Sunbelt Catholicism argues that during the New Deal era the American Catholic Church integrated into the market for its material survival. Using St. Petersburg, Florida from 1940 to 1973, as a case study, where Sunbelt capitalists skirmished with the New Deal political economy, the Catholic Church was restructured within this landscape. Studying change over time in the chancery of the Archdiocese of St. Augustine, suburban parish life, a nursing home, and a hospital, this thesis narrates how and why these organizations entered the market as changing demographics and the emerging service economy required Catholic institutions to conform to capitalist logics. Terming this phenomenon Christocapitalism: the necessitated application of market principles and practices by Christian institutions as an act of preservation and dissemination of their faith; this thesis exhibits three different ways it was practiced. Business integration by the chancery's adoption of speculative practices in buying real estate by transforming the parish priest into a financier and service worker; labor integration by using the underpaid labor of women of color in a nursing home; and cultural integration, by publicly syncretizing capitalist principles with Catholic value systems of service inside a hospital. Functioning as a business and labor history of the American Catholic institutional structure, this thesis incorporates religious history within new historiography on the New Deal political economy and labor histories of the neoliberal era, while augmenting the religious history of American capitalism by pioneering Catholicism into these scholarships.
Colin Wood (Thu,) studied this question.