The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation

Abstract

The 1930s Dust Bowl on the Great Plains was one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history. Over-farming, severe drought, and high winds primed dust storms. Depopulation occurred in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. All was made worse by the economic crisis. While historians have written extensively about the Dust Bowl, its causes and its effects, there is little detailed scholarship on the religious dimensions of this ecological tragedy. This article examines some of the important ways that the Dust Bowl shaped Protestant religious life and popular theology just as it prompted denominational relief campaigns, educational efforts, and conservation work. It looks particularly at Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, holiness groups, and Pentecostals. Reactions to the Dust Bowl reveal patterns of thinking about and acting on ecology, social concern, migration, millennialism, and new federal relief efforts. An examination of the growing historical fragmentation of white Protestantism is central to this article. In this era of environmental ruin and mass migration to the West, religious groups and individuals offered vastly different solutions and interpretations, foreshadowing later political and cultural conflicts. In the 1930s, long before the birth of modern environmentalism, Protestants were asking why things had gone so horribly wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it.