This panel explores how the specific convergence of religion, class and labor yield different historical memories and sensibilities. From fields to factories and from Black women’s clubs to economic uplift efforts, religious ideas have fostered, and continue to foster, pragmatic and utopian views of labor, advocacy and equality, while also complicating the intersections of class, gender, and race.
Driven by the work of the now overlooked A. L. Morton and Dona Torr, the famed postwar British Marxist historians developed extensive research on the historic role of religious radicalism of peasants, artisans, middle-class dissenters, working class, etc. Their explanations of religion were its role in the transformation from feudalism to capitalism and how its progressive ideas were being absorbed into emergent socialism. After outlining the key ideas of the British Marxist historians, this paper looks at their legacy and reception. This discussion includes early receptions focused on expectations of the working class being able to realise the utopianism of historic religious radicalism. The paper then looks at how and why understanding the transformation of class relations was increasingly downplayed in the reception of the British Marxist historians over the twentieth century and why the emphasis shifted to a romanticised history of religion ‘from below.’
Black women's clubs and organizations can be situated as extraecclesial sites that illustrate intersections of Black women’s labor advocacy and spiritual and moral praxes outside of church institutions. This project presents the Coming Street YWCA’s Training School for Domestic Workers (Charleston, SC) as a an extraecclesial site and case study of Black clubwomen’s efforts to have their students achieve higher paying domestic employment through merit while also acquiescing to the white gaze by subjecting their students to health examinations upon their completion. This case inserts the precarious role of class as clubwomen—mainly among the city’s Black middle and upper class monitored the health of their working-class counterparts in the name of economic uplift.
This paper addresses the question of labor, class and capitalist oriented systems by focusing on the social teaching of the preeminent 20th century theologians and social activists Archbishop William Temple (1881 -1944) and Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Temple and Day advocated for a restructuring of existing capitalist-oriented systems within the United Kingdom and United States respectively. The Great Depression highlighted gross exploitation which their distinct social teaching sought to address. This paper will argue that the doctrine of the Incarnation provides the Christian basis for a counter view of labor and class, focusing on Temple and Day’s incarnational theology. This incarnational theology promotes the equal dignity of humanity, based on Christ’s own embodiment of all humanity as a worker. The contemporary value of incarnationally centered social teaching advocates for a dissolution of capitalist-oriented structures which diminish humanity equality.