Capitalism in Christianity Part 2: The Cycle of Stories Justifying Systems
Okay this was a monster episode, so this blog is going to be basically my script because I’m so tired and you’re not my dad so you can’t make me write a whole blog post about this topic - I’m a grown adult! Wah!
Enjoy my historical deep dive into how Christianity and Capitalism were used to justify each other throughout history and became weapons of white supremacy and nationalism in the United States!
Pretend I don’t know what Capitalism is
For our purposes, I want to clarify what I mean when I say “Capitalism,” since there are a good number of official and colloquial interpretations. A lot of folks take “Capitalism” to simply mean “commerce,” which, honestly, is a pretty genius tactic to get folks to defend Capitalism. All that said, Capitalism is the specific economic and political system where a country’s industry, trade, and commerce are all controlled by private companies rather than the state. This is why a lot of anti-government folks who label themselves right-leaning claim to prefer Capitalism - it provides the illusion of being free from government corruption.
In reality, it simply transfers that corruption to entities that have more money, fewer restrictions, and a lack of transparency that allows them to do pretty much whatever they want. Also, without adequate regulation, Capitalism necessarily forms monopolies and other ethics issues because it values profit over all else - including human life. We’ve seen it just recently with the issue of vaccine production and intellectual property; American pharmaceutical companies have all but fully admitted they would rather preserve their intellectual property and let thousands of people in India and the global south die rather than lose potential profit.
That brand in particular is the kind of system I mean when I talk about modern Capitalism.
As a side note, Jesus also wouldn’t be much of a fan of it either, based on what we know of his actual teachings. Granted, we can never know his exact political compass alignment, but we can say with relative confidence that he valued human connection and compassion above most else.
So, it would naturally follow that the religion (sort of) based on his teachings would also be anti-Capitalist, right? The current Pope even routinely speaks out against Capitalism and how it’s antithetical to Christianity-- and yet…
Uh oh. It’s not anti-Capitalist, is it?
Haha.
Okay, let’s start at the beginning and figure out just how deep the roots of Capitalism run. The first economic revolution is generally agreed to be agriculture, which was, as far as we know, first introduced to hominids around 12,000 years ago in modern-day Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. Instead of hunting and gathering, we started domesticating plants and animals that we knew to be useful for clothing, food, medicine, etc. entirely for our use. It’s also interesting to note that written history pretty closely aligns with the start of the agricultural revolution - by the time written historical records were being kept, farming and domestication had already become normal for us.
So, something funny happened when we started cultivating our own survival needs: the population went way up. And it makes sense, right? Suddenly, there was no need to go out into the wild and get eaten by predators. We could just stay home and farm-- and have tons of kids to help on said farm. What was once small bands of humans became city-states of well over 100,000 people. And once the population was too large to count on one hand, record-keeping became super important to keep track of who had enough food, who made the food, which people belonged to which families, etc. And, even further, once we had a good record of who everyone was, we were able to start enforcing the first-ever social hierarchies.
In a nutshell, comparatively huge groups of humans ostensibly needed some order, so those who had power over the land and, therefore, supplies needed to survive gained control over, well, everything. A caste system was gradually enforced as rules in the city-states became more rigid; architecture was generally the signifier of power in these days, where the people who had the most control had the biggest and most elaborate houses. Those who did the grunt work, obviously, had much smaller houses that surrounded the bigger ones. Most importantly, these caste systems were non-optional and inherited through families. There was no class mobility - if you were born a farming peasant, your entirely family would stay farming peasants.
Sounds like it’d be tough to make people do that
You’d think, but it wasn’t exactly difficult to convince people to participate in the caste systems of early human history. In fact, it was pretty easy with the help of good ole religion. See, these social hierarchies weren’t innate to human biology or psychology. Though there’s something to be said for the survival appeal of gaining a ton of power, there wasn’t always a biological need to convince a population that you’re better than everyone else by design.
But humans do have this weird tendency to want to be part of something greater than themselves. So those who wielded power used that desire to justify the social systems - they used religion to convince the masses that unquestioned loyalty to the system was a sign of something holy. Overworking oneself, suffering, being taken advantage of by the ruling class were all seen as signs that a person’s life would be eternally rewarded. They also claimed that the lower class’s loyalty to one leader (who may or may not have been directly chosen by the deities of the time) would result in untold, god-given riches for everyone. This may be sounding familiar.
