Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites.

The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their...