Case Study 2: Churches as Community Infrastructure During the Coal Wars

The Meeting Place That Could Not Be Shut Down

In the winter of 1931, the coal operators of Harlan County, Kentucky decided that the union organizers had to go. They had used every tool available: mine guards with rifles, eviction notices from company housing, blacklists that would follow a man from mine to mine across the coalfields. They had arrested organizers, beaten them, shot at them. They had pressured county officials to deny permits for public gatherings and ordered the sheriff's deputies — who were also paid by the coal companies — to break up any assembly that looked like it might have something to do with the United Mine Workers of America.

They closed the union halls. They forbade gatherings on company property. They made it clear that any man caught attending a union meeting would lose his job, his house, and his family's access to the company store that was, for many, the only source of food.

But they could not close the churches.

This was not because the coal operators respected the sanctity of worship — most of them funded their own company churches and expected ministers to preach obedience. It was because the independent churches — the little Holiness congregations meeting in converted storefronts, the Missionary Baptist churches built on land that predated the coal companies, the brush-arbor meetings that happened wherever a preacher could gather a crowd — were beyond the companies' control. They existed outside the company town system. Their preachers were farmer-preachers or miner-preachers who did not depend on the company for their livelihood. Their buildings, however humble, were owned by the congregation, not the corporation.

And so, when every other meeting place had been shut down, the churches became the meeting places that the union needed to survive.

The Church in the Company Town

To understand why independent churches mattered so much during the coal wars, you first have to understand what company-controlled churches looked like.

In the typical company town — and Harlan County had dozens of them — the coal company built the church just as it built the houses, the store, the school, and the doctor's office. The company owned the building. The company often subsidized the minister's salary. The company expected, in return, a minister who would support the social order — who would preach the virtues of hard work, obedience to authority, gratitude for employment, and the sinfulness of envy and discontent.

This was not always cynical. Some company-sponsored ministers were sincere men who believed that the gospel of patience and heavenly reward was genuinely true. They ministered faithfully to sick miners, buried the dead, counseled grieving families, and provided real comfort in communities where suffering was constant. The fact that their message also served the company's interests does not necessarily mean their faith was insincere.

But the structural reality was unmistakable. A minister who depended on the coal company for his salary, his house, and his church building was not in a position to criticize the coal company from the pulpit. And when the labor conflicts intensified — when miners were being shot, evicted, and starved — the company-sponsored minister was expected to counsel peace, patience, and submission. Those who failed to do so were replaced.

Primary Source Excerpt — Testimony before the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, U.S. Senate, 1937: "The company built the church and paid the preacher. And the preacher, he knowed which side his bread was buttered on. He'd get up there of a Sunday and talk about the hereafter and keeping your place and not coveting what other people had. Never a word about how the children needed shoes or how the scales was rigged or how a man couldn't buy groceries nowhere but the company store." — Miner's testimony, Harlan County, Kentucky

The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee — a U.S. Senate investigation into violations of workers' rights, chaired by Senator Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin — heard extensive testimony in 1937-1938 about conditions in Harlan County. The testimony painted a picture of total corporate control over community institutions, including churches. Ministers who deviated from the company line were evicted. Church buildings that hosted unauthorized gatherings were boarded up. The company's control of religious life was one dimension of its control of all life.

The Independent Churches: A Different Kind of Power

Against this backdrop, the independent churches — the ones the company did not build, did not own, and could not control — became something more than places of worship. They became the infrastructure of resistance.

These churches were overwhelmingly small, poor, and unimpressive by any material standard. They met in one-room buildings with no plumbing, heated by potbellied stoves, lit by kerosene lamps. Some met in private homes, living rooms cleared of furniture and packed with worshippers sitting on benches and folding chairs. Some met outdoors under brush arbors — roofs of cut branches laid over poles, providing shade but no walls.

What they had was independence. Their buildings, however modest, were owned by the congregation. Their preachers worked day jobs alongside their congregants and owed nothing to the coal company. Their membership rolls were beyond the company's reach. And they had a theological tradition — rooted in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible and the social teachings of Jesus — that provided a framework for understanding economic exploitation as sin.

When the United Mine Workers began organizing in Harlan County in the early 1930s, the independent churches became critical nodes in the organizing network. Union meetings were held in church buildings when no other space was available. Church members served as communication links, passing information along kin and congregational networks that the company's spy system could not easily penetrate. Preachers offered prayers and sermons that framed the labor struggle in biblical language — the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, the prophets' condemnation of those who exploited the poor, Jesus's overturning of the money-changers' tables in the temple.

Preacher as Organizer

Several ministers in Harlan County and the surrounding coalfields became openly active in supporting the union cause, at significant personal risk.

These minister-organizers operated at the intersection of two authority systems — the authority of the church and the authority of the union — and their ability to link the two gave the labor movement a moral dimension that purely economic arguments could not provide. When a minister said that the coal operators were sinning against God by starving children and killing miners, that was a different kind of claim than when a union organizer said the operators were violating workers' economic rights. Both claims might be true, but the religious claim reached people at a deeper level, connecting the immediate struggle to a cosmic framework of justice and judgment.

The risks were real. In Harlan County, churches that hosted union gatherings were sometimes dynamited or burned. Ministers who supported the union received death threats. Some were beaten. Some were driven from the county. The coal operators understood that the independent churches represented a threat precisely because they were beyond corporate control, and they responded with violence.

