Between 1874-1941, Slavic migrants in the industrial United States protested corporate and religious authority through seven decades of strikes, schisms, and church uprisings. More than two million Slavic migrants forged a new cultural region, which I term the Slavic Industrial Belt, establishing over 1,200 churches and building a dense network of church-controlled newspapers, banks, and mutual aid institutions that structured working-class life.

Based on church, union, and corporate archives, as well as foreign-language periodicals, I show how corporate support for church construction implicated clergy in labor conflicts. During strikes, priests were caught between competing loyalties—to the corporations that funded them and to the striking workers in their pastoral care. Labor conflict had theological consequences, prompting many congregations to form independent churches and demand collective ownership of parishes.

By situating migrant religion at the center of industrial conflict, I reframe Slavic religion as a key force shaping the major religious, political, and economic debates of America’s industrial golden age. Slavic resistance transformed North American Christianity as it consolidated into progressive new denominations, such as the Polish National Catholic Church, which advanced democratic models of church governance and adopted theological reforms, including the ordination of married clergy, universal salvation, and the appointment of women as trustees. The proliferation of new churches also transformed the religious architecture of steel and mining towns with soaring baroque steeples and onion domes.