Evangelicalism and Labor in the United States

Evangelical belief and practice offers resources for supporting the interests of workers and it may even justify active opposition to management through organizing unions and job actions such as a strike. The familiar evangelical perspective on the meaning and purpose of work emphasizes the worker as an individual, but it ignores the political and economic structures that shape the workplace. Yet examples of evangelical involvement in labor struggles illustrate how the usual alignment of evangelicalism and corporate interests is only one example of an evangelical orientation to political economy. An exploration of evangelical definition provides a theological and historical context for the interviewees in the subsequent chapters. The history of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) situates evangelicalism in the United States as a phenomenon of the post-World War II era. The NAE’s positive pronouncements on organized labor provide nuance and supplement the standard account of the alignment between evangelicalism and business interests. Evangelicals, in this era, are typically viewed as consumed with anti-communism and unable to acknowledge labor unions as an independent and positive force for workers. Yet some evangelicals associated with the NAE in its earliest years claimed that evangelicals were the very source of organized labor.