Religion and the American industrial city: Protestant culture and social transformation in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1824--1890

Lowell, Massachusetts, established in 1823, was the first modern industrial city in the United States, the site of the introduction of fully-automated manufacturing carried out on a large scale within a modern corporate structure. The several decades following the introduction of manufacturing witnessed the transformation of Lowell from a carefully planned factory village to a diverse industrial city. This dissertation explores the dynamic interplay between the existing Protestant religious culture of New England and the new social and cultural environment created by the rise of the industrial city. At the level of discourse, the dissertation examines varied Protestant articulations of the ways that religious influence should be brought to bear upon both the factory system and the industrial city as a whole. Working-class spokespersons argued that Christianity should provide restraints on market activities and govern the social relations created by industrialization. Clergy, capitalists, and workers alike conceived of religion as a critical component in the self-cultivation and individual improvement of the new industrial worker. Constructions of genuine Christianity that tended to equate religion with morality and ethics emerged from this discourse. At an institutional level, churches in Lowell positioned themselves as guardians of social order and agents of moral uplift, turning to business elites for financial support for their endeavors and engaging in a good deal of interdenominational cooperation. Churches' efforts reveal a creative tension between the realities of voluntarism in the religious marketplace of Lowell and a persisting establishmentarian impulse that envisioned churches as quasi-public civic institutions. In addition, the logistics of church building in a rapidly expanding city led churches to borrow innovative methods of financing from the commercial sector, with the result that churches became both opportunities for profitable investment and sites of consumption in ways that blurred the lines between sacred and commercial space. Throughout, an ongoing discourse built on fears of religious indifference and moral dissipation among the working class helped to propel a Protestant civilizing mission that linked religion with respectability, promoted interdenominational cooperation, and created a sense of crisis that perpetuated the image of the irreligious industrial city.