential part of the American religious tradition rather than as a revision of our familiar pictures of both religion and radicalism in the United States, see McKanan, Prophetic Encounters and Craig, Religion and Radical Politics. For peace historians’ attention to faith-based activism, see: Patricia McNeal, Harder than War: Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Rachel Waltner Goossen, Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941–1947 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central America Solidarity Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Roger Peace, A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Rosalie Riegle, Crossing the Line: Nonviolent Resisters Speak Out for Peace (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013); Melissa Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Allan Austin, Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
- 13.
For examples of the history of the Protestant left, see: Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Patricia Applebaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Jill K. Gill, Embattled Ecumenicists: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011); David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); and Perry Bush, Peace, Progress, and the Professor: The Mennonite History of C. Henry Smith (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2015). On the history of Catholic radicalism, see: Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); and Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Life and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
- 14.
The earlier emphasis on faith on nonviolence was represented, in different ways, by: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); and David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the End of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
- 15.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–63. Key works in the new vein include: Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Recent exceptions in their attention to Christian nonviolence are: Kosek, Acts of Conscience; and Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). See Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) for a unique perspective on religion in the black movement. On Frazier and many others, and generally on the contested status of religion in the African-American freedom struggle, see: Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
- 16.
Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Ken Fones-Wolf and Elizabeth Fones Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 20th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Luis D. Leon, The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)
- 17.
The history of religious support for gay rights has a longer history than is commonly known. As Heather White has shown, a small group of Protestant clergy began to question received wisdom on homosexuality and collaborated with gay rights activists in the 1960s. See White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
- 18.
On “movement halfway houses,” see Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Danielson, L., Mollin, M., Rossinow, D. (2018). Introduction. In: Danielson, L., Mollin, M., Rossinow, D. (eds) The Religious Left in Modern America. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73120-9_1
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