[Excerpt] The alliance between labor and the church is not only one of the oldest relationships in the US; it is also one of the most potent. Even in Puritan New England, according to Jama Lazerov's Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America, many labor activists were "spurred on by the pious pronouncements of sympathetic clergy people." Saul Alinsky's, Let Them Call Me Rebel, recounts how key church leaders rendered great assistance to the striking packinghouse workers in Chicago after the Second World War. More recently, we see the strong presence of the church within labor and community industrial retention efforts such as the Naugatuck Valley Project and the Tri-State Conference on Steel.