Anti-Labor, Anti-Catholic

David Sehat argues (The Myth of American Religious Freedom) that the American moral establishment was undermined by the labor movement: “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the corporation had joined the family, the church, and the school as an institution perpetuating Christian moral authority” (189).

This created problems because industrialists were not always exemplars of Christian morals: “Their rapaciousness and their seemingly casual disregard for Christian decency in their treatment of workers required some kind of justification.” To defend the corporate leaders, “many moral establishmentarians shifted the blame from the owners to the workers, claiming that industrialists were forced to address the degraded moral condition of the workers who, like slaves, required stricter forms of control.” Moralists thus supported management in disputes with labor, and demanded that the “state ought to support owners over workers . . . because God created the state, just as he had created wealth, to enforce his moral norms” (189). 

Support of the owners over workers typically meant supporting Protestants over Catholics: “quite a larger percentage of workers were Catholic or Jewish. . . . Faced with a body of Protestant owners and a larger body of Catholic and Jewish workingmen, the allegiance of the moral establishment seemed clear. Workers needed Protestant owners to guide them. The tendency of Christian writers . . . to bathe industrial mendacity in the cleansing waters of Christian morality combined with anti-Catholicism of writers . . . to support owners against workers through the formidable regime of the moral establishment” (189-90).