In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism for alienating people from an understanding the world and their interests within it, this is doubly wrong. Not only is the embrace of religion often a prudent response to isolation or disintegration on the part of the individual believer, but the choice of religion and the form it takes is in part the outcome of a political project, an expression of the prudential interests of powerful individuals and institutions. By luck and experimentation, economic and political elites in America and elsewhere have allied themselves with minority Christian sects that promised to draw popular attention away from radical activism towards moral and reli-ious fervour. Elite groups prefer evangelical and Pentecostal religion to Catholic liberation theology, liberal Protestantism, and secular socialism.
The relationship today between business and religion in the United States recalls the politics of the decades between the Civil War and the Depression. The rich then funded a variety of institutional alternatives to socialism and populism, including prohibitionists, nativists, and racist groups like the Klu Klux Klan. The vast profits made from American industrial expansion, their concentration in relatively few hands and a new mass communications infrastructure gave the rich the means to conduct these experiments in cultural politics. The dislocation and political unrest of the period gave them a pressing motive. The main beneficiaries of this elite spending were the Churches that favoured the structure of the new industrial society.
Between 1910 and 1915, two oil millionaires, Lymon and Milton Stewart, supported the publication of The Fundamentals, a series of twelve paperback volumes that outlined fundamentalist doctrine. It is difficult to assess the significance of the Stewarts’ support for fundamentalism, but a total of three million copies of these books were printed. These insisted in the historical accuracy of the Bible and enlisted recent archaeological discoveries in the Middle East to help make their case. In an atmosphere of increasing scientific scepticism and support for political reform, fundamentalists held out for the absolute truth of scripture and helped set in train a long confrontation in the United States between ‘enlightened’ opinion and the evangelically inclined.
This sense of a split between a secular culture and the elect did not prevent collaboration between sophisticated, even atheistic capitalists and evangelicals on matters of common concern. Big business energetically supported evangelical attempts to prohibit the sale of alcohol in the United States. Michael Woodiwiss writes in his recent book, Gangster Capitalism, how in the early years of the twentieth century,
‘business leaders…..supported the tide of moral reform that effectively shifted attention from the power and behaviour of corporations towards aspects of the personal behaviour of the masses considered to be unhealthy and undesirable in this still very puritan nation.’ ([1])
Financial support for moral reform from the robber barons meshed neatly with evangelical efforts to extirpate vice and to replace the sociability of the saloon with a community in Christ. Prohibition of alcohol, argued some of its proponents, was necessary if the state was to be protected ‘against anarchy and red revolution’. ([2]) Certainly manufacturers thought that a work force deprived of alcohol would buy more of their products.
In some senses the Prohibition movement provides a template for American politics nationally and globally in the following century. An evangelical belief in the perfectibility of man, the moral duty of an elect to reform others, and a lively corporate interest in glossing over the material abuses of government and corporations combine to create a crusade against evil. Evangelical religion with its ability to recast the infirmities of man as cosmic drama puts on the show; business covers the production costs. Together they will be crucial in the crusades that follow against domestic radicalism and Soviet communism, against gambling, prostitution and narcotics. They remain central to American politics in the struggle against social liberalism at home and international terrorism overseas.
The Family
The Depression in America in the 1930s and Roosevelt’s attempts to address it through state intervention in the economy created enormous anxiety in sections of the business community. Famously the establishment media praised Hitler and Mussolini in the most fulsome terms. This admiration was widely shared by business leaders. A small group of industrialists even plotted a coup against Roosevelt that would have established a Major General from the Marines, Smedley Butler, as a pro-business dictator. One of the most important and long-lasting legacies of this anxiety about the forces being unleashed in the New Deal came in the form of ‘The Family’, a Christian order dedicated to resisting the spread of popular radicalism. Writing in Harpers, Jeffrey Sharlet explains:
‘The Family was founded in April 1935 by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant who made his living as a travelling preacher. One night, while lying in bed fretting about socialists, Wobblies, and a Swedish Communist who, he was sure, planned to bring Seattle under the control of Moscow, Vereide received a visitation: a voice, and a light in the dark, bright and blinding. The next day he met a friend, a wealthy businessman and former major, and the two men agreed upon a spiritual plan. They enlisted nineteen business executives in a weekly breakfast meeting and together they prayed, convinced that Jesus alone could redeem Seattle and crush the radical unions. They wanted to give Jesus a vessel, and so they asked God to raise up a leader. One of their number, a city councilman named Arthur Langlie, stood and said, “I am ready to let God use me.” Langlie was made first mayor and later governor, backed in both campaigns by money and muscle from his prayer-breakfast friends, whose number had rapidly multiplied……Prayer breakfast groups were formed in dozens of cities, from San Francisco to Philadelphia. There were already enough men ministering to the down-and-out, Vereide had decided; his mission field would be men with the means to seize the world for God. Vereide called his potential flock of the rich and powerful, those in need only of the “real” Jesus, the “up-and-out.” ‘([3])
Just before America joined the Second World War, Vereide moved to Washington. By 1945 nearly a third of US senators attended one of his weekly prayer meetings. In 1953 he established the one widely publicised Family event, the National Prayer Breakfast. Every February with the blessing of the US Congress, 3,000 dignitaries attend these events. Sharlet explains in his article how the ecumenical Prayer Breakfast acts as a chance meet prominent people in business and to invite them to more intimate meetings to ‘meet Jesus man to man’.
