Working with religion: Industrialization and resistance in the eastern Kentucky coal fields, 1910--1932

This dissertation explores the intersections of life, labor, and religion in the development of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky. Paying special attention to the experiences and religious expressions of coal miners and their families, it argues that work and labor are important sites of religious thought and action. It begins by outlining the history of religion in Southern Appalachia, suggesting that not enough focus has been paid to the way that religion is lived in everyday life, especially in relation to the experiences of work. To remedy this situation, it moves on to examine various religious meanings of work in the subsistence farming economy of the eastern Kentucky mountains and religious responses to social and economic change that accompanied the introduction of industrial coal mining. Next it turns to the experiences of life in coal towns and the work of coal mining, exploring the ways that miners and their families gave religious significance to the tensions and dangers of their new industrial work setting through the use of religious idioms available to them from local churches, folklore, and ways of talking. For miners, material concerns were simultaneously existential and spiritual concerns. Religious idioms informed their interpretations of labor, and in turn work experiences were occasions for religious expression. During this period Holiness and Pentecostal religion, with its focus on bodily experience, healing, and the power of the Holy Spirit, was especially effective in expressing the structures of feeling that emerged from the work and life of coal mining. It offered a form of symbolic resistance to material limitations on human and social value. Finally, the dissertation explores the religious dimensions of the early labor movement by looking at the way that the National Miners' Union took on religious significance for many miners and their families as they negotiated material existential crises.; Resources for the recovery of the religious history of coal mining in eastern Kentucky are scarce. Therefore the dissertation relies heavily on oral histories, songs, and stories to uncover the everyday experiences of life in coal towns and the work of mining.