FDR's Clergy Letters

Lodged firmly in the American psyche and a bedrock part of American history, is the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash in October of 1929 - the market lost 50% of its value in weeks - and lasting a decade, it was the worst calamity to hit the United States since the Civil War. Unemployment soared, farms went under, long bread lines formed, people up and left their homes for a better place, and poverty skyrocketed. The emotional toll on millions was just as severe. For us, the question is, in what ways did religion – one of the greatest and most ubiquitous forces in our history – react to the Great Depression? Understanding this will help us better comprehend and perpetuate the American project, including the religion clauses in the U.S. Constitution: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" and “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof.”  As part of our multi-episode series about religion in the Great Depression, Dr. Alison Greene and Dr. Randall Stephens are joining us to talk about the story of FDR’s clergy letters. Dr. Alison Collis Greene is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches United States religious history, with interests in American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South. She is author of No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, as well as a number of essays and articles on modern United States religious history in both scholarly and popular outlets. Dr. Greene is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Religion. Dr. Randall J. Stephens is professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture and is the author of several books including The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South and The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll, and was editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History. Specific to our discussion today, he is the author of an article that came out in the October 2023 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture: “The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation.”