Historians have mined Detroit’s documentary record to great effect, finding in Motor City a window onto any number of momentous trends in American life, ranging from industrialization and unionization to the rise of working-class conservatism. But as Matthew Pehl’s new book, The Making of Working-Class Religion, underscores, archival treasures aplenty remain to be unearthed.
Pehl’s book casts twentieth-century Detroit in new light, as a center of religious creativity and conflict, a place where faith—for all of its ambiguous sociopolitical implications—was seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of not just private but also public life. His story picks up in the 1910s, when diverse streams of migrants, including European Catholics, white Protestants, and African Americans, were pouring into the city’s neighborhoods and factories. Pehl deftly shows how, for all of that diversity, there were also many commonalities in religious experiences. Christian beliefs, practices, and institutions, Pehl argues, offered working people “a...
