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RELIGION

POLITICS AND PLURALISM

The period between the stock market crash of 1929 and the beginning of World War II was an important time for the development of a religiously pluralistic United States. The nomination of Al Smith as the Democratic Party candidate in 1928 drew attention to the fact that Catholics living in East Coast cities now held considerable political power and that rural Protestants no longer automatically determined presidential candidates. During the 1930s Catholics made up two-thirds of the union membership, and in 1932 Father James Cox led what was then the largest protest march on Washington in American history to draw attention to the needs of suffering workers. Catholic votes would be critical in solidifying Democratic political power, so Catholics gained a presence in Franklin D. Roosevelt's new administration. Of the 196 federal judges that the president appointed, fifty-one were Catholic. During the preceding three administrations only eight Catholics had been appointed to the 214 judicial openings. The president appointed Catholics James A. Farley as postmaster general and Thomas J. Walsh as attorney general. Roosevelt's social initiatives resonated with the pro-labor papal encyclicals of Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Two priests committed to Catholic visions of economic justice, John A. Ryan and Francis J. Haas, sat on New Deal committees. In 1931 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker newspaper, and by 1942 thirty-two Houses of Hospitality attended to the nation's impoverished.

Spurred on by the economic crisis, Roosevelt looked beyond the Protestant elite to establish an alternative to Herbert Hoover's conservatism. While governor of New York, Roosevelt had been impressed by the reform orientation of many progressive Jews, and he invited some of them to Washington; Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Baruch, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Samuel Rosenman, Alexander Sachs, J. David Stern, Nathan Straus, and Benjamin Cohen became the president's friends and advisors. Between four and five thousand young Jews who were recently trained in law, economics, and social work, and who were experiencing difficulty finding employment in the anti-Semitic environment of the period, found welcoming positions in the government.

In contrast to Catholics and Jews, mainline Protestant clergy showed little support for Roosevelt. By 1936 when a Literary Digest poll asked "Do you NOW approve the acts and policies of the Roosevelt New Deal to date?" over 70 percent responded "no." Liberal and moderate Protestants—Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians—supported any candidate who ran against Roosevelt. Seventyeight percent of all Congregationalists, for example, voted for Alfred M. Landon, the Republican candidate for president, in 1936. On the other hand, Baptists and smaller fundamentalist, holiness, and Pentecostal groups consistently voted for Roosevelt. The numbers of these conservative Protestants were rapidly growing throughout the country. Between 1926 and 1940 Southern Baptists grew by 1.5 million, membership in the Assemblies of God increased four fold, and the Church of the Nazarene grew from 63,558 congregants to 165,532. Conservative Protestants voted with the majority of Americans, supporting the president even though he oversaw the dismantling of prohibition in 1933. While Protestant clergy attacked the New Deal for either being too socialist or not socialist enough, the working class and the poor directly benefited from Roosevelt's programs.

GROWTH OF CONSERVATIVE PROTESTANTISM

During the Depression, the number of conservative Protestants increased as a result of their vigorous evangelization efforts and the growth of their educational and parachurch organizations. By 1930 there were approximately fifty nondenominational Bible schools in major cities that not only trained lay workers, Sunday school leaders, and foreign missionaries, but also supplied pastors and printed materials. Evangelicals increasingly sent their children to their own institutions of higher education; the enrollment in seventy of these colleges doubled between 1929 and 1940. A network of Bible conferences offered a mix of piety and recreation during the summer months. Foreign missionary activity was also critical to the evangelical worldview. The Sunday School Times listed forty-nine mission agencies in 1931; the number had increased to seventysix by 1941. When displaced farmers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri settled in southern California and Arizona and parts of Washington and Oregon, they brought their evangelical commitments with them. The religious landscape of the nation became permanently altered when southern Protestantism moved into the West because of the Dust Bowl.

A few conservative Protestants preached extremist visions of political and economic systems. Gerald B. Winrod founded the Defenders of the Christian Faith, and in 1938 entered the Republican primary for the United States Senate seat from Kansas. His anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and antiblack vitriol combined premillennial fundamentalism with political populism. Gerald L. K. Smith was a Disciples of Christ minister who joined with the governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, to promote his "Share-Our-Wealth" program. William D. Pelley, the son of a Methodist preacher, hoped to establish a Christian (evangelical Protestant) state where Jews would be disfranchised and confined to the equivalent of an American ghetto. Unlike Winrod and Smith, who stayed close to their fundamentalist roots, Pelley's message also included theosophy, astrology, and spiritualism.

DIVERSIFICATION AND MAINSTREAM DECLINE

African Americans who moved from the South during the Depression also brought their Christian commitments to urban centers. Olivet Baptist church in Chicago was America's largest Protestant congregation. Another Chicago church, Pilgrim Baptist, was one of the nation's ten largest churches by 1930 and managed to liquidate its $150,000 debt during the Depression. New religions emerged in the cities alongside the traditional black denominations. In New York, Father Divine held massive communion feasts and taught his followers the principles of positive thinking. Some African Americans chose to join communities that linked themselves to Islam, but congregational rivalries caused disunity and fragmentation among black Muslims. Others developed communities that used Hebrew scriptures and Jewish rituals. Migration out of the South brought African Americans in contact with Catholics and their parochial school system. In the segregated diocese of Chicago, all black parish schools flourished and contributed to the growing number of African-American converts. White priests at Corpus Christi Church baptized twentyone adult African Americans in 1920, 131 in 1935, and 322 in 1938. During the Depression, African Americans diversified their religion rather than escaping from it.