Now, in case you’re sitting at home thinking, “Hey, that’s not Capitalism! You said Capitalism was control of commerce via companies rather than the state,” you’re right! Although the lines are pretty blurred between “company” and “state” at this point, the central government was very much in control of everything and everyone else. Think the pharaohs of ancient Egypt: yeah, they controlled most of the wealth in the country, but they were very much still the government.
In fact, Capitalism was a result of a couple of things that relate directly to this caste system. As with any group living under constant oppression and exploitation, folks started to catch wise to the fact that maybe it was unfair that a handful of people got to live in a jewel-encrusted castle layered in gold leaf while they had to toil in the fields for table scraps. After a while, it became clear that leaders’ promises of unfathomable rewards were, for lack of a better term, bullshit. And all this predictably culminated in an extremely pessimistic opinion of leadership.
You don’t say
Wild, I know. In the minds of the people, the ongoing theocratic hierarchical systems not only didn’t work - they were actively evil. So, of course, the opposite - privatized property and voluntary exchange of goods and wealth, or Capitalism - must be the solution. This mass shift in consciousness is known by scholars as the Axial Turn, and its principles are present in almost all the major religions of today. It can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Taoism, Islam, you name it. All of them formed with the core belief that status-based caste systems were bad, that the people should self-determine, and that social hierarchies move us further from God.
A really good example of this is the story of Genesis in the Old Testament and the Tanakh. For those who aren’t aware, Genesis is basically the origin story for all life on Earth. Over the course of 6 days, the force known as God speaks light, the sky, the land, plants, and living creatures into being before creating mankind in his own image. Man, usually known as Adam, is created from the dust, and Woman, known as Eve, is created from one of Adam’s ribs. They are given free reign to enjoy the paradise known as the Garden of Eden and procreate freely, but they’re forbidden from eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
This all works out for like a couple days before a serpent, who people generally think of as the devil today but wasn’t originally intended to be, convinces Eve that God is hiding things from her and that she won’t suffer if she eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. So Eve grabs one and shares it with Adam, and they’re suddenly acutely aware of their nakedness, their smallness, and are riddled with shame and guilt. God discovers their “betrayal,” curses the snake, and then curses Adam and Eve. Adam and his descendents will eternally have to “toil and work the land for food,” and Eve’s will forever suffer painful childbirth, menstrual periods, and have to be subservient to men.
Hooray! The Creation story!
So, on its face, and at the risk of making some folks mad, there is no difference between this story and the myths we’re taught to study in elementary school. Most scholars generally agree that this is a mythologized creation story meant to teach humans something about the natural world that couldn’t be explained by other means at the time.
People disagree about what that could be, but my favorite interpretation (because it makes the most sense to me) is that this was a rebellion against agriculture and social hierarchy. The argument it seems to be making is that humanity was closest to God when it was closest to nature, that God intended mankind to have no awareness of conceptions of “good” or “bad.” More importantly, it seems pretty up front about condemning the human need to categorize things (and people) as better than others, and the first humans’ hubris ultimately leads to an eternal curse on the rest of humanity.
And notice how those curses are directly related to the development of agriculture? Men are cursed to eternally work the soil for food and suffer from their work. Women are cursed to suffer pain as they bear children - which women did a whole lot more of once they settled into city-states and needed more hands for farming. And women are also cursed to forced subservience, a concept that is implied to only exist after eating the fruit of knowledge. Social hierarchies, painful labor, and farming are all results of straying further from God.
So the first Axial leaders wanted to push away from caste systems and agricultural economies. It was, in essence, a revolutionary way of thinking - and a pretty humanist one. The goal was to reduce human suffering by giving them freedom to self-determine. But humans are humans, and the systems that followed suffered because a.) humans were still being informed by generations of biases from the caste system and b.) economic radicalism wasn’t exactly well-received by those with the power to change things. In most areas, Axial thinking was compromised and watered down to appeal to a wider audience, which is why we see echoes of the caste system in things like the Divine Right of Kings.
Sounds like the relationship is pretty complicated
You got that right. So, two things are simultaneously true: Christianity (and Judaism) have radical, revolutionary economic roots, and Christianity was founded on systems that were inherently oppressive and exploitative which informed the way it developed.
We see the pull toward Capitalism in early religion, not in the sense that people wanted companies to have all the power, but in the sense that they wanted the people to have the ability to gain and use wealth, to self-determine, to exist beyond confining social strata. To me, these are all incredibly noble goals. And it makes sense, especially as we start to move into the Middle Ages.
