When Religion and American Business Became One

By Dallas Darling
Courtesy Of "World News Network"

"Jesus picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world..." -From the best seller "The Man Nobody Knows," 1920's

"Moses was one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived." -American Insurance Pamphlet, 1920's

When President Calvin Coolidge declared that the business of America was business, he was merely expressing a popular cultural concept in the 1920's. Many Americans had become increasingly fascinated with prosperity and wealth and consumerism, brought on by the world of business and its mass media. For the first time, Americans could purchase consumer goods using credit, or the installment plan. Welfare capitalism abounded as more and more people took risks investing in corporate stocks and bonds and in Wall Street. Supply-side economics took root in American society too, as government policies continued to favor the wealthy and corporations by lowering their tax rates, believing it would somehow stimulate the economy.

But a silent depression was looming on the horizon. During World War One, New England bankers and Wall Street brokers had established corporate farms throughout the Midwest. They also encouraged farmers to produce massive amounts of foods to be shipped and sold to European nations at war. At the end of the war, a surplus of food and livestock prevented many farmers from attaining parity. Mechanization had increased the ranks of the unemployed in many agricultural industries. Adding to this economic downturn were European nations that were finding it difficult to repay their loans. Signs of race riots, massive labor strikes, and regions filled with unemployment and poverty, were still gripping America.

Meanwhile, a spiritual depression was also taking root in America's experiment with democracy and capitalistic ideologies. Specifically, business and religion became intertwined, something that has remained entangled to this day. While it was considered a compliment when clergymen and pastors were called good businessmen, education, including parochial schools, started to be thought of as one of the greatest American industries. Many churches, like the Swedish Immanuel Congregational Church in New York, recognized the superiority of the business to the spiritual appeal by offering to all who contributed one hundred dollars to its building fund "an engraved certificate of investment in preferred capital stock in the Kingdom of God."

One church billboard in upscale New York proclaimed: "Come to Church. Christian Worship Increases Your Efficiency." The association of business with religion spread when the National Association of Credit Men held their annual convention in New York. At the Cathedral of St. John the divine, special devotional services were offered along with five sessions of prayer conducted by Protestant clergymen, a Roman Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi. Credit collectors and bankers were also uplifted with sermons such as: "Religion and Business," "Spiritual Principles in Advertising," and "Advertising the Kingdom through Press-Radio Service." The fact that cabaret entertainment and Beauty Pageants were also present was a sign that even men of great faith must have their fun.

So prevalent were both Scripture and Business, that it was difficult to know which one gained the most from such a close association. One insurance company published a pamphlet entitled, "Moses, Persuader of Men." It declared that "Moses was one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived," that he was a "Dominant, Fearless, and Successful Personality in one of the most successful selling campaigns that history ever place upon its pages." (One has to wonder if the insurance company also used the fear of Biblical plagues and the guarantee of inheriting the Promised Land when closing a deal.)

In Bruce Barton's "The Man Nobody Knows," which was the best selling non-fiction book for two years, the book taught that, "Jesus was not only the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem" and "an outdoor man," but a great executive. "The Man Nobody Knows" also relates how Jesus "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world..." His parables were "the most powerful advertisements of all time...He would be a national advertiser today." In fact, Jesus was "the founder of modern business." Why, you ask? Because he was the author of the ideal service.

The Barton Gospel, as it was called, however, did not prevent one of the greatest economic collapses in the history of America, one that produced unemployment, homelessness and hunger on an unimaginable scale. Instead, it showed that faith without works is dead, as is amassing wealth without accountability and with impunity. And as previously mentioned, many religious and business ideologies found in present-day America were formulated in the 1920's. For decades, they have become so entrenched in America's narrative and collective spirit and religious culture that it is often difficult to distinguish between church business and the business of the church.

Applying capitalistic business principles to religion and faith has also led untold misery, and has made the Gospel, that churches are supposed to prophetically live and proclaim, almost obsolete. While the number of homeless have increased dramatically, hitting highs not seen since the Great Depression, (According to the Coalition for the Homeless 115,000 New Yorkers are homeless, 43,000 are children. This is an 8% increase from the previous year and a staggering 37% from 2002.), four hundred of the wealthiest Americans continue to amass enormous amounts of wealth, controlling over fifty percent of America's national riches.

