No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta by Alison Collis Greene

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta by Alison Collis Greene Jeannie Whayne No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. By Alison Collis Greene. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 317. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-937187-7.) No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta analyzes the impact of the Great Depression and the changes it wrought on religion in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas and in Memphis, Tennessee, the most important metropolitan cotton center in the region. Alison Collis Greene paints a moving portrait of the struggles of both poor black and white cotton workers in the countryside and in the city, paying close attention to how their religion shaped their understanding of what was happening to them. She argues that religious leaders of the conventional Christian denominations were reluctant to abandon long-held precepts about the causes of material distress and initially viewed the Great Depression as a sign of spiritual decline. Preaching redemption from economic [End Page 213] disaster by turning to God instead of to other alternatives—such as the federal government—southern religious leaders found their congregations increasingly restive. Ultimately, when church leaders realized the enormity of the economic crisis confronting the country, their own utter inability to deal with the suffering of the poor, and the danger to the cotton economy, they abruptly changed course. Religious and political leaders embraced New Deal programs and used them to consolidate their power, both material and spiritual. By the end of the 1930s, however, after the danger to the cotton economy passed, these leaders returned to their original positions and became critical again of government intervention generally and of New Deal programs specifically. Greene perceptively analyzes dissenters, some of whom even dared to engage in a systematic critique of American capitalism. Among these dissenting Christians were Catholic leaders from Pope Pius XI on down, homegrown southern Christian radicals, and a few adherents of the Social Gospel movement. Among the last were a few students of Alva Taylor, a Vanderbilt University professor who was also a Disciples of Christ minister. Imbued with Christian socialist ideology and a commitment to civil rights, Taylor’s students played crucial roles in fighting southern rural poverty by supporting the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). Founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934, the STFU united black and white tenants and sharecroppers in an alliance against New Deal agricultural programs. The names of Ward Rodgers, Claude Williams, and Howard Kester are intimately connected to the evolution of that organization. One of the most fascinating sections of Greene’s book covers the itinerant evangelical preachers who worked outside the conventional religious denominations. Here Greene makes an important point often overlooked by historians and certainly overlooked by many observers at the time: the religion of the poor was more a lived experience than one they expressed in a church building. Too poor to construct a church and too transient to support one had they done so, poor Christians attended church irregularly, and when they did, it was often in a home, in a public building, or outside. These worshippers responded to charismatic traveling preachers enthusiastically, and Greene’s analysis of one such person demonstrates the rifts within a traditional denomination, the Baptists. Fighting Joe Jeffers had keen insight into the religious environment of the Delta and a sense of what appealed to people suffering an economic calamity beyond their comprehension. A vaudeville-trained performer with a sense of the dramatic, Jeffers was not above using the situation to his advantage. He landed in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in the early 1930s and soon stood at the center of a dispute within a congregation that hinged on his interpretation of what caused their economic difficulties. Although he arrived as a revival speaker, he saw an opportunity to land the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Jonesboro. The result was chaos, and Jeffers eventually departed after a gunfight left one man dead. No Depression in Heaven is an important book...