Ahhh, the Middle Ages
During the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, people started to see incredible feats of technology - clocks, wind and water mills, new kinds of architecture, the three-crop rotation system, gunpowder, you name it. The world was starting to look like a buffet of cool new things that were basically magical compared to the previous centuries. But without a way to distribute these technologies, they would have remained curiosities in small areas. There would have been no reason to manufacture large amounts of clocks, for instance, because there would have been no money in it. And in that case, why would others continue to invent upon the first clock? There would have been no need, no vehicle for competition.
So, as necessity is the mother of invention, new systems began to establish themselves. The freedom of enterprise was fueled and refined by none other than the Catholic church, whose Cistercian monasteries became the backdrop for modern conceptions of Capitalism to unfold.
Though society had tried to pull away from theocracies, the Catholic church owned about a third of the land in Europe by the Middle Ages. In case it isn’t clear, that’s a shit ton of land. So, to properly control that land, the church established a continent-wide system of canon law that tied together multiple bureaucratic, legal, and economic systems, including a universal language.
Those monasteries I mentioned earlier were also instrumental in creating the economic systems that created modern-day Capitalism. Where the church needed to set power structures into place, the Cistercian monks were the perfect labor force. Their celibacy ensured a clear divide between business and family, which hadn’t been the case in the old caste system. Moreover, their main activities within the monasteries focused on literacy and study. They learned to read, write, handle money, resolve disputes - all highly valued qualities in what we now call human capital.
To quote this Wall Street Journal article on the subject, “It was the church more than any other agency… that put in place… the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings.”
Wow. So the first true Capitalists were celibate monks. Who knew?
Now, to kind of speed through Protestantism and the Enlightenment, Protestantism cropped up for the first time in the 16th century as a response to the corruption people were seeing in Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire. You may have heard of Martin Luther and the 95 Theses - these were a reaction to priests taking concubines, extorting church members for money by selling “indulgences” for sins, all kinds of gross stuff.
Without getting too far into it, there were a series of holy wars throughout the 16th and 17th century and, as a result, the Protestant Reformation created footholds in several countries where Protestantism would continuously influence culture.
As Catholicism’s stranglehold on religious practice waned, Protestantism (in its many forms) very much grew up with countries’ geographical borders. Instead of one unified collective under Catholicism, each country’s version of Protestantism was unique (hence the titles Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Puritan, etc.). As a result, new countries (like the United States) were influenced by Protestantism when building the very fabric of the nation - it’s baked into every aspect of our society.
Because there were so many types of Protestantism (which by now just means any Christian that isn’t Catholic), nailing down a central belief system is difficult. But basically, it’s characterized by belief in the Bible as the only valid expression of God’s will, and that Christians are saved or redeemed by their faith alone, not through the church as a body.
As a general rule, Protestantism based its belief system on the writings of Paul in particular. The law of God was not a road map to God but rather a means to measure human shortcomings and judge them. Some said that whenever people were saved, it was to God’s credit; whenever they were lost, it was their own fault because they refused to hear the Word and accept the gift of grace. Others, like Calvinists, believed in predetermined fates of some to be saved and others to be damned (though this isn’t widely practiced today).
There’s also the interesting element of suffering for faith, which wasn’t inherent to Lutheranism but became a generationally valued part of it. Early Protestants found themselves in the crosshairs of religious persecution, and many died in defense of their faiths during the Protestant Inquisition. And it made sense - many assumed that true believers should suffer as Jesus suffered during his life, since believers are meant to mirror Christ in every aspect.
So we have a culture of judgment, deification of Paul’s writings, glorification of suffering, and baked-in nationalism within a country’s borders.
Uh oh
Even better, the Age of Enlightenment added some other fun qualities to the mix. The big emphasis was on individual liberty and success, especially as it related to private property. The idea was that no individual should be exposed to or influenced by “the whim of another.” Which I have… thoughts about.
The Enlightenment also did this interesting thing to the different factions of Protestantism - see, Enlightenment values dictated a hypothetical toleration of differences and generally promoted the creation of societies and communities based on “natural laws,” which I would argue exist but not in such a way that one can based laws on them - but whatever. Either way, the criticisms of religion within the Age of Enlightenment inevitably served to reform the way it was practiced, such that the different sects of Protestantism made up with one another and tried to unite all their practices under the same tenets. The same thing happened later, in the 20th century, but between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians - hence, why Christians generally don’t care what kind of Christian you are (with minor exceptions), they just care that you’re a Christian.