And while wealth and corporations have evidently become venerated-400 people own more than 150 million Americans-poverty, homelessness and social programs have become demonized, specifically Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. For example, the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives just passed a budget proposal that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, two health programs that service millions of children and elderly. They also invented false information and lies about a universal healthcare plan, claiming it would lead to Death Panels. Actually, a universal healthcare plan would have saved millions of Americans from home foreclosures in the last several years.

One highly visible politician, Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is also a popular speaker at Americans for Prosperity events, uses the Gospels to tell the story about how a "woman laid it all on the line" by pouring an expensive fragrant ointment over Jesus' head. Bachman then insists that Americans should pour themselves our for Jesus and when promoting American businesses and enterprises at home and abroad. (Historically and contextually, the woman anointed Jesus to prepare him for his confrontation with the Roman Empire, including his betrayal, torture and execution. She knew Jesus had already been labeled and condemned as a political and economic agitator by the authorities.)

Newt Gingrich, a possible presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2012, believes God has called him to preach about the importance of religion and the renewal of business and economics. In his book, Rediscovering God in America, Gingrich believes success in business and accumulating wealth are signs of God's favor. Other talk show hosts and ultra-conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh and David and Charles Koch-who owns the second-largest privately held conglomerate in America, Koch Industries, and funds the American Tea Party-are unabashed by the wealth they have amassed through either entertainment industries or corporate mergers, often at the expense of paying workers low wages and by destroying their rights.

(Recall that the 1992 Contract With American and so-called Gingrich Revolution was an ultra-conservative movement based on Christian fundamentalism and Reaganomics.)

Other Republican proselytes preach Jesus as a "rugged individual" and free market warrior who opposes progressive taxes, unions and collective bargaining, and minimum wage laws. Such a mixture of corporate and capitalist ideologies, imposed on the Gospels, makes President Coolidge look like a saint. At least he recognized: "The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise. Today, the very wealthy and their moneyed-pocketed politicians only have reverence and praise for massive corporations. They only have scorn and blame for the poor, the worker, the sick, and the elderly."

American corporations and their values are diabolically different from Jesus' call to revolutionary discipleship-one that challenged the rich to sell all and give to the poor, one that led campaigns of civil disobedience by overturning the money changers tables in the Temple and then chasing them out, one that said nations would be judged if they fed the hungry, clothed the poor, and visited the sick and those in prison, one that threatened to end the Pax Romana and its imperial rule through military conquest and to start a new political and economical-based society built on forgiveness, mercy, service and equality. It is also a far cry from mega-churches that pay people to attend services or hold raffle drawings on Sunday morning to give-away new autos or big screen television sets.

But this is what happens in a business-oriented and celebrity culture that strips the Gospels of any historicity and sacredness. The historical Jesus, the one that led a massive peasant movement of workers, prostitutes, zealots, and of children against the Roman Empire and its religious and political collaborators, is no longer memorialized or celebrated. Instead, corporate values like greed, power, consumerism, militancy, and wealth are worshipped and idolized. Forgotten are persecuted early Christian communities that provided political and economic alternatives to the Roman Empire. Such communities replaced militarism, imperialism, and retaliation with that of prophetic faith and unity. They sold their possessions and goods and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44, 45)

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(It was this very same week in 1905, that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law that protected workers, and then ruled that corporations also had the same rights as found in the Fourteenth Amendment. In Lochner v. New York, the federal court said that a bakery owner from Utica, New York had the right to increase workers hours as guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. With this ruling, American corporations had the same natural and civil rights as American citizens. Backed with big money, corporate rights were usually revered over the rights of the average person.)

(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas' writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.)

All references and quotes are from: "Coolidge Prosperity" in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties by Frederick Lewis Allen, Copyright 1931 by Frederic Lewis Allen; copyright renewed by Agnes Rogers Allen and reprinted by Harper Collins Publishers.