Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust [Hardcover]

Exploring themes of work and labor in everyday life, Richard J. Callahan, Jr., offers a history of how coal miners and their families lived their religion in eastern Kentucky's coal fields during the early 20th century. Callahan follows coal miners and their families from subsistence farming to industrial coal mining as they draw upon religious idioms to negotiate changing patterns of life and work. He traces innovation and continuity in religious expression that emerged from the specific experiences of coal mining, including the spaces and social structures of coal towns, the working bodies of miners, the anxieties of their families, and the struggle toward organized labor. Building on oral histories, folklore, folksongs, and vernacular forms of spirituality, this rich and engaging narrative recovers a social history of ordinary working people through religion.

Callahan (religion, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia) provides a multidisciplinary study of the religious culture that developed when coal mining replaced subsistence farming as the economic base of eastern Kentucky life starting in the late 19th century. He first sketches traditional Appalachian mountain religion, rightly rejecting interpretations that see it as a fatalism rooted in deprivation. Rather, a profound sense of the supernatural was key to this religious style associated with independent Baptists and Old Regular Baptists. Companies often subsidized churches representing mainline denominations, but white miners preferred newer Holiness-Pentecostal groups. They bridged mountain religion and the industrially oriented mines. Mistreated by mining executives, mining families found in the Holiness-Pentecostal churches ways to resist oppression and give the life of work meaning. For those sometimes attracted to unions (even the communist-backed National Miners' Union), unions became extensions of the church, for they also spoke to issues of meaning and values. Callahan shows the profound connectionsl(