In the closing months of 2023, the national media spotlight descended on a little-known electrician from Kokomo, Indiana. Shawn Fain had toiled for decades at a Stellantis plant in his humble hometown prior to his election earlier that year as president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). By autumn, he was leading the union headlong into an ambitious “stand up” strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. On the eve of that historic action, Fain delivered an impassioned speech, striking notes that electrified the membership even as they left some observers puzzled. He talked about how he had been sworn into his office on his grandmother’s Bible and how proud he was to have inherited her faith. He then went on to exegete some famous passages from the Gospel of Matthew. Fain cited Jesus’s promise that “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move,” before going on to vow, “Yes, these corporations are mountains, but together we can make them move.” Fain proceeded to invoke Jesus’s famous dictum, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” It was not hard for the UAW president to see why. “I have to believe that answer, at least in part, is because in the Kingdom of God no one hoards all the wealth while everybody else suffers and starves,” Fain declared.Footnote ¹

Soon thereafter, veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse published a profile of the UAW’s new boss, commenting, “There’s somewhat of a paradox to Fain. On one hand, Fain … comes across as a traditionalist, talking of his God and faith and three grandparents who worked in auto plants … At the same time, Fain comes across as a militant, channeling Bernie Sanders as he bashes ‘the billionaire class.’” Greenhouse’s presumption that there must be something paradoxical about a person who embraces both religious faith and labor militancy is contradicted by countless precedents. In fact, a long line of working-class prophets has left an indelible mark on modern U.S. history. Their number includes the evangelical and Catholic artisans who helped to launch the labor movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the Jewish and Christian socialists of the Gilded Age, the labor priests and spirit-filled organizers of the New Deal era, and iconic postwar figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. But if Greenhouse’s befuddlement seems misplaced given this history, it is more understandable when one takes into account the shape of the historiography.Footnote ²

Jon Butler’s perceptive 2004 observation that “religion more often appears as a jack-in-the-box” in the scholarship on the modern United States was certainly true of labor and working-class history. There were long stretches of time during which, if religion “popped up” at all, it was most often on the community maps that were once a staple of social histories. Houses of worship dotted those pages just as they did many an American built environment. But scholars only rarely stopped to interrogate what was going on inside them, let alone to offer a textured sense of how workers’ faith related to the rest of their lives. There were important exceptions to the rule, of course. Some of the field’s most pathbreaking books—from E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) to Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal (1990)—were ones that took religion seriously. British historians like Thompson have generally been more attentive to the many ways that religious and working-class history are inextricable. It is hard to say exactly why this insight has been more elusive on this side of the Atlantic. When I was in graduate school, one senior scholar suggested to me that it had to do with a basic lack of comfort and familiarity: because so many labor historians were themselves secular, they did not know how or where to begin writing about religion.

This may be part of the answer, but there are other variables too. Labor historians’ significant reliance on a Marxist lens in which religion is mere epiphenomenon has played a role. And so have the contingencies surrounding these fields’ disparate origins and development within academic institutions. While labor history evolved in the context of university history departments, religious history emerged out of seminaries and divinity schools. “Church history,” as it was long called, was often quite literally parochial in its horizons. Protestant and Catholic scholars founded separate guild societies and elaborated distinct historiographies, neither of which was especially well connected to the conversations and debates shaping U.S. history writ large. Religious and labor historians were therefore unlikely to run into each other in the hallways, let alone read one another’s work. When one considers these various factors, the origins of the jack-in-the-box problem hardly seem mysterious.Footnote ³

