Abstract

Emerging from participant observation fieldwork in varied interfaith organizations, this essay argues that intentional interfaith engagement in the United States is a decidedly classed phenomenon that too rarely includes the presence and concerns of persons who are working poor. This dynamic is particularly problematic given religious entanglements with free-market capitalism and the specific political economic vulnerability and religious diversity of recent immigrants and refugees. Interfaith organizing models, especially with their inclusion of labor unions, offer an important balance in the ecology of interfaith engagement and resistance to the civil religion of neoliberalism. Through these place-based, consociational collaborations, labor organizations help faith communities historicize, conceptualize, and navigate complex economic dynamics while expanding labor's value-frameworks, forms of organizing, and apprehension of worker's faith-filled identities.