Since its heyday in the 1950s as a prominent actor in America’s public religion, the Family has become much more discreet. It has operated through a number of different institutions including the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, and the International Foundation. In 1966 Vereide made it clear that the organisation would limit the number of recruits:
‘There has always been one man or a small core who have caught the vision for their country and become aware of what a “leadership led by God” could mean spiritually to the nation and the world……It is these men, banded together, who can accomplish the vision God gave me years ago’.
This ‘small core’ included Suharto and Costa e Silva, respectively the dictators of Indonesia and Brazil, the Salvadorean general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova and the Honduran Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. In 1978 with help from the CEO of Raytheon, Tom Phillips, the Family bought a mansion called ‘The Cedars’ in Washington. It has become a meeting house and residence for the religiously inclined among America’s political elite. ([4]) There they are able to combine religious striving and social contact with potential allies and benefactors.
Facing Godless communism
With the end of the Second World War and the resumption of hostilities between the USA and the Soviet Union, Christianity and especially Evangelical Christianity found new strength of purpose in the cosmic struggle between the God-fearing West and Godless communism. Facing the possibility of nuclear confrontation the American people flocked to the Churches in the 1940s.
‘…church membership grew at a faster rate than the general population, books on religion led the best-seller lists and evangelical rallies drew thousands. In a world threatened by atomic extermination and by the spectre of communism, religion gained a new place in public life.’ ([5])
This renewed religiosity took symbolic as well as institutional forms. For example in 1954 the wording of the US Pledge of Allegiance was changed to include the words ‘under God’: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ ([6])
The alliance between political liberalism, mainstream (i.e. non-evangelical) Protestants, and organised labour had formed the political basis for the New Deal in the Roosevelt era. During the Depression,
‘The Federal Council of Churches had provided enthusiastic support for the New Deal, noting that it “embodied many of the social ideals of the churches”. Its revised “Social Creed” advocated social planning, the rights of workers to organise collectively, social control of credit, and economic relief for farmers through price controls.’ ([7])
But the struggle against the Soviet Union would create the conditions for a new domestic consensus in which the Churches, both mainstream and evangelical, would play an important role. Business actively promoted religion in the workplace.([8]) The secular enlightenment that had characterised the politics of the New Deal would be subordinated to the overriding emergency of the struggle with godless communism. Over time the state itself would become associated with the dead hand of collectivism and under cover of individualist rhetoric a dynamic corporate sector would, slowly at first, once again escape meaningful regulation. Groups like the Christian Freedom Foundation were on hand to explain how ‘creeping socialism, state socialism, government controlled agriculture, government subsidies for schools, price and wage fixing’ represented ‘steps towards collectivism’. ([9]) It called for ‘the church to speak up for capitalism and kept up a steady drumbeat of warnings that the survival of religion depended upon the survival of capitalism.'([10])
Just as religious language played a part in helping business groups to regain the initiative in domestic politics, it helped frame America’s foreign policy from the late 1940s onwards as a struggle between Christian light and Satanic darkness. Religious activism helped many American people to think in these terms. For example, in 1955 Senator Frank Colson announced that The Family was to launch a ‘world-wide spiritual offensive’ and in the same year the organisation funded Militant Liberty, an anti-communist film that would be used through-out the world by the Department of Defense. ([11])
Meanwhile other target audiences could be presented with the drama of a showdown between democracy and totalitarianism which used the categories of individualism and collectivism in a slightly different way. The cultural propaganda developed for use in Western Europe took a shape not so different from that of Cold War Christianity, although the details were strikingly different. The early exponents of American ‘soft power’ allied themselves with artistic individualism against statist conformity, a division perfectly captured, in painting, in the contrast between abstract expressionism and socialist realism. The Cold Warriors were as happy to mobilise the cult of the bohemian genius as that of the Virgin Mary, or of the rugged individualist, according to circumstances. ([12])
Specifically evangelical religion would once again also be an ally against communism abroad and collectivism at home. One of the clearest winners of the Cold War was a young Baptist preacher by the name of Billy Graham. Born in 1918 in North Carolina, Graham came to national prominence in 1949 during his ‘Los Angeles crusade’, a series of tent meetings.