Florence Reece, the wife of union organizer Sam Reece, wrote "Which Side Are You On?" in 1931 after company gun thugs ransacked her home looking for her husband. The song, which became one of the most famous labor anthems in American history, frames the coal war in terms that are simultaneously political and moral:

They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

The churches, in Reece's framing, were not neutral ground. They were contested territory — spaces where the moral meaning of the struggle was defined and where the community's allegiance was shaped by the theological convictions of its religious leaders.

The Women's Network

One of the most important — and most overlooked — dimensions of the church's role during the coal wars was the organizing work done by women through church networks.

The women of the independent churches were, in many cases, the practical backbone of the labor movement in their communities. They organized food distribution for striking families. They took up collections. They made quilts for families who had been evicted from company housing. They cared for the children of jailed organizers. They bore witness — showing up at picket lines, attending court proceedings, making the human cost of the coal war visible in ways that the companies could not ignore.

This work was deeply rooted in the church's tradition of mutual aid. The same women who had always organized church suppers, visited the sick, and brought food to bereaved families now channeled those skills and networks into supporting the strike. The transition from church work to union support was, for many of these women, seamless — not a departure from their religious identity but an expression of it.

The churches provided the organizational infrastructure that made this work possible. Church membership lists were, in effect, ready-made organizing lists. Church meetings provided a regular, legitimated occasion for gathering. The networks of trust and obligation that the church had built over decades of mutual aid now served the union's need for solidarity and collective action.

Primary Source Excerpt — Oral history interview, Aunt Molly Jackson (1960s): "The church women, they was the ones who kept people alive during the strike. They gathered up what little food there was and made sure every family got some. They didn't call it organizing — they called it being Christian. But it was organizing, sure enough."

Aunt Molly Jackson — midwife, singer, union organizer — was herself a product of this tradition. Raised in a religious family in Clay County, Kentucky, she understood the labor struggle as a religious obligation. Her songs and speeches blended biblical language with political analysis in ways that were utterly natural to the mountain religious tradition, where the line between sacred and secular had always been thin.

The Other Side: Churches Against the Union

The story would be incomplete without acknowledging that many churches during the coal wars supported the operators rather than the miners. Company-sponsored congregations preached patience and obedience. Independent churches with conservative theological commitments — particularly the fatalist strand that interpreted suffering as God's will — counseled acceptance rather than resistance. Some preachers genuinely believed that union organizing was sinful — a form of covetousness, a disruption of the divinely ordered social hierarchy, an invitation to violence that contradicted the gospel of peace.

The theological division was real, and it cut through communities and sometimes through families. A man might attend one church where the preacher supported the union and have a brother who attended another church where the preacher condemned it. The competing theological claims — that justice demanded resistance, that faithfulness demanded patience — were not easily reconciled, and the tension they created within communities was painful.

This internal religious conflict is important because it challenges the temptation to romanticize the role of churches in the labor movement. Religion was not uniformly on the side of the miners. It was on both sides, providing moral justification for both resistance and submission. The question of which theological tradition was "right" — whether the prophetic tradition or the fatalist tradition better represented authentic Christianity — was never settled on theological grounds. It was, in the end, settled by history: the conditions that the fatalist preachers counseled people to accept were conditions that, when challenged, could be changed. The union victories that followed the coal wars proved that suffering was not inevitable — that it was the product of specific human choices and could be altered by different human choices.

The Legacy

The role of churches as community infrastructure during the coal wars established a pattern that would recur in Appalachian social movements for the rest of the twentieth century. During the mountaintop removal protests of the 1990s and 2000s, churches again served as meeting places, communication hubs, and moral authority for resistance. During the black lung movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ministers were among the most outspoken advocates for miners' health rights. During the Brookside Strike of 1973-1974 in Harlan County — the conflict documented in Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning film Harlan County, U.S.A. — churches again provided the organizational infrastructure that sustained the strike.

The lesson is not that Appalachian churches were always on the right side of history. They were not. The lesson is that churches were — and remain — the most durable, most deeply rooted, most resistant-to-outside-control institutions in Appalachian communities. When every other institution has been captured, co-opted, or destroyed, the church that meets in someone's living room is still there. And the skills, networks, and moral frameworks that churches cultivate — the ability to organize, to speak publicly, to build solidarity, to sustain hope in the face of adversity — are the same skills that social movements require.

The coal wars revealed what was always true: that the church in Appalachia was never only about the hereafter. It was about the here and now — about power, justice, survival, and the question of whose voices would be heard.

Discussion Questions

1. The case study describes a tension between company-sponsored churches that preached submission and independent churches that supported the union. How does the economic relationship between a religious institution and its community affect the message that institution delivers? Can you identify contemporary examples of this dynamic?

2. The women of the independent churches channeled their skills in mutual aid — cooking, caregiving, community organizing — into supporting the labor movement. How does this example challenge the assumption that "real" political organizing is separate from the domestic and communal work traditionally done by women?

3. Some preachers who opposed the union did so on sincere theological grounds — they genuinely believed that patience and acceptance of God's will were the proper Christian response to suffering. How do we evaluate a theological position that is sincerely held but that, in practice, serves the interests of the powerful? Is sincerity a sufficient defense?

4. The coal operators understood that independent churches were a threat to their control and responded with violence — dynamiting churches, threatening ministers, driving organizers from the county. What does this violent response tell us about the actual power of these small, poor, unimpressive religious institutions?

5. The pattern described in this case study — churches serving as infrastructure for social movements — has repeated across Appalachian history. What is it about the church as an institution that makes it particularly suited to this role? Could other institutions serve the same function? Why or why not?