Now I want to focus on the United States in particular, not just because I live here, but also because there’s a level of intermingling between Capitalism and Christianity here that I haven’t seen in most other countries. Sure, most of the most fiscally and militarily powerful countries subscribe to Capitalist society and widely practice Christianity, but there’s something different here, and that something is what really keeps me up about all this.
So, we have a Protestant culture that grew up with Capitalism, where both schools of thought share qualities across the spectrum, and thus both Protestantism and Capitalism influenced and were influenced in tandem throughout history.
This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
You bet! Then the Puritans happened. The Great Migration in the 17th century was, in a nutshell, the pretty term for when Puritan extremists were either sent to or voluntarily chose to live in what indigenous people today refer to as Turtle Island and is now the New England area United States. Some of the Puritans wanted to separate entirely from the Church of England, some didn’t, but what the did have in common was a unique set of beliefs that included:
That God had a particular contract with them to reform the Anglican church
That many believed in predetermination and as such lived in a constant state of anxiety, constantly searching for signs of whether they were saved or damned
That the community, not the individual, was responsible for keeping the covenant between them and God, so they kept careful track of the “spiritual health” of their society.
Obviously, this belief system was difficult to maintain. Like, can you imagine being in a constant state of anxiety? Hahahahahaha ANYWAY it was pretty exhausting, so over time the level of religious fervor tapered off. Still, the societal basis of the United States was inarguably Puritan - and other forms of Protestantism were even persecuted (they tried to kill off the Quakers, and it was bad news).
Now this is the part where I turn my chair around and sit on it backwards, because I’m gonna get real with you. The period between English colonialism and now is pretty wide. I could go into painful detail about the shifts in consciousness that led to what we have today, but two things are stopping me from doing that. One, it wouldn’t be interesting. And two, I’ve sunk like a full 40 hour work week’s worth of time into this episode, and I’m burnt. I don’t wanna. So instead, I’m going to generalize until I get to the interesting stuff.
Fair enough
So now I’ll fast forward through, uh, all of American history and try to summarize the development of initial Capitalist society to what is modern Capitalist society. Basically, the combination of an anxious, guilt-ridden populace, a religious elite who thought they were specially commissioned by God to tell everyone how to live, a culture that valued work and suffering, and Enlightenment values that dictate an emphasis on individualism.
In America, Capitalism expressed itself as a reflection of the Puritan ethic at first, though global trade had already established itself. The populace embraced hard work and thrift, but also viewed itself as the saviors and, ultimately, masters of all others. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade crystalized that attitude, and the cruelty and dehumanization was often justified with this idea that white people had been commissioned by God to subjugate lesser people. And since there was still a lingering predestination rhetoric, it wasn’t difficult to convince the people that continental Africans were simply not chosen by God.
Think also of Manifest Destiny - the idea that white colonists had the God-given right to continuously expand westward, that the colonies wouldn’t be satisfied until they had conquered all there was to take. Societally speaking, this lays the foundation for the value of perpetual growth that we see today. Individually, there was a preoccupation in the colonists even then to own something that would make them a fortune. Go west, young man, and run a farm, make a fortune, succeed by the sweat of your brow. The indigenous people, be damned.
Was every colonist like that?
I mean, it’s all one big exploitative system, and that means that exploiters could also be exploited. The colonists were largely merchants or laborers who arrived under the sponsorship of companies. Indentured servants came to work off their debt. Those in power used slave labor to maximize profits. Eventually, the Industrial Revolution saw those with existing wealth establish the factory system and the invention of the working class.
All along the way, the narrative of personal achievement and individual thrift, morality, etc. were used to justify the power imbalance that was growing in the U.S. Enlightenment prioritization of the individual convinced many that they had no responsibility to the collective - only to themselves and their own “pursuit of happiness.” A nation that was convinced that God gave his favor only to the few easily slid into supporting a Capitalist system because the narratives reinforced one another.
On one hand, those who have success must have earned it because God only rewards the just and moral, the chosen. On the other hand, those who suffer in this life should a.) be happy they suffer because it means their lives are like Jesus’, and b.) recognize that their suffering is God’s will because they simply aren’t doing enough. If they just worked harder, they would be rewarded.