Hearst and Luce support Graham
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to Graham’s followers, both William Randolph Hearst the newspaper magnate and Henry Luce the head of Time and Fortune magazines decided to promote Graham. In The New Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian provides a possible explanation;
‘… William Randolph Hearst, head of one large publishing empire, and Henry Luce, chief of another, Time, Inc., were both worried about communism and the growth of liberalism in the United States. Billy Graham, an obscure evangelist holding poorly attended tent meetings in Los Angeles…..Hearst and Luce interviewed the obscure preacher and decided he was worthy of their support. Billy Graham became an almost instantaneous national and, later, international figure preaching anticommunism. In late 1949, Hearst sent a telegram to all Hearst editors: “Puff Graham”. The editors did in Hearst newspapers, magazines, movies, and newsreels. Within two months Graham was preaching to crowds of 350,000.’ ([13])
Graham was an uncompromising enemy of communism. He often said that ‘either communism must die, or Christianity must die’. A fundamentalist, Graham demonstrates a rather charming, ecumenical approach to matters of salvation. He doesn’t, for example, feel that non-Christians are doomed to eternal damnation. This has created some problems with later generations of hard-line evangelicals, who can see the marketing benefits of a jealous God. In this respect he shows how fundamentalism fails to provide the evangelical movement with any like a clear, defensible orthodoxy. But on the key issue of Cold War politics Graham was unwavering. In his career as a preacher he spoke to an estimated 210 million people in 180 countries, denouncing communism until its sudden demise as a credible Christianity-killer in the years between 1989 and 1991.([14])
As we have already seen, the conflict between (American) individualism and (communist) collectivism wasn’t limited to evangelical religion in the period. It was a central theme in Cold War cultural politics. Individualism was closely identified with Christian or Judaeo-Christian religion and played an important ideological role in broadly speaking secular organisations. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958. It took its name from a Baptist missionary and intelligence officer who had been killed by the Communist Chinese and whom they described as the first casualty of the Cold War. The Birchers claimed that America was being undermined by a secret communist conspiracy. They stood for resistance to collectivism and for the freedom of the individual. Writing in 1970 the founder of the society, Robert Welsh, declared that ‘we have taken on the assignment to preserve the moral principles arrived at through many centuries of Judaic and Christian experience and thought’.([15]) These moral principles were to be preserved against the insinuations of ‘communist sophistry’ and ‘situation ethics’. The John Birch Society took its militant anti-communism to bizarre lengths, coming to accuse many prominent Republican politicians, including President Eisenhower himself, of being agents of international communism. It also acted as an incubator for the idea that the United Nations represented a grave threat to the sovereignty of the United States. But its descent into comic book paranoia shouldn’t blind us to its substantial popular appeal in the late fifties and its important role in shaping Barry Goldwater’s New Republicanism.
The Koch brothers
The publishing activities of the Stewart brothers in the first decades of the twentieth century find a modern parallel in another pair of oil-rich brothers, David and Charles Koch. These two billionaires they control one of the largest private companies in the world have spent millions on constructing a network of think tanks and political action committees that includes the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Rather than evangelical Christianity, these institutions promote corporate-friendly libertarianism and receive generous assistance from Philip Morris, Exxon, Ford and other large companies. Just as money buys converts to evangelism, it buys intellectual respectability and exposure for pro-corporate ideas. Liberal critics of religion sometimes fail to register the common interests that bind secular advocates of corporate power and socially conservative evangelicals. Their differences make for good cultural drama and offer some of the excitement of controversy and debate, but their apparent differences enlightened secular libertarianism on the one hand and socially conservative fundamentalism on the other mask their common acceptance of the broad outlines of established power. David and Charles’ father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the blend of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ morality and paranoia.
