The generous and successful programs of the New Deal weren’t pushed through via the lobbying of savvy, connected and nominally liberal religious advocates, they were underwritten by the “moralistic, idealistic and politically naive” movement known as the Social Gospel.
Sheila D. Collins
Sheila D. Collins is Professor of Political Science Emerita, William Paterson University and co-editor with Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg of When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal (Oxford University Press, 2013). Her other books include Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare Reform and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (with Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, 2001); Let Them Eat Ketchup! The Politics of Poverty and Inequality (1996); Jobs for All: A Plan for the Revitalization of America (with Helen Lachs Ginsburg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, 1994); The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and the Future of U.S. Politics (1987); A Different Heaven and Earth: A Feminist Perspective on Religion (1974).
