Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

Susan D. Becker

Abstract

There has been a voluminous amount of study done on the Great Depression of the 1930s, but most of it has dealt with national organizations and with prominent people, leaders, and spokespersons. Besides individual church histories, little study has been done on local congregations. Yet, churches as voluntary social organizations can be vehicles to investigate the responses of groups to socioeconomic stress. Churches were the arbiters of social ethics and the main sources of benevolent assistance before the Depression, but that changed with the New Deal. This study investigates the impact of the Depression on local congregations and their responses to it. The Disciples of Christ were chosen because their lack of a national structure to impose views and actions on local churches and their strict congregational autonomy provided a context of freedom for people to act out their individual and collective beliefs. Two churches each were selected from three Upper South cities with large numbers of Disciple chinches and located in its historic heartland along the Ohio River. These churches reacted to the Depression by contracting their support for charitable endeavors, yet did not forsake their care for the needy. Their programs for the needy arose more out of the biblical injunction to care for the poor than out of a commitment to a Social Gospel ideology. In this and other ways, their views and actions differed from the pronouncements of national leaders. Their congregational autonomy combined with internal dissension over theological modernism to hinder their offering substantial economic amelioration to their communities. The churches responded to economic duress much as individuals did: they "made do" with what they had, gave assistance where they could and hung on to their hopes for the better times that would come.

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