This is the Grounding Truth from our latest podcast which you can listen to on Buzzsprout, Spotify, or Apple podcasts and that includes an interview with activist Eduarda Serafim. 

It is probably hard to ponder this right now with capitalism being synonymous with being an American which is also synonymous with being a Christian, but back in the late 1930s capitalism was under attack and for good measure. Unregulated markets and financial policies which benefitted the rich over the poor, while lacking any safety net for the millions of people slipping through the cracks all came to a head in the Great Depression, beginning in 1929. The meek response by the Hoover administration failed to meet the moment and so President Roosevelt was swept into office in 1932 and immediately set to work to bring back the economy and make it work for all people. 

The recovery was long and slow and Roosevelt had to fight many battles in Congress and the Supreme Court along the way. It was one of the toughest decades in the history of the United States. It was also a tough decade for conventional conservative causes and institutions. One of those institutions was the US Chamber of Commerce. Chamber leaders quickly came to understand that capitalism had earned some pretty bad press, so they hired public relations firms to turn the narrative around. They did not budge on policy change – just how capitalism was being perceived. However, by 1940, they had made little progress so they finally recruited religious leaders to tell the story that unregulated free markets were a blessing and not a curse. 

One of the leaders of this work was a Congregationalist minister named Rev. James Fifield. Writing in his excellent book, One Nation Under God, the historian Kevin Kruse described Rev. Fifield’s address to a gathering of businessmen in 1940 organized by the Chambers of Commerce. Kruse writes, 

“Rev. Fifield listed a litany of sins committed by the Roosevelt administration, ranging from its devaluation of currency to its disrespect for the Supreme Court. He denounced the ‘rising costs of government and the multitude of federal agencies attached to the executive branch’ and warned ominously of ‘the menace of autocracy through bureaucracy.’ His audience of executives was stunned. Over the preceding decade, these titans of industry  had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nation’s downfall. Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation…With his speech at the Waldorf-Astoria, Fifield convinced the industrialists that clergymen could be the means of regaining the upper hand  in their war with Roosevelt in the coming years. As men of God, they could give voice to the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest.” (p. 6-7, 2015)

I find it intriguing that the sins Fifield accuses the Roosevelt administration of have nothing to do with its treatