Clergy Reaction to the New Deal: A Comparative Study

Billington, Monroe; Clark, Cal

doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1986.tb00707.x

Cited by 2 publications

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“…In 1935, for example, the Roosevelt administration wrote to more than 120,000 clergymen, asking for their views on Social Security, the public works program, and other New Deal initiatives. Remarkably, more than 30,000 of the recipients responded, the vast majority expressing strong support for the administration's domestic program (Billington and Clark 1986). More to the point, many of these letters characterized core New Deal initiatives, such as old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, as divinely inspired programs that promised to fulfill the nation's covenantal obligations toward its marginalized citizens.…”

Section: The Mainline Protestant Clergymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Compton

2019

Religions

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Scholars of American civil religion (ACR) have paid insufficient attention to the micro-level processes through which civil religious ideas have historically influenced beliefs and behavior. We know little about what makes such appeals meaningful to average Americans (assuming they are meaningful); nor do we know much about the mechanisms through which abstract religious themes and imagery come to be associated with specific policy aims, or what Robert Bellah called “national goals.” This article argues that a renewed focus on the relationship between civil religion and organized religion can help fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I draw attention to three mainline Protestant institutions that for much of the twentieth-century were instrumental both in cultivating respect for the national civic faith and in connecting its abstract ideals to concrete reform programs: namely, the clergy, the state and local church councils, and the policy-oriented departments of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Finally, I argue that a fresh look at the relationship between civil religion and “church religion” sheds new light on the (arguably) diminished role of civil religious appeals in the present. If, as Bellah claimed in his later writings, ACR appeals have lost much of their power to motivate support for shared national goals, it is at least in part because the formal religious networks through which they once were transmitted and interpreted have largely collapsed.

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Section: The Mainline Protestant Clergymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Compton

2019

Religions

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The End of “The Protestant Era”?

Greene¹

2011

Church Hist

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More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression. This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.

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Clergy Reaction to the New Deal: A Comparative Study

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

Why the Covenant Worked: On the Institutional Foundations of the American Civil Religion

The End of “The Protestant Era”?

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