Religious broadcasting
Two changes in the regulations governing broadcasting in the United States added to the cultural advantages already enjoyed by evangelical organisations in the context of the Cold War. Federal rules had stipulated that television networks made a certain amount of time available for ‘public interest programming’. In practice this was mostly provided by religious groups. At first the networks had given this ‘public interest’ airtime away for free. But in 1960 the Federal Communications Commission allowed broadcasters to sell airtime to religious groups. They also exempted these programs from the rules limiting the number of commercials per hour elsewhere on the schedules. As Stauber and Rampton point out in their book Banana Republicans:
‘TV stations quickly realised that they could maximise their profits by offering airtime to paying religious broadcasters, which in turn favoured a specific type of religious broadcaster’.([16])
Evangelical groups were already well versed in fund-raising through appeals to the faithful and that could see the entrepreneurial possibilities of regular access to a mass market. The televangelists ‘brought the carnival-like showmanship of revivalist tent shows to television religion’.([17])
As we have seen religious sentiment played a part in the conduct of the Cold War and in the campaign against further advances by the New Dealers at home. Evangelicals like Billy Graham and quasi-evangelicals like Abraham Vereide helped to create the Cold War consensus but so did many mainstream churches and ecumenical lunatics like the John Birch Society. In the late sixties the evangelical movement began to take a more active interest in electoral politics and its leadership began to build bridges with the Republican Party. As the Democrats became radicalised by war in Vietnam, by environmentalism and feminism, by new sexual freedom and a permissive attitude towards drugs, the Republicans gained support from social conservatives and the evangelicals began what they saw as a crusade against godless hedonism and flagrant disregard for the divine law. Like the Birchers, evangelicals flocked to Goldwater’s disastrous Presidential campaign in 1964. In 1968 they came out in large numbers for Nixon, the man who seemed to champion the godly ‘silent majority’ against the long-hairs, hippies and freaks who opposed the war in Vietnam and wanted America to take her clothes off.
The spectacular collapse of the Nixon presidency in 1974 led to victory for the born-again Jimmy Carter in 1976, but by 1980 the evangelicals who had strongly supported him had become disenchanted. Ed McAteer explained to Barbara Victor:
‘After several years of Carter, having been elected by the Evangelicals for his first term, I realized that when he refused to endorse anti-abortion measures or come out against separation of church and state, or refused to invite Evangelicals to the White House, that he was not going to go to bat for us.'([18])
Reagan, unlike Carter, hadn’t been born again, and so in evangelical terms wasn’t strictly speaking a Christian. (He was also keen on astrology, which is frowned on in evangelical circles in the normal run of things). Nevertheless Reagan appreciated the value of the evangelical vote and recognised that Falwell’s organisation Moral Majority could deliver. At a meeting of the Religious Roundtable in October 1979, Reagan famously declared to an audience of evangelical leaders, ‘I know you can’t endorse me because of your non-profit status, but I endorse you and what you believe’. ([19]) His enthusiastic use of biblical categories of good and evil, his crusades against communism and pornography, and his misty-eyed religiosity helped make 1980s America safe for the evangelical world-view, although his prudent reluctance to do very much to satisfy evangelical demands led to some disenchantment in his second term.
Reagan’s Vice-President George H. W. Bush, suffered in part as a result of Reagan’s breezy betrayal of the evangelicals, in part as a result of his reluctance to move away from liberal Republicanism. Pat Robertson, the charismatic evangelical broadcaster, ran against him for the Republican nomination in 1988 and won the Washington State primary. The spectacular downfall of several prominent evangelical preachers helped save the former head of the CIA from defeat but Bush Senior lost the Presidential Election in 1992 and the years that followed were mostly marked by political disappointment for the evangelicals. Federal funding for their organisations was reduced, the Christian Coalition was stripped of its charitable status and the centrist Democrat Clinton romped to victory in 1996. In Clinton’s second term the Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent investigations did considerable harm to Clinton’s reputation in the country and his vice-President narrowly and controversially lost the 2000 election to a ‘compassionate conservative’ whose favourite philosopher was Jesus Christ and who knew what it was like ‘to be right with God’. Whether Bush is actually a born again Christian isn’t entirely clear, but his political rhetoric is larded with evangelical terms and the story of his recovery from alcoholism strongly resembles an evangelical tale of rebirth, including the almost mandatory conversations with long-time White House visitor, Billy Graham.
The presidential election of 2004 was again widely fought on the issue of ‘moral values’. A President engaged in a very strange foreign war and committed to tax cuts for the very rich drew possibly decisive support from Christians of all social classes as a result of his opposition to gay marriage. The decision to campaign on these terms might have been a sincere and morally brave impulse by the President to defend what he has called ‘the fundamental institution of civilisation’ from sexual anarchy. But it was based on careful polling research. The evangelical imagination was again an electoral resource in a way that would have been recognisable to the enemies of populism and advocates of Empire in America the 1890s.
