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FORUM: American Religion and the Great Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2011

Extract

Few topics seem more natural and, sadly, timelier than American religion in bad economic times, our own or the economic depression of the 1930s. The essays by Heather Curtis, Jonathan Ebel, and Alison Greene point up how little we know about religion in the 1930s and, by implication, how little religion has informed policy during our own economic downturn. Perhaps our own crisis is still too new or we are distracted by the “Christian nation” debate or the latest clerical sex scandal. Whatever the cause, Curtis, Ebel, and Greene demonstrate that in the 1930s religion and economic dislocation produced remarkable religious challenges and transformations whose similarities as well as differences underlined their sometimes fateful intersection.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2011

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References

1 Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History 29, no. 1 (March 1960): 316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The only previous study of Roosevelt's letter to clergy focuses on Catholic clergy, who also responded positively: Billington, Monroe and Clark, Cal, “Catholic Clergymen, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal,” Catholic Historical Review 79, no. 1 (January 1993): 6582Google Scholar.

3 Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Dochuk, Darren, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grass Roots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011)Google Scholar; Heineman, Kenneth J., A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Wenger, Beth S., New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.