Obviously Christianity is only one vehicle for which that narrative was pushed, but it was a powerful one. And eventually, it became instrumental to continue to justify the fallout of modern Capitalism.
That sounds incredibly manipulative
You’re telling me. What had once been a radical system meant to empower the people and allow them self-determination became evidently unbalanced, to say the least. To give you an idea of what I mean by that, here are some numbers.
The United States has a form of low-road Capitalism where, instead of competing over the quality of goods, businesses compete for the lowest prices. It’s why large corporations like Wal-Mart with billions in reserve assets can sell poor-quality items for a fraction of the price a brick and mortar local shop could - driving it out of business.
Wages are suppressed to keep prices low, workers are incentivized by poverty, starvation, and punishment rather than a rewarding work life, and the wealth gap only continues to widen as time goes on. In fact, in 2019 1% of the population controlled over 40% of the nation’s wealth and a larger percentage of the population lived in poverty than any other country in the world.
An international association called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) actually rates countries based on their countries’ business regulations as they pertain to workers’ rights from 1 (very loose regulations) to 5 (very strict regulations). For example, countries like Indonesia and Portugal have relatively strict regulations when it comes to firing people, 4.1 and 3 respectively. Japan’s score is much lower, with a fairly loose 1.3. In the United States, any severance pay or dismissal justification regulations pretty much vanish; we’re dead last, with a score of 0.5.
As an aside, the inherent cruelty and unrestrained greed in America’s brand of Capitalism is absolutely a direct result of the institution of slavery. A lot of the first systems of management were created to manage ever-growing plantations. Plantation owners got more money than they knew what to do with, bought up more land that the government stole from indigenous people, bought more human lives to work that land, and thus had to appoint complex hierarchies of white people to oversee the whole operation. They kept records of productivity, what methods produced higher output, growth over time, whether a rebellion was imminent by which weapons or tools went missing.
This is sounding disturbingly close to a modern-day corporation
Yes! Even the idea of constant growth over time stemmed from the enslavement period; research has shown that, over the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked by an enslaved person increased by 2.3% per year. In simpler terms, that means that the amount of daily cotton picked increased by 400% in 60 years.
So now, we have a culture of superiority, fear, control, supervision, and straight up torture that serves as the bed of modern-day Capitalism. The only thing that mattered was that profits were higher when workers were afraid. And, not that it super matters, the white supremacy that fueled it didn’t even benefit white people - slavery drove down everyone’s wages and gave white workers the illusion of freedom simply because they oversaw others. They believed that life could be a lot worse, since they witnessed slavery firsthand. Combine that with the Christian rhetoric I mentioned before, and they were easily willing to accept what companies gave them.
Non-black day laborers were paid, but they worked in the same abusive conditions. And the fact that “business” owners could choose to buy slaves meant that they had no incentive to raise wages - a phenomenon that still happens today, but instead of slavery it’s false job scarcity.
Is this all related to Christianity in particular?
Well, for one, I would argue that Christianity played a fair role in justifying slavery and treatment of workers in general. But the same is true even in recent history. As the much smarter writer Elizabeth Bruenig put it, Capitalism as it exists in America is in a constant state of self-justifying. It continuously evolves its own narrative to appease the masses just enough to accept the unacceptable. Narratives, both critical and supportive, are necessary for capitalism, because criticism forces it “to evolve and temporarily resolve some of its contradictions ... thus preserving it as a system for the long haul.” In a nutshell, it needs stories to present it in a positive light even when it’s actively ruining people’s lives.
By the middle of the 20th century, the expressly Christian ethics that contributed to Capitalist society had dimmed down to a vaguely spiritual “self care” type rhetoric. You might recognize it today as “treating yourself” with products, the idea that you can practice spiritual fulfillment by buying the right things, and that successful companies are inherently moral entities simply because they’re successful. After all, if people didn’t like the businesses, they’d simply stop buying from them, right?
But after the Great Depression, people had suddenly had enough of scraping by and suffering all the time. Their families and friends were sick and dying, and the government didn’t seem to care. No one had enough money, enough food, enough time to spare with loved ones. It was so bad that suddenly the American public was kind of okay with entertaining the idea of populist concepts. Some of the more socialist-adjacent institutions we have today are results of the Great Depression and trying to dig the country out of its self-made hole.
But see, this was a problem for the wealthy folks in the U.S. The Great Depression didn’t really apply to them, so they had no use for populist politics. In fact, higher wages and safety net programs meant that they would probably make less money. So, to preserve their enormous wealth, they decided to spend money to make money.
