Homebrewed Christianity Podcast

This was a conversation with Heath Carter, historian and author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. Heath walked us through his journey from growing up in evangelical Orange County to discovering a working-class theological tradition that has been largely erased from our collective memory. We explored how the social gospel wasn't born in elite seminaries but was hammered out by workers quoting scripture in union halls, threatening to leave churches that sided with their bosses, and forcing institutional Christianity to reckon with inequality. Heath traced how both Protestant and Catholic churches went from being uniformly anti-labor in the late 1800s to embracing living wages and collective bargaining by the New Deal era—not because theologians had brilliant insights, but because grassroots pressure made it pragmatically and theologically untenable to ignore the labor question. We discussed why this tradition was gutted in the late 20th century, what UAW President Sea