My historical question was: “How did the role of religion within American society shape and be shaped by the social climate of the 1930s, and were peoples’ religious beliefs strengthened or weakened by the hardships of the Depression?”
Going into this assignment, I already knew that the late 1920s saw a rise in conservatism, especially with the advent of the radio paving the way for pre-televangelism. This took societal hold even further in the 1930s, and I always assumed that was owed to people seeking a higher power to turn to during the Depression.
When selecting my sources, I knew that I wanted to focus on religion: prayer, church, priests. But when one of my sources wound up being a man speaking of his discussion with a Jew on the rise of fascism in Europe, that got me interested in Judaic aspects as well, instead of keeping the question fully focused on Christian reactions to the Depression.
This got even more interesting with Voyant: ‘church’ and ‘god’ are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common terms out of my searches. But ‘jew’ far surpasses ‘priest’, ‘jesus’, and ‘christian’. I can think of an explanation for ‘christian’ being so low – almost all the speakers from the sources that I read ensured to emphasize their denomination of Christianity, while that isn’t as much of an issue in Judaism. But even after I tried to filter for terms like ‘catholic’, ‘protestant’, or ‘evangelical’, the numbers were still much lower.
Out of curiosity, I came back to the source that inspired me to include Judaism, and I searched for the term ‘fascism’. It appears eight times – six of which come from that source. The Jewish man within it speaks of how he fears that only other Jews cared about what was happening to Europe in 1939. I don’t think this is unfounded. American goyim either didn’t seem to care or were convinced that it wouldn’t spread. ‘Fascism’ only overlaps with one document containing the Christianity-related terms that I searched for, and the word is scarce in mention across the rest of the corpus. True, America was dealing with its own problems, but nothing happens in a vacuum.
In this vein, I might choose to revise my question into, “How did religious beliefs and differences affect the concerns of America during the Depression?” Many of the Christian sources speak of attempts to convert more sheep to the flock, or prescribed prayer in the hopes of a divine remedy for domestic strife. Christianity seems to have been confined to two spheres: home and church. Judaism, while more centralized in urban/immigrant-heavy places like New York City, takes to the streets and gathering places like cafes. As someone who comes from both Catholic and Jewish backgrounds, I definitely find it fitting that the Christian sources are actively attempting to solve what they perceive as “problems”, while the Jewish sources pose more questions.