Enter a man named James W. Fifield, Jr. a pastor who specialized in telling wealthy churchgoers that their wealth was actually a sign of a virtuous life and God’s approval. His line of business was, predictably, incredibly lucrative, and he eventually received patronage from oil tycoons and businesses like General Motors to spread this idea of moral wealth across the nation. His organization was called Spiritual Mobilization, and its central goal was to eradicate any Christian support of Socialist policy or federal generosity - specifically the New Deal - and replace it with fervent belief in Christian Libertarianism.
And let me tell you, this guy was a piece of work. He was dinged by the Anti-Defamation League more than once for his racism and anti-semitism, and he even was responsible for the removal of any material from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, from schools in Los Angeles.
His church was one of the biggest in the country in the 40s with about 4,000 members. He preached to other ministers about the righteousness of Libertarianism, that to support the government was to deny God, and that liberalism in any form was equivalent to totalitarianism. Eventually, he had recruited over 17,000 spiritual leaders with his messaging, and they began convincing the public that Christianity and Capitalism were both systems that should obey only natural laws, that they are so intricately tied that any legislation that tries to limit Capitalism (here meaning the power of businesses) was actually against the Ten Commandments themselves.
At this point I’m not even surprised
Then the 1950s happened, and the Red Scare only made things worse. Widespread panic about Communists made it super easy for Spiritual Mobilization to claim that Russian Communists were trying to take over our country and stamp out their religion, cleverly conflating Christianity, Capitalism, and nationalism. The “other” they created was a monstrous, Godless, evil entity that opposed everything the United States stood for, but also conveniently opposed Capitalism and Christianity, thus those three things were inextricably tied. Fifield began a radio show called “The Freedom Story,” which was broadcast on over 800 stations nationwide. They circulated the phrase “freedom under God” so successfully that it actually became part of the Pledge of Allegiance and was required to be on all U.S. currency in 1957 under Eisenhower.
Holy absolute sh*t
And this did, in fact, extend to Catholics in some capacity. America’s National Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a pastoral letter in response to Reagan’s trickle-down economic ideology, asking Catholics to pursue “economic justice for all.” The letter took its inspiration from part of the gospel of Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek,” which didn’t go over so well with the wealthier folks in attendance.
Even before the bishops got the final draft of their letter into print, the conservative theologian Michael Novak published a critique from the American Enterprise Institute and argued that the authors had “an inadequate grasp of crucial concepts such as enterprise, markets, and profits,” while their descriptions of poverty, unemployment, and taxation “remain significantly one-sided.”
That’s decidedly evil
This rhetoric they used wasn’t necessarily new, by the way. Fifield drew on older, existing talking points from existing religious structures. It stole from the Fundamentalist, Puritanical beliefs that God would display his favor on people, not luck or generational inheritance. The old correlation between spiritual purity and material success was drawn from Protestantism, which drew from Catholicism, which drew from the tangled, warped understanding of Jesus from Paul, which drew from zealotry within Judaism, which drew from existing caste systems, and so it goes on.
Even now, Capitalist spokespeople reuse these stories, whether they’re aware of it or not. Televangelists used these tactics to gain viewership and convince their congregations to give them money. Oprah does basically the same thing, but with self-care, personal success, etc. to get you to buy her products and the products that sponsor her.
And obviously not every Christian is like this. Plenty of Christians - Catholic and Protestant alike - have criticized and continue to criticize the state of trickle-down economics and individualist Capitalism. One quote from a Catholic bishop named Robert Busch that really summed it up was:
“They make fun of us as ‘social justice warriors,’ tree-hugging types. What a thing to have in a church—thinking there is fun to be made of people who are out there running food pantries and helping the homeless. The conservative seminary system, under very conservative leadership, has led to a conservative hierarchy infrastructure. For them, it’s all about personal morality and holiness, with rarely a word about social justice. What a diminishment of the church!”
But it’s impossible to ignore the consequences this has had on Christian culture. We now have corporate megachurches (which here mean any non-Catholic church with over 2000 members) that are run like businesses, whose goals are not the quality of the services but the growth and retention of members, which they say is a sign of God’s blessing.
Is it normal that I feel sick?
Yup! According to the Hartford Institute’s database, there are around 1300 megachurches in America alone. And for just a taste of what kind of things these “churches” prioritize:
World Changers Ministries, for instance, operates a music studio, publishing house, computer graphic design suite and owns its own record label.
