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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Corporate America Invented Christian America
The entire article is well worth reading.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030.html#ixzz3XqD61MJb
Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. Addressing the crowd of business leaders, Fifield delivered a passionate defense of the American system of free enterprise and a withering assault on its perceived enemies in Franklin D. Roosevelts administration. Decrying the New Deals encroachment upon our American freedoms, the minister listed a litany of sins committed by the Democratic government, ranging from its devaluation of currency to its disrespect for the Supreme Court. Singling out the regulatory state for condemnation, he denounced the multitude of federal agencies attached to the executive branch and warned ominously of the menace of autocracy approaching through bureaucracy.
It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifields audience of executives was stunned. Over the preceding decade, as America first descended into and then crawled its way out of the Great Depression, the these titans of industry had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nations downfall. Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation.
They just needed to do one thing: Get religion.
Fifield told the industrialists that clergymen would be crucial in regaining the upper hand in their war with Roosevelt. As men of God, ministers could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest. They could push back against claims, made often by Roosevelt and his allies, that business had somehow sinned and the welfare state was doing Gods work. The assembled industrialists gave a rousing amen. When he had finished, a journalist noted, rumors report that the N.A.M. applause could be heard in Hoboken.
It was a watershed momentthe beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed Christian libertarianism. Fifield and like-minded ministers saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined, and argued that spreading the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. The two systems had been linked before, of course, but always in terms of their shared social characteristics. Fifields innovation was his insistence that Christianity and capitalism were political soul mates, first and foremost.
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)eridani
(51,907 posts)Often new religions are against it--see Christians vs Rome. The longer they are around, the more likely it is that they will be co-opted.
RKP5637
(67,111 posts)And, as you say, serves the power structure. Religion is politics served with the appropriate propaganda to sway the masses, as applicable.
orwell
(7,775 posts)...capitalism is the antithesis of Christianity.
Did any of these heretics ever study the life of Jesus Christ?
Martin Eden
(12,871 posts)That is certainly at the core of rightwing ideology today, but it is only as valid as the concept of Jesus Christ being "inextricably intertwined" with the money changers in the temple.