A look at Southern Churches and the New Deal

In the twenty-first century, white southern churches overwhelmingly support Republican efforts to dismantle the welfare state, and religious leaders like Franklin Graham provide the language and rationale for that work. They have not always done so. In the wake of the most devastating economic crisis of the twentieth century, southern churches helped build a New Deal welfare state that in turn reshaped the place of churches in their local communities. This talk examines the collapse of religious voluntarism in the early 1930s, the subsequent support among religious leaders for the New Deal, and the gradual alienation of conservative Christianity from the state. Decades after they had supported the expansion of the welfare state, white southern churches turned their backs on it, instead spinning a myth of a redemptive Depression, unwelcome federal intervention, and an undeserving underclass.