Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf’s Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie examines how the ideas, institutions, and practices of white Protestant evangelicals responded to the regional organizing campaign that the CIO launched in southern states in May 1946. The authors’ proposition that postwar unionization efforts assumed varying and contested religious meanings among workers, employers, and pro- and antiunionization spokespersons alike is a useful reminder that workplace authority, employment, and wages are ethical as well as economic issues. Their decision to explore the unionization campaign from the vantage of southern white evangelicals, while perhaps surprising in its exclusion of African American Protestant workers, does yield significant interpretive advantages. The decision helps to focus analysis on key moments in the emergence of a pro-business regional variant of evangelicalism as a southern phenomenon. It provides a way to think about how common evangelical religious cultures...

You do not currently have access to this content.