One of the things we realized as we read the contributions to this symposium is that if you try to shine a bright light on a factor that has been ignored or slighted by previous scholarship in the field, it ends up distorting some of what you are trying to say. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, we hope that we did not give the impression that we blamed Protestant evangelicalism for Operation Dixie’s failure or that we intended to privilege that factor above all others. We believe that a powerful mix of racism, anticommunism, employer intransigence, and repressive state and local governments was the major impediment to the CIO’s campaign. What we discovered, however, was that aspects of the region’s dominant religious culture at that particular moment made the CIO’s overtures less appealing to white workers than labor activists...

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