Between the Pew and the Picket Line

This introductory chapter gathers a number of local histories and suggests that although many Americans worshipped in churches and worked on shop floors, most lived in the space between the pew and the picket line. This space includes Pentecostal miners who had faith in prosperity and sought miracles at the mine; automobile workers and sympathetic ministers evangelizing one another on the shop floor; and black sharecroppers and white Protestant liberals who saw the creation of a credit union as an investment in a more cooperative capitalism. The chapter covers a vast chronological and geographic scope and draws upon the diverse experiences of the American workforce, arguing that the space between the pew and the picket line is not only where most Americans have lived, but where the contours of both American Christianity and American capitalism have been shaped.