The Churches Do Their Part

Abstract

This chapter shows how mainline Protestant religious leaders, often working in conjunction with Jewish and Catholic groups, were instrumental in building popular support for New Deal programs including unemployment insurance, the National Recovery Administration, and the Wagner Act. It shows that Protestant elites offered the Roosevelt administration a variety of tangible forms of assistance—from local educational sessions to letter-writing campaigns to “NRA Sundays”—that went well beyond their public expressions of support. Arguably the churches’ greatest contribution to the construction of the New Deal-era welfare state, however, was to serve as a bulwark against attacks from a growing cadre of proto-libertarian entities on the far right. So long as most Protestants attended mainline churches, and so long as mainline leaders were monolithic in their support of social welfare programs, claims that there was something un-American about redirecting resources to aid the downtrodden remained an exceedingly tough sell.