Yet there have been discernible shifts in the two decades since Butler’s article first appeared. For one, there has been a marked increase in the sheer volume of work. The 2008 financial crisis was no doubt the prime mover behind this quickening of interest. Even as Occupy Wall Street protesters were going toe to toe with the leadership of Trinity Wall Street, one of the nation’s wealthiest congregations, a group of mostly younger scholars were striving to understand the complicated role of religious ideas and communities in the making of Gilded Ages, past and present. Some were trained in labor history and others in religious history. Collectively, in the decade after 2008, they produced a flurry of books at the intersection of their fields. This burgeoning literature shed important light on the religious imagination of late-nineteenth-century radicals and on the working-class origins of the Social Gospel; on the complicated and momentous ways that faith inflected American responses to the Great Depression, both at the grassroots and in the halls of power; and on the pivotal role of Christian voices in both advancing and opposing postwar labor and civil rights movements. Whether this burst of activity will evolve into a sustained tradition of scholarship remains to be seen. The pace with which new publications at this intersection are appearing has slowed, though the 2020s have seen significant contributions on everything from the fate of Christian socialism to the spirituality of Pentecostal farmworkers.Footnote ⁴

Even as labor and religious historians were plumbing new depths in the wake of the financial crisis, colleagues in adjacent fields such as political history were generating related insights in the context of another quest, namely, to understand the deeper sources of the Right’s remarkable resilience in the contemporary United States. The now-robust historiography on the Religious Right has illuminated, among other things, the twentieth-century resurgence of Christian libertarianism. This “gospel of free enterprise” had powerful boosters in Washington and on Wall Street, to be sure. But it also proved irresistible to countless ordinary white evangelicals and—even more than the scholarship has yet let on—Catholics, including many whose parents and grandparents were the direct beneficiaries of New Deal programs. The new history of capitalism, also much en vogue following 2008, often missed these critical developments at the grassroots, overemphasizing the structural and exuding almost a sense of inevitability. But important exceptions, such as Bethany Moreton’s landmark study of Wal-Mart, underscored that the success of right-wing populism cannot be understood exclusively or even primarily as an imposition from the top down. The power of the Right’s appeal has sprung in significant part from its message’s resonance with the changing social-ethical intuitions of everyday Americans—intuitions that, in the modern United States, it turns out, have almost always had a religious valence.Footnote ⁵

This insight has often befuddled the Democratic Party elite, with even Barack Obama, certainly among the most religiously fluent, failing at times to disguise disdain for those who “cling to guns or religion.” It continues to confound labor and working-class historians too. For all the strides that the field has made in terms of addressing the jack-in-the-box problem, it is not clear to me that the field as a whole is aware that religion is not just a discrete realm of activity that happens in a set-apart sacred space on Saturday or Sunday. It has often been deeply implicated in how people navigate every aspect of their lives, including everything from what they eat to how they vote. For countless workers, past and present, ideas about wages and working conditions, attitudes toward unions and collective bargaining, and deeper convictions about the very meaning of economic and racial justice have often been inextricably connected to beliefs about God, participation in religious communities, and faith and ritual practices.Footnote ⁶ There is overwhelming evidence that, in the modern United States, religion has been intricately bound up in what counts as common moral sense about everything from how much inequality is too much to whether workers deserve to be paid a living wage. The decisive shifts in such sensibilities between the New Deal era, say, and our own have also been deeply intertwined with momentous changes in religious life, as the aforementioned literature on the Right has underscored. The upshot of all this, of course, is that if the field were truly to answer Butler’s call, all labor historians would also have to be religious historians.

But it goes the other way, too. As someone who came up through religious history circles, let me hasten to add by way of closing that my field has ample room to grow when it comes to interrogating issues of labor and class. Almost three decades after the study of “lived religion” first came into vogue, there is still so much we do not know about the role that poor and working-class people have played in shaping American religious life. Books like Felipe Hinojosa’s Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio, which repositions working-class Latino activists as key figures in the remaking of postwar ecumenical Protestantism, remain all too rare. And while class analysis is not entirely absent in the field today, nor is it anywhere near the fore, as underscored by the contents of the program at recent American Society of Church History annual conferences. If future scholars and journalists are going to make better sense of someone like Shawn Fain—not as a paradox but as one important window into the wider worlds of American workers—there are so many questions that remain unanswered: about his grandmother’s faith, how it was passed down, and what changed along the way; not to mention about how on earth her Bible and the Gospel of Matthew became effective rallying points for hundreds of thousands of workers in a religiously plural twenty-first-century union. If we are going to address the jack-in-the-box problem, then religious historians have our work cut out for us too.Footnote ⁷