The Marriage of Christ and Capital
Would it surprise you that the addition of Capitalism to Evangelical Christianity had much more to do with capitalists than sound biblical study?
For much of my life, I have been baffled by the “Christian” Republican Party’s obsequiousness to the wealthy. For instance, when Joe Biden’s administration made a common sense move to hire more auditors to tackle the wealthy’s lack of compliance with the tax code and to make sure they pay the same tax rate as the middle class (it takes many more auditors to audit complex accounts, so the rich simply won’t be properly audited without them), the Republicans turned it into a deep state conspiracy to kick down peoples doors. When you look at the Bible, Biden was acting more in tune to the Bible than the Christian Nationalists are. I am not saying that he is a Christian Nationalist, but he is doing something everyone normal agrees on that just happens to be in the Bible.
Proverbs 23:20 Unequal weights are an abomination to the Lord, and false scales are not good.
Unfair weights are a metaphor for unequal treatment in commerce leading to exploitation of one group and not the other.
James 2: 1-4 My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. 2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. 3 If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
Clearly a system that shows favouritism to the rich is offside with scripture, leading one to wonder “Is Biden better at the Bible than MAGA Mike?”
So how did Christian Nationalist theology become so slanted against the Bible except for a few proof texts written to *The Israelites, not America” about humbling ourselves and praying so God will heal our land?
Turns out it was in response to another Christian movement called the Social Gospel. Now I don’t want to pretend that the Social Gospel was perfect. It incorporated many of the follies of its day like eugenics. Some parts of it may have had a bit of a Christian Nationalist orientation in some aspects, which I think we should reject. However, it was serious about following many of the parts of the Bible about justice between the rich and poor I just outlined, and was not a handmaiden to capital.
However we class it, Capitalists of the day, many of whom had relations with the attempted fascist takeover US Democracy known as the Business Plot, were very worried that the Social Gospel was becoming influential in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, which was causing them to make decisions that hurt their business and (so they claimed), lead to Communism. So they sought out pastors and theologians who would back capitalism, or as they called it “the American way of Life”. (1)
Who they found were:
-James Fifefield, who might be said to be the real founder of the Christian Libertarian Movement.
-R. J. Rushdooney, a neoconfederate, who believed that people asking for welfare, support and redistribution because they were poor and had no resources to live with, were really suffering from a case of covetousness, and thus were breaking one of the ten commandments. He believed in strict hierarchy in all parts of life, including race and gender, and the Old Testament Law was given to us to enforce this. R. J. Rushdoony is now considered the founding father of the ideology of Christian Nationalism.
-The Family: I have already written a lot about them. Founded by Abram Vereide, and continued by Douglas Coe, they have always followed the philosophy “and the first will be first and the last will be last”, believing that powerful people have been imparted something special from God, just like Jesus. They believe it is for the elite to unlock and interpret scripture, and use it in a self serving way, painting Jesus as similar to the entrepreneurs and politicians they deal with… because power is divine to them. I suspect they have some sort of apocalyptic teaching that guides them based on their behaviour, but I have yet to locate it. Organizationally, they have many intersections with the New Apostolic Reformation.
-Billy Graham: Graham started out an anti-communist, pro capitalist fire brand convert of Klan favourite antisemitic preacher Mordechi Ham. However, he tempered his messages, as well as converting to becoming pro civil rights as the 70s approached, perhaps to get rid of the cultural baggage when speaking to young people. This doesn’t mean his attitudes changed based on antisemitic comments he made to Richard Nixon around that time. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2018-02-28/dont-forget-billy-grahams-anti-semitic-turn-with-richard-nixon
Here he is depicted as the Übermensch of the crusade:
-Norman Vincent Peale: Peale is sort of a guru of positive thinking. He to had a fascist past (all of his co-speakers were prominent fascists or antisemites in this NYT clip. Miss Dilling called the New Deal a Jew Deal, Curren was associated with the infamous Rev. Charles E. Coughlin) He teaches a form of New Thought, a very American philosophy that your thinking and personal greatness can bring you wealth, power and influence. It is loved by business people and taught at executive seminars because it enforces peoples own sense of entitlement to wealth and privilege. It is also popular among the poor and middle class who participate in sales, and multilevel marketing, because it holds out promises of riches assuredly if you can just get your thinking right.
All of them taught that unfettered Capitalism is the natural, biblical and American way of life. They didn’t have a scriptural basis for this, so they went to other pastures of the occult philosophy of New Thought. The New Thought current is strong throughout the movement they created. Peale was already incredibly popular with the business class, I assume because he told them what they wanted to hear. Eventually it would jump the rails into Christianity and become the “Health and Wealth” or “Name it and Claim it” idea which has robed so many people of their health and wealth.
Word of Faith/ Health and Wealth don’t work. There are loads of empirical evidence demonstrating this. We have to admit though, that it is efficacious at one thing: getting common people to believe unbridled capitalism is good for them. The reasoning here is subtle. Let’s say you get a lottery ticket, and you have a one in one hundred chance of winning. It is not going to make you more favourable to pure capitalism, because your odds of becoming a capitalist seem abstract and unlikely. Now say the odds are 1 out of 2. It is more likely. We start thinking about what we would do with the money. We start worrying about the tax. Furthermore, we might wish there is no tax.
The “health and wealth” gospel is like giving you that highly probably ticket from a psychological standpoint. You are told you will be wealthy if only you master right thinking and give to the pastors. Suddenly, you start to relate to the rich pastors in mansions, because you are told you will become like them. You also relate to Elon Musk and Donald Trump and develop empathy with them because you are on your way to the same life they live. Even after you give up on the Health and Wealth doctrine for yourself, you still maintain the teaching that everything these men got is due to their own hard work and right thinking. We are just not great enough to get the thinking that would make us rich.
The writer of Ecclesiastics would disagree.
Ecclesiastics 9:11: I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.
1. Most of the information in this substack was sourced from One Nation under God by Kevin Kruse. I believe everyone in the nation needs to read this book:
https://www.amazon.ca/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/1501238213