The End of “The Protestant Era”?

Abstract

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.

Parables and Politics

“…Alison Greene (2011) describes the post-Depression era, when, she writes, “the clergy had begun to acknowledge that the Great Depression sapped American religious institutions’ power to face social crisis and alleviate individual suffering” (p. 602). The shift of charity far from complete, the New Deal helped fast forward the role of government as a social services provider in lieu of what had traditionally been the role of religious and philanthropic organizations.…”