Capitalism and Christianity. They go together in today's America like beer and pizza, guns and grits, cops and killings.
But it hasn't always been so. In fact, there's nothing natural in the alliance. What part of Jesus's directive to "go and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor" comports in the least with soulless dog-eat-dog capitalism? No part -- none, nada, zero, zip. The Prosperity Gospel of today's Christian Libertarianism is a monstrous anomaly in the long line of Christian tradition.
So how can the conjunction of these two opposed things -- Christian love, compassion, forgiveness, and generosity versus Capitalist/Libertarian selfishness, money worship, hatred, and hypocrisy -- sit together so comfortably in the American mind? (And only in the American mind -- elsewhere it's not only far from so, it's a ridiculous and even blasphemous pairing.)
It can because it was made to be that way, through a long, careful, deliberate, and expensive campaign of well-funded propaganda by corporate beneficiaries:
Capitalism is a system braced by stories.... [T]he rise of the liberal individual, a kind of atomistic personhood, distinct from all other persons...has been recruited for such purposes, where it underwrites much free-market discourse about the primacy of the individual over the collective. This is only one of the many accounts which have been absorbed into the vast narrative support structure of capitalism—that is, the series of stories that make life under capitalism seem plausible, positive, and even necessary. In the United States, Christianity might be capitalism’s most impressive conscription so far....
Following the desolation of the Great Depression...mistrust of financiers and their associates was at a perilous high...
Concerned that populist politics might endanger their wealth, America’s monied interests did what they do best: They bought a solution. It came in the form of James W. Fifield Jr., a Congregationalist pastor who made his fortune in Southern California by preaching to the fabulously wealthy and accepting their patronage. Fifiel...was especially gifted at assuring wealthy Christians that their riches were evidence of virtue rather than vice.... [Fifield] spread the gospel through his organization, Spiritual Mobilization. Its mission was simple: to stamp out Christian support for a generous welfare state—which paired naturally with New Deal concern for the poor, elderly, and vulnerable—and to advance a new theory of Christian libertarianism....
Spiritual Mobilization sought to influence ministers across the country, and with its bottomless monetary resources, it was doomed to success.... Christianity was rented out, quite consciously, to buttress a shambling narrative about the continued dominance of the monied class....
Spiritual Mobilization circulated literature touting the righteousness of the libertarian-Christian gospel, and, in 1951, decided to host a series of events celebrating the newly minted notion of “freedom under God.” A turn of phrase coined by Fifield himself, the rhetoric was a hit, and private companies voraciously reproduced it; the Utah Power & Light Company, among others, printed ads and funded festivities to advance the notion that Christian deference to industry is a vital part of the American Way. This stew of supply-side economics, small government, hard-core U.S. patriotism, and Christian rhetoric was entirely novel, and smashingly effective. When we look back now on the McCarthy era and find Christian verses interwoven with tirades against communism, this is the carefully engineered blend we are revisiting....
Billy Graham [was] a spiritual inheritor to the early efforts of Christian libertarians like Fifield.... Graham’s ascent opened the way for other pastors with political aspirations, like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority cohort, to wax passionate about the gospel while raking in cash from committed capitalists delighted by the arranged marriage of God and mammon.... [T]he arteries of money and power that we now take for granted—between the progenitors of the Christian right on one side, and preachers, industrialists, and politicians on the other—were built.
Christian socialism was once the default for those of the Christian persuasion, and it still is in most places that are not America. Christians are enjoined to be their brother's keeper, not to advocate for guns and for cutting taxes for the wealthy.
People who call for war with Iran and want to kill Muslims for Jesus have been hoodwinked in the most pathetic, despicable, and cynical way.
But at some point narratives can no longer patch up the obvious flaws they were manufactured to cover up. Voracious capitalism, having consumed what it can with the aid of motivated Christian evangelicalism, is beginning to move on. Young evangelicals no longer hold the same social ideas as their elders about such politically useful wedge issues as gay marriage, and are moving, if not into the Democratic camp, at least into more nonpartisan social activism. Ted Cruz bemoans the increasing standoffishness of an evangelical army of voters to turn out and lift him as on the wings of angels into the presidency.
Narratives can shift, particularly when they are false and full of inherent contradictions because they've been manufactured for an ulterior motive.
And when they've been discarded by the manufacturers as no longer useful, that leaves space for more natural forms to take their place.
What would Jesus really do?
Pack heat?
Screw his neighbor?
Shame the sluts?
Refuse cake for gay weddings?
Take food out of the mouths of poor children?
Scream for more war?
I don't think so.
It's long past time for believers to let go of the lies they've been fed by the wealthy and by the political opportunists on the right, and to go and sin no more.