The Great Depression marked a watershed moment in American religious history. As they struggled to find work and feed their families, hardworking Americans also searched for meaning in the deepening crisis. Focusing on black and white residents of Memphis and the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, this project traces the theological reorientation among laypeople and clergy, the transfer of charity and social services from church to state, and the shifts in power among American religious bodies as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Memphis and the Delta together illustrate the distinct experiences of the Great Depression in urban and rural America, even as bonds of migration, economy, and religion connected the city to the countryside.

Religious leaders in the region described the economic crisis as the outward expression of a spiritual crisis, and they argued that it demanded as powerful a response from the pulpit and pew as from Capitol Hill. Once at the center of southern charity and social reform, religious organizations struggled alongside secular ones to make ends meet in a contracting economy. Churches focused more on their own survival than that of their adherents, and they scaled back charities and social services at the time when people most needed help. Their own work in disarray, religious leaders failed to offer a meaningful explanation for widespread suffering.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal marked the transfer of welfare and reform from church to state. While some religious leaders applauded the state's expanded social role, others worried that needy families would turn away from the church as they turned to the federal government for help. At the same time, reformers who had once provided aid through the churches found new opportunities to put their skills to work for Roosevelt. As the major southern denominations ceded moral and social authority to the state, they faced growing competition from upstart Christian labor activists and Pentecostals who offered alternate avenues for religious activism and expression. The Great Depression and the New Deal remade American religious life and forever transformed the role of the church in society.