Abramoff
This sense that evangelical believers provide a political and economic resource to be exploited gains substantial support from the revelations surrounding the career of Jack Abramoff. A Washington lobbyist contracted to protect the interests of Native American tribal casinos, Abramoff used evangelical zeal against the evils of gambling to advance his own, and sometimes his clients’ interests. Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon paid evangelical leaders to protest against particular casinos. Once their targets approached financial collapse the lobbyists would step in and promise to remove the pressure in exchange for lobbying fees. Having deployed Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition against the Tigua tribe in Texas, Abramoff and Scanlon’s company went on to receive $4.2 million in fees from the casino-owners. In a variation on this theme the lobbyists also used their evangelical friends to prevent the licensing new casinos that threatened to compete with those of their existing clients. ([20])
Abramoff and Scanlon ran what amounted to a protection racket where the sincere desire of millions of believers for a world without vice inadvertently provided the muscle. The lobbyists were unusually blatant and reckless in their running of this scam, but they only did what members of the political and economic elite have been doing for more than a century in the United States. The religiously coded wars on alcohol, drugs and terror, abortion and gay rights have all channelled religious enthusiasm into support for policies that are directly helpful to established power or else distract potential opposition to elite projects. Ever since the late sixties the evangelical leadership has translated its support for socially conservative candidates into membership of local and national networks of power and funding. Brokered in this way, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, faith ‘degenerates into a swindle’ and becomes ‘an instrument of rational administration'([21]) :a means to power and wealth for some evangelical leaders of course, but more importantly a method by which a largely secular elite in business and government can pursue their goals without having to concede or reveal too much to the wider public. Enlightened intellectual culture collaborates in this process to the extent that it elevates the dispute between evangelicals and social liberals into a matter of central world-historical importance.
Notes
1 Michael Woodiwiss, Gangster Capitalism (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005) p.5.
2 Michael Woodiwiss p. 5.
3 Jeffrey Sharlet , ‘Jesus plus nothing’ Harpers, March 2003
4 Jeffrey Sharlet
5 Elizabeth A Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994) p.223.
6 Fones-Wolf p.223.
7 Fones-Wolf p.219.
8 ‘Nation’s Business observed that not since the Victorian era……has there been anything like the spate of religious printed matter which employees receive today.’ Fones-Wolf p.224.
9 Howard E. Kershner, quoted in Fones-Wolf (see note 5) p.223.
10 Fones-Wolf, (see note 5) p.223.
11 Jeffrey Sharlet (see note 3)
12 This use of both enlightened and religious language to describe the world in terms suitable for the conduct of Cold War foreshadows a similar approach in the propaganda surrounding the War on Terror. Secular liberals today can understand America’s role in the world in terms of a struggle between democracy and human rights on the one hand and ‘Islamo-Fascism’ on the other. Meanwhile the religiously inclined have every opportunity to conceive of the times in which they live as a crusade against Islam itself, perhaps as part of a flurry of apocalyptic emergencies. Though mutually incompatible, both descriptions are consistent with the continued conduct of war in the Middle East. Both versions are more or less equally inadequate as explanations but they presumably provide their intended audiences an equally peaceful, easy feeling. These formal similarities between secular and religious descriptions of both the Cold War and the War on Terror form yet another indigestible difficulty for those who want to retain the shape of the 18th century confrontation between Church and Enlightenment. At various times both have been used as instruments of administration.
13 Bagdikian, Ben, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004)pp.42-43
14 See www.billygraham.org/
15 See www.jbs.org/
16 John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Banana Republicans, (London: Constable Robinson Publishing, 2004) p.52.
17 The direct quotations and the information about the FCC rule changes come from Banana Republicans pp.54-55. The authors of that book cite Sara Diamond’s Spiritual Warfare (Boston MA: South End Press, 1989) as a source.
18 Barbara Victor, The Last Crusade (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005) p. 97
19 Barbara Victor p.98
20 For more about Abramoff, see, for example, the Washington Post’s investigations which won a Pulitzer prize, at <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/ 2005/06/ 22/ LI2005062200936.html>
21 Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London:Verso, 1979), p.20. ‘The paradoxical nature of faith degenerates into a swindle, and becomes the myth of the twentieth century; and its irrationality turns it into an instrument of rational administration by the wholly enlightened as they steer society towards barbarism.’