The Religious Left in Modern America

This edited collection of exciting new scholarship provides comprehensive coverage of the broad sweep of twentieth century religious activism on the American left. The volume covers a diversity of perspectives, including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish history, and important essays on African-American, Latino, and women's spirituality. Taken together, these essays offer a comparative and long-term perspective on religious groups and social movements often studied in isolation, and fully integrate faith-based action into the history of progressive social movements and politics in the modern United States. It becomes clear that throughout the twentieth century, religious faith has served as a powerful motivator and generator for activism, not just as on the right, where observers regularly link religion and politics, but on the left. This volume will appeal to historians of modern American politics, religion, and social movements, religious studies scholars, and contemporary activists.

Leilah Danielson is Professor of History at Northern Arizona University, USA. She has written extensively on the role of religion and race in left politics and the peace movement, and is the author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (2014). Marian Mollin is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech, USA. She is the author of Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest. Her current book project, The Power of Faith: Understanding the Life and Death of Sister Ita Ford, explores connections between gender, religion, and politics in the postwar era. Doug Rossinow teaches history at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (1998) and Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (2007), among other works.

Chapter 1: Introduction; Leilah Danielson, Marian Mollin, and Doug Rossinow.- Chapter 2: The Other Social Gospelers: The Working-Class Religious Left, 1877-1920; Janine Giordano Drake.- Chapter 3: The Social Gospel, the YMCA, and the Emergence of the Religious Left after World War I; Christopher Evans.- Chapter 4: Judaism, Yiddish Peoplehood, and American Radicalism; David Verbeeten.- Chapter 5: Dorothy Day, Religion, and the Left; Nicholas Rademacher.- Chapter 6: "Saints for this Age": Religion and Radicalism in the American Century; Leilah Danielson.- Chapter 7: Resisting Jim Crow Colonialism: Black Christianity and the International Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Sarah Azaransky.- Chapter 8: To Create Such a Crisis and to Foster Such a Tension: African American Religious Conceptions of the State; Doug Thompson.- Chapter 9: The Catholic Interracial Council and Mexican American Civil Rights in Iowa, 1952-1974; Felipe Hinojosa.- Chapter 10: Black Power/Black Faith: Rethinking the "De-Christianization" of the Black Freedom Struggle; Angela D. Dillard.- Chapter 11: "Pray to God; She Will Hear Us": Women Reimagining Religion and Politics in the 1970s; Lilian Calles Barger.- Chapter 12: "The 1900-Year Crisis": Arthur Waskow, the Question of Israel/Palestine, and the Effort to Form a Religious Jewish Left in America, 1967-1974; Doug Rossinow.- Chapter 13: Ita Ford and the Spirit of Social Change; Marian Mollin.- Chapter 14: Global Encounters and the Evangelical Left; David R. Swartz.