“God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War
Sarah Ruth Hammond
Yale University Ph.D., 2010
For decades, historians of the twentieth-century United States have treated evangelicals as politically apathetic and culturally marginal between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the Reagan revolution. To the contrary, evangelical businessmen during the Depression and World War II opposed the New Deal on theological and economic grounds, and claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the same visionary pragmatism they practiced in the boardroom. For example, industrialist R.G. LeTourneau and executive Herbert J. Taylor countered government centralization in the 1930s and 1940s with philanthropies that invested in a Protestant, capitalist, and democratic world.
Meanwhile, the Christian Business Men’s Committee International, the Business Men’s Evangelistic Clubs, and the Gideons infused spiritual fellowship with the elitism of advertising culture. They were confident that they could steer the masses to Christ and free enterprise from the top down. Indeed, for a few exhilarating years, World War II seemed to give America and its missionaries dominion over the globe. Piety, patriotism, and power drew LeTourneau, Taylor, and the new National Association of Evangelicals to the center of it all,Washington, D.C. The marriage of religious and economic conservatism since the 1970s, which surprised many historians, reflects historical continuity rather than evangelical retreat.
https://philanthropy.iupui.edu/files/file/sarah_hammond_final_dissertation_april2010.pdf
Compounding the Sacred and the Profane: How Economic Theory Brings New Insight to the Growth and Decline of American Protestantism
Bretton Chad
Claremont McKenna College
2016
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2296&context=cmc_theses
THE BLESSINGS OF BUSINESS: CORPORATE AMERICA AND CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM IN THE SUNBELT AGE, 1945-2000
by DARREN ELLIOTT GREM
ABSTRACT
Scholars and pundits have often cast postwar conservative evangelicalism as a kind of doppelganger of liberal activism, as a grassroots expression of populist will against the social revolutions of the 1960s. In contrast, this dissertation argues that the rise of culturally and politically-engaged, conservative evangelicals first began in the midst of the New Deal state in the 1940s and 1950s and depended heavily on another will—the will of corporations and corporate actors, especially those working out of the economic and social context of an emergent, postwar “Sunbelt.” There, in the midst of a burgeoning regional economy that stretched from Georgia to Texas to California, a postwar generation of business leaders worked with evangelical leaders to resurrect the cause of religious, economic, and political conservatism in the midst of the early Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Culture Wars heated up, they brought their faith, free market policies, and “family values” to the forefront of American public life.
The blessings of business were everywhere—in the ministries of celebrity evangelists like Billy Graham and lay evangelists like R.G. LeTourneau; in corporate-funded missionary groups like Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, The Navigators, and Wycliffe Bible
Translators; in independent evangelical colleges strung throughout the South and West; in everyday operations at thousands of small businesses and dozens of mass-market corporations; in evangelical-inspired “biblical success” books and in a cottage industry of evangelical-led entrepreneurial seminars; in evangelical culture industries and megachurches; and, most especially, in the careers of evangelical political leaders from Jerry Falwell to George W. Bush.
In documenting both the successes and failures of these corporate-evangelical alliances, this dissertation explains why conservative evangelicalism reemerged when and where it did. But it also shows how corporate power has shaped—and continues to shape—religious culture and politics in modern America.
No comments:
Post a Comment