Providing for the first time a national, regional, and local picture of religion's role in working-class formation, this book challenges the now common notion that the republican ideal constituted the principal ideological impulse behind the development of the early American labor movement. Uncovering the pervasive presence of Christian institutions, ritual, and language in the first flowerings of labor protest, Jama Lazerow argues that religion promoted a withering critique of industrializing America yet at the same time retarded the formation of working-class consciousness.
The book recreates the social and cultural world of workers in antebellum America with detailed studies of communities including Fall River, Fitchburg, and Boston, Massachusetts; Wilmington, Delaware; and Rochester, New York. Lazerow's exhaustive and unprecedented research - into local church records, tax lists, small-town historical society vaults, and private homes, as well as contemporary magazines, letters, diaries, and memoirs - has yielded a rich reinterpretation of working people and their churches.