Matewan.
This year’s annual conference of the Working-Class Studies Association, of which I have been a member for nine years, takes place from 18 to 21 June in Laramie, Wyoming. The conference theme is “The Power of Working-Class Action and Thought.” I will be participating with the paper “Beatitudes of the Coalfields: Prophetic Christianity, Class Solidarity, and Working-Class Thought in Matewan (1987).” Here is the abstract:
John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) dramatizes the events surrounding the Battle of Matewan — an early episode in the West Virginia Coal Wars — through the intersecting lives of miners, families, and union organizers in a small Appalachian town. The film follows Joe Kenehan, an ex-Wobbly organizer who arrives to help miners confront the Stone Mountain Coal Company, alongside “Few Clothes” Johnson, a Black miner recruited as a strikebreaker, and Danny Radnor, a young miner and lay preacher whose moral voice frames the narrative. Amid wage cuts, evictions, and the threat of the Baldwin-Felts detectives, Matewan exposes the racism, xenophobia, and strategic fractures that threaten working-class unity, while insisting on the ethical stakes of collective action.
This paper argues that Matewan treats religious language and communal ritual not as incidental background but as a mode of working-class thought formed through struggle. Sayles juxtaposes church preaching, personal faith, and moral storytelling with union meetings, racial tension, and the dilemma of whether solidarity can survive escalating violence. Drawing on scholarship on Christianity and labor politics in America’s coal country, as well as studies of working-class cinema, I show how Matewan frames religion as an idiom through which workers interpret exploitation, contest division, and imagine interracial organizing. The film ultimately demonstrates how working-class action and working-class thought emerge together — through speech, ritual, and moral decision-making under pressure.
