No Depression in heaven masterfully weaves together the narratives, voices, dissents and stories of those who lived in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas and in Memphis, Tennessee, during the Great Depression. As its title suggests, the book centres on the transformation of ‘religion’– more specifically what the author, historian Allison Collis Greene, calls ‘the southern Protestant establishment’, as it related to social, political, charitable and religious interventions in the fight to end poverty. Fundamental to the book's core, Greene teases out how Christianity, capitalism and Americanism were linked together during the struggle between the early twentieth-century religious right, leftists, Prohibitionists, clergy, the white poor and African Americans. Dividing her book into four parts: ‘Crisis’, ‘Depression Religion’, ‘The New Deal’ and ‘Religion Reinvented’, Greene tells the story of how rural southern Americans ‘looked to God, and then … looked to Roosevelt’ to survive hunger, sickness and grave economic depravity (p. 2).
A rich contribution to southern American religious history, Greene provides texture to the everyday lives of the poor and working class – across racial lines – in such regions often overlooked by historians of American religion, politics and culture. Among many striking aspects of the book, Greene's usage of the term ‘Jim Crow capitalism’ reverberates throughout, as she cites it as ‘the most damnable of all the Delta's evils [which] arbitrarily designated some souls worthy and others worthless’ (p. 63). However, she does not use her discussion of such persons as ‘Fighting Joe Jeffers’, the preacher who set pulpits ablaze with God's judgement and a call for revival, to explicitly define or characterise what Jim Crow capitalism was, what it looked like, and how it manifested itself amidst the Protestant establishment's arguments that ‘poverty among numerous evils … resulted from the state's failure to enforce Prohibition and moral uprightness’ (p. 51). Was Jim Crow capitalism different from Reconstruction capitalism or post-Civil Rights capitalism? Does ‘Jim Crow capitalism’ as a term attend to the racialised violence of capitalism? None the less, Greene's regional focus and specificity on the Delta adds to the growing literature on religion and the economy.
While Greene presents a southern world replete with racial and classed diversity, No Depression in heaven reads like a project focused significantly on the white poor and the white southern Protestant establishment with African Americans, for instance, as peripheral concern. This was perhaps most evident in one prominent missed opportunity: tapping into the rich history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), one of the largest Black Pentecostal denominations, which had its headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. While historians have written about the COGIC and the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, Greene's text could certainly have benefitted from focusing upon the religious and political actions of the COGIC in the 1930s (just about twenty years after its founding) and during what some historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall have described as the early portion of ‘the long Civil Rights Movement’. Attention to this period in Black Pentecostal history would also have complicated what constituted ‘the southern Protestant establishment’, especially as the COGIC was one of few African American denominations to ordain white preachers during Jim Crow segregation. Such attention could have inserted the Delta into the literature on anti-capitalist organising in the 1930s, which Green gestures towards in her discussion of the African American educator and businesswoman Nannie Helen Burroughs of Washington, DC (p. 97).
While I found the book to be incredibly well researched and written, I do think that there was another missed opportunity, that of providing texture, depth and detail regarding the everyday lives of African Americans during the Great Depression – apart from political mobilisation with white reformers (pp. 70–1). What were African Americans doing amongst themselves in the Delta – from Black Churches to independent schools to fraternal orders to women's organisations to nightclubs to stores? On page 120 of Greene's book, the image of a teacher in a school that met in church near Shaw, Mississippi, distributing fruit to schoolchildren is a wonderful example of the dexterity, ingenuity and flexibility of Black communal spaces, especially among the non-elite, working class and poor. While Greene's book was a pleasure to read, I found myself longing for more attention to the intimate details of the poor and working class, attention that is quite extensively given to such prominent persons as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Yet, without question, Greene's meticulous focus on southern religion is sure to shift the field of American religious history, and I am grateful for the example that she provides – archivally – for excavating voices otherwise overlooked and inserting those voices into larger historiographies about race, class, region, religion and citizenship in the United States. To this end, what might we learn as historians of American religion by focusing upon the South in the same way as the North (and in some instances, the Midwest) has long been the focus? What might regional studies reveal and/or call us to unlearn and re-learn?