While some religious groups flourished during the Depression, liberal and moderate Protestants noted a decline in the critical elements of their religious culture. Between 1916 and 1926 congregations had expanded their physical plants, broadened their services, and increased their staffs. As a result, they experienced a sharp rise in operational costs and debt. With the onset of the Depression, church members withdrew much of their financial support, leaving ministers unable to meet expenses. Funding for foreign and domestic missionary programs also dropped, and it was difficult to find volunteers to venture overseas. Theological disputes drew some congregants into more conservative denominations. Other men and women found that their humanistic impulses could be satisfied outside of the church in the growing fields of social work, education, and government service. From the perspective of ministers and theologians, many of those who remained within their denominations were at best disillusioned and at worst mired in a form of sanctified commercialism.

A similar pattern occurred in American Judaism. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewish population in the United States grew by 40 percent and the number of synagogues increased from 1,910 in 1917 to 3,748 in 1937. Congregations in areas with large Jewish populations, such as New York City, expanded, but financial support dropped when the crash hit. In order to survive, synagogues raised their membership fees, which caused more Jews to break away from communal worship. Rabbis complained of the spiritual lethargy and intermarriages of their people. On the other hand, "mushroom synagogues" arose in New York City to cater to unaffiliated Jews. Jews in smaller communities had an easier time weathering economic decline because they could more efficiently adapt to the changing economic climate. Zionist organizations increased their membership. While anti-Semitism made Jews feel more sharply that they were outsiders, the reforming spirit of the New Deal brought socialist and labor union Jews closer to the political mainstream.

Native Americans found it easier to participate in their rituals after John Collier was made Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. His "Indian New Deal" included directives that insisted there be no interference with Native American religious life or ceremonial expression. Collier restricted religious instructions—typically conducted by Christian missionaries—in the newly established Indian day schools. He ended compulsory Christian services and supported voluntary instruction in native religions. During his administration, the Native American Church, along with its peyote rituals, was approved to function on the reservations. Although Collier and the Indian New Deal were controversial, there is no question that they helped shift the power on the reservation away from Christian groups and toward traditional ceremonial expression.

MEDIA AND DEVOTIONAL PIETY

The variety of faith communities in the United States and the diversity within those groups made for a complicated religious environment. However, decisions made by the broadcasting industry with the support of older Protestant denominations sought to present America as having only three religious faiths, which were all orderly and controllable. By 1925 there were at least sixty-three church-owned radio broadcasting stations across the country. Economic problems, however, forced many of them to sell. Rather than eliminate religion from the airwaves, the major commercial broadcasting networks NBC and ABC decided to provide free time to representatives of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities. In consultation with liberal Protestants, the networks agreed that religious broadcasting should be nondenominational, should avoid controversial or doctrinal matters, and should stress ecumenical ideals.

In 1934 the Federal Council of Churches assumed the responsibility for network Protestant broadcasting. The National Radio Pulpit on NBC presented sermons given by Harry Emerson Fosdick, Ralph Sockman, and David H. C. Read. NBC also broadcast the Message of Israel and the Catholic Hour. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen began his media career on the Catholic Hour, attracting a listening audience of seven million and receiving six thousand letters per day.

Groups whose religious messages did not conform to the network's standards could purchase airtime or struggle to maintain their own broadcasts. In 1926 fundamentalist Bob Shuler installed a radio station in the tower of his church and sent his message out across Los Angeles. His sensationalist exposés of political corruption provoked the Federal Radio Commission to terminate his right to broadcast in 1931. Father Charles E. Coughlin, with the approval of his local bishop, also bought radio time to promote his notions of Catholic piety and economic reform. Less controversial was the preaching of Walter A. Maier during the Lutheran Hour. Belonging to the conservative Missouri Synod, Maier preached in English rather than German, and in 1938 listeners sent over 125,000 letters responding to his programming. Other ministers presented music, healing, and testimonials on the radio. Elder Lucy Smith, the founder of the All Nations Pentecostal Church and an important African-American healer in Chicago, broadcast her interracial healing services throughout the 1930s. Many tuned in merely to hear her gospel choir sing. Aimee Semple McPherson continued to have a radio presence during the 1930s and broke with the sermon model of preaching by designing dramatic reenactments of biblical and moral tales. She encouraged her listeners to kneel next to their radios to pray with her and to place their hands on the receiver in order to heal their bodies and souls.

Protestants and Catholics looked to the miraculous to heal themselves and their families during the difficult times. Pentecostal women sent letters to religious magazines where they testified to both their suffering and God's goodness. Others laid the devotional magazines themselves on the afflicted parts of their bodies. Both black and white Pentecostals used handkerchiefs anointed with oil to achieve healing. Catholics flocked to novenas to the saints and the Virgin Mother. In 1938, 70,000 people attended a series of communal prayers offered to Our Lady of Sorrows in Chicago, and devotion to Saint Jude, the patron saint of desperate causes, spread throughout the country. Religious orders of priests and nuns offered to enroll people in devotional societies for their donations, sending the members medals and holy cards. Even Father Coughlin offered masses to be said for those who joined his Radio League of the Little Flower. Replicas of the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes were built next to churches so that Catholics could imaginatively connect with the healing power of the shrine. The Vatican had encouraged lay piety since the nineteenth century, and during the 1930s increased fervor enabled many churches to not only survive but to make their Catholic world in public space. While people have always used religion to transform suffering into sacrifice and thus give meaning to their lives, during the Depression this need was intensified.

See Also: CHARITY; FATHER DIVINE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Flynn, George Q. American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932–1936. 1968.

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COLLEEN MCDANNELL