The Archbishop’s letter, sent last February to state legislators on the finance committee, probably caught many Wisconsin Catholics off-guard. The fierce debate over stripping collective bargaining powers had so far been largely framed in economic terms: Were labor rights and a balanced state budget mutually exclusive? Citing Pope Benedict’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in veritate as evidence, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki made the case that Wisconsinites ought to view the conflict through a religious lens. “Hard times,” Listecki wrote, “do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.”

Nor was Listecki’s letter an isolated event. United Methodist Bishop Linda Lee wrote an open letter to Governor Walker asking him to reconsider his position on collective bargaining. The Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin organized a prominent display at the state capitol. Religious leaders in Illinois offered refuge for Democratic state senators who left the state in order to prevent a quorum from voting on the bill. Priests, pastors, and rabbis marched on the state capitol, chanting, “Tell me what religion looks like? This is what religion looks like.”

This was not the posture voters in the state were accustomed to hearing from their clerics. In recent years, religious fault lines in Wisconsin, like the rest of the country, have generally been drawn with respect to the so-called “culture war” issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, sex education, and the like. In 1997, voters mounted a campaign to recall Senator Russ Feingold over his support for abortion rights. In 2009, religious groups played a vocal role in opposing the Healthy Youth Act, a bill that mandated teaching comprehensive sexual education to teens. (That bill, initially signed into law by then-Governor Jim Doyle, has since been repealed by Governor Walker.) In 2006, a Catholic bishop in Madison, Robert Morlino, caused a stir when, just days before voters went to the polls to cast ballots on a same-sex marriage amendment, he recorded a 14-minute message that warned any opposition to the Church’s official position would be considered “an act of disobedience, which could have serious consequences.”

Political scientists, myself included, have expressed doubt over the extent to which social issues affect the outcome of elections. For the vast majority of voters, pocketbook concerns are often more important than their priests’ mandates. That said, there is little question that religious considerations play an important role in Wisconsin politics.

Still, the opposition of many religious leaders to the elimination of collective bargaining rights is not the stuff of a culture war. Instead, the connection between religion and workers’ rights reflects a much older—and often forgotten—tradition in Wisconsin politics. While it is important not to overstate the relationship between religion and early labor reforms (Milwaukee Socialists and Catholics regularly butted heads), the recent Wisconsin protests do not mark the first time that labor and religion have formed important alliances in the state. As early as 1894, groups like the Church and Labor Social Union in Milwaukee worked to bridge the gap between organized labor and clergy, framing the goals of labor in largely religious terms. From the early twentieth century forward, religion was often deeply intertwined in politics as Wisconsin took on a leadership role in national progressive reforms.

Much of this was due to the influence of faculty at the University of Wisconsin who were heavily influenced by the Social Gospel movement. Faculty promoted “the Wisconsin Idea”—the concept that knowledge generated at public universities would work toward the common good of the state. This idea had a prominent influence on progressive policymakers. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Social Gospel faculty like Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons took an active role in promoting progressive and pro-labor reforms within the state. Other types of influence were less direct. While serving as governor, the progressive leader Robert “Fightin’ Bob” LaFollette got a visit from his former University of Wisconsin professor John Bascom—a teacher he called “the guiding spirit of my time.” Bascom told LaFollette, “[Y]ou will doubtless make mistakes of judgment as governor, but never mind the political mistakes so long as you make no ethical mistakes.” Now these forces might seem to make strange bedfellows, but a century ago, progressive politics, a Christian outlook on economic justice, and the role of the public university were all joined at the hip in Wisconsin.

Continue on to Religion & Politics for the rest of the story.