Ex-Evangelical Apologetics: Christianity and Capitalism
Brad discusses the idea that capitalism and Christianity go together from two angles. First, he outlines how in the mid-twentieth century big business actors infiltrated church spaces with the ideas that free market capitalism, individualism, and libertarianism were God ordained from the Bible. Like abortion in the 1970s, the idea that capitalism and Christianity are natural partners is the result of an external operation that used faith to gain cultural traction.
Brad then discusses the case of Denmark, one of the happiest countries on earth. Its social welfare system is extensive--and largely a result of Lutheran ideals inherited from the Reformation. It's a counter-example to the idea that Christianity is incompatible with socialism or any system other than capitalism.
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What's up y'all?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center.
Today we're doing another installment of Ex-Evangelical Apologetics, and today I want to talk about the idea that Christianity and capitalism go hand-in-hand.
Many of you, I think, have heard this from time to time.
I know some of you in our Patreon feed and Discord have mentioned that with family members and at church, this was a common refrain, the idea that individual ambition, private property, and the free market are all sort of baked into a biblical worldview.
So let's talk about this and see if that holds up.
One of the things I like to do, and one of the reasons I like history so much, is to figure out where ideas came from.
And in this case, there's a pretty clear conception in American history as to where we got these ideas that free market capitalism and Christianity go together.
If you listen to The Orange Wave, and I'll just say, today I'm going to do a brief episode, but if you'd really like to dig into this, I'm going to give you two suggestions.
One, listen to The Orange Wave, especially the first two episodes, and you will really get a nice explanation as to the history of everything I'm going to talk about today.
Number two, in the second episode and the third episode of The Orange Wave, I interviewed Gerardo Marti, who is a sociologist of religion.
Gerardo Marti has written a great book called American Blind Spot, where he talks a lot about this history.
And here's what Marti says, and here's, well, here's what he sort of argues.
And again, if you want more of this, either pick up the book, or listen to The Orange Wave, or do both.
But essentially what Gerardo Marti shows us is that in the mid-20th century, in the wake of the New Deal, There were a lot of business magnates who were very interested in promoting the interests of capitalist entrepreneurs.
They, of course, didn't like all of or any of the aspects of the New Deal.
So if you think about the New Deal in the 30s and then World War II in the 40s, What you are left with in the 50s and 60s is a United States that is prosperous and is at the sort of head of the international table.
Well, what folks don't often realize is that during those years there was a lot more emphasis on taxing the rich.
There was an emphasis on social welfare programs.
I mean, the 20th century is what gave us Social Security.
It is what gave us things like Medicare and so on and so forth.
So, in the middle of the 20th century, you have big business magnates who really would like to find ways to relax some of the government regulations, they would like to pay less taxes, and they really don't want efforts to make American society, in economic terms, more equal.
And so if you're looking around you in the 1960s and seeing the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement and the gay rights movements and so on and so forth, right, you're starting to see the writing on the wall that as a rich white entrepreneur, usually 90% of them are men.
You're going to see a situation where the kind of equalization that's happening, the expansion of rights and freedoms, may actually start to really extend to the economic realm.
So how do you combat this?
Right?
How do you make headway here?
And one of the things that I think is so fascinating about this history is that they recognized very clearly that if they were able to develop a message in religious communities, namely conservative white Christian communities, that emphasized the individual, that emphasized free choice, that emphasized the God-given blessing of affluence and of wealth,
If they could get that kind of message across, then this idea of economic free market capitalism and Christianity would go together.
They could make it a very American thing.
And they would be off to the races.
So I'll give you one more book to read, and if you really want to dig into this, and that is Kevin Kruse, K-R-U-S-E, and his book is called One Nation Under God, and it is... Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton University, widely regarded as one of the The preeminent historians of the American 20th century is a contributor to the 1619 Project and so on.
But that book, along with Gerardo Marti's book, really shows us how big, big business interests invested in projects to really try to take American Christianity back from progressives who were really kind of on the side of the Civil Rights Movement, who were on the side of Arguing for more protections and social welfare programs and a social safety net for all Americans.
I'm obviously doing a very quick and dirty history here.
And so again, if you'd like to dig more into this, look into those resources.
But one of the things I want to just highlight is a word or a phrase that Gerardo Marti uses, and that is Christian libertarianism.
So what we get in the 50s and 60s is this idea of Christian libertarianism.
And the idea is this, right?
The government should not do anything except for, you know, pave roads and have an armed military to protect us and a very bare-bones approach to government.
Government should get out of your life and not try to limit your freedom, right?
We're libertarian.
We should be able to choose whether that is To own guns or to not, you know, have kids wear masks at school or whatever, okay?
So this libertarian idea, and I want you to think about libertarianism with me for a minute, is the idea that the government should take its hand off of the economic and cultural elements of a society and allow it to just play out.
Allow free choice, allow self-interest, and allow competition To really determine how society is structured.
Who wins, who loses, who prospers, who doesn't.
The way people want to live.
And some libertarians go very far with this.
The Christian version often doesn't.
But there are libertarians out there that would say there should be no limitations on like, you know, drugs and narcotics.
That, you know, if people want to use those, whether that's methamphetamines or whatever, why should you limit that, government?
That's none of your business, right?
So you can see this sort of get-off-my-property, government-you-are-the-enemy kind of idea.
What Gerardo Marti argues so persuasively in his work, and shares this on the Orange Wave, is that libertarianism often says, I don't want the government to intervene, but it fails to recognize how the government has already intervened.
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