The Potter's House also has a record label as well as a daily talk show, a prison satellite network that broadcasts in 260 prisons and a twice-a-week Webcast.
New Birth Missionary Baptist Church has a chief operating officer and a special effects 3-D website that offers videos-on-demand. It publishes a magazine and holds Cashflow 101 Game Nights.
And Lakewood Church, which recently leased the Compaq Center, former home of the NBA's Houston Rockets, has a four-record deal and spends $12 million annually on television airtime.
Can you guess the average annual net income for megachurches? $4.8 million! And while churches do pay property taxes and salaries of employees, they are exempt from all income taxes.
They must donate some of that, right?
Y’know philanthropy is a tough subject, but I’m more worried about the church pastors’ individual senses of morality.
For example, during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Joel Osteen, owner and head pastor of the single largest megachurch in the United States, with a main worship center that has a 16,800 capacity, refused to open his doors to those displaced by the flooding until a Twitter firestorm exposed him. Even then, he lied about it and claimed that the main worship center had been inaccessible due to flooding, which was later proven to be false by both anecdotal reports and the fact that he eventually did cave to pressure and open the worship center.
#JoelOsteenIsOverParty, am I right?
So now the summary. What we’re seeing today in folks who rabidly defend the GOP despite their being antithetical to the Gospels is the result of thousands of years of the cards being stacked against them. By and large, Christian fundamentalists and nationalists have been convinced that the reason for suffering is a lack of Christianity and Satan’s influence, that God is trying to let us live lives of peace but that the government is actively trying to stymie that peace, that those who do not believe in God or practice Christianity the way they do are responsible for the government’s movement away from salvation, and as such those people (immigrants, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, anyone secular, etc.) are agents of evil.
They have been sold this line that secular humanism in any form is a one-way trip to all the moral vices of the world. They believe, and I’m quoting this directly from a Christian Capitalist, "the hostile barrage from atheists, agnostics and other secular humanists has begun to take a serious toll on that heritage. In recent years, they have built up their forces and even increased their assault upon all our Christian institutions, and they have been enormously successful in taking over the 'public square.' Public education, the media, the government, the courts, and even the church in many places, now belong to them."
White fundamentalists in particular have this disease twofold, because they harbor the long-standing belief that God has chosen precious few (white people) to dominate over all others. Because of the immense fear that has been instilled in them, they believe that evil is an external force that can be crushed by a large enough power. That violence is acceptable if it’s in the name of destroying that evil. They give up their own moral compasses in favor of a guidebook provided by people who want to exploit them. But the thing is, they think they made the guidebook, so they think like the Capitalist elite and try to sacrifice others for their own ends - even though they really have no power or freedom at all.
And the system has become what it once set out to reform: a caste system where all the wealth is in the hands of the few who retain all the power within our society. Where a working class is essentially reduced to indentured servitude to survive at all even though there is more than enough for everyone. Where slavery is used to cut costs. And where all of it is justified with a soothing voice saying, “Don’t worry - your participation in this system guarantees you rewards in this life and the next. Trust me, and I’ll lead you towards salvation.” All while hoarding the world’s resources for the sake of continued supremacy over others.
On one hand, there is the hope that progressive, anti-fascist policy will always eventually be installed in the face of oppression, as we saw with early Capitalism vs. the caste systems. But the largely successful efforts from the wealthy and self-appointed “upper class” to reinstate a bastardized version of the caste system has chilling implications, in my opinion. The pessimistic side of me wonders if we are eternally doomed to this cycle, because it seems that, as long as power exists and means something in our societies, people will always be willing to exploit other people to retain that power. The optimistic side hopes that we eventually learn from our mistakes (before the planet burns down) and figure out how to, you know, see everyone as human beings. Or something.
Sources:
https://medium.com/@mark_ajita/unearthing-the-religious-roots-of-capitalism-9477def89d06
https://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-10-number-3/how-christianity-created-capitalism
https://newrepublic.com/article/161626/big-money-dividing-american-catholicism
https://www.forbes.com/2003/09/17/cz_lk_0917megachurch.html?sh=3084a1a27489
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-came-in-the-first-ships-capitalism-in-america
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-new-history-of-american-capitalism
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/30-biggest-american-megachurches-ranked/
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/big-business-modern-christian-nationalism-5e0af6e36192/