The Holy Land

During the harsh New York City winter of 1909-10, 20,000 garment workers marched and picketed to win recognition of their union. "You are striking against God and Nature, whose law it is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow," a magistrate hectored one young seamstress. "You are on strike against God." To which George Bernard Shaw responded from across the ocean, "Delightful. Medieval America always in intimate personal confidence of the Almighty."

There is nothing simple about sin, particularly in a land where piety has always been a public enterprise. For that justly forgotten judge, every class-conscious sweatshop was a breeding ground for anarchy. Thankfully, few Americans could swallow the image of the Lord as an authoritarian employer; He had, after all, so many other evils to combat.

And so many eager helpers, stirring up righteous trouble from all points on the political map. Consider the bounty of activities Shaw could have mocked in the early years of the past century. Prohibitionist clerics organized to ban "the liquor traffic," sentinels of womanly virtue (from both genders) tried to stamp out prostitution and abortion, and churchgoing segregationists adopted Jim Crow laws to protect the white South against the designs of "savage" blacks. On the left, Christian Socialists cursed capitalism as an evil system that enthroned money-changers and mocked the Sermon on the Mount. When the federal government jailed Eugene Debs for speaking out against World War I, one minister from Ohio hailed the radical leader as the "vicarious victim of Society's sins...his life is a continual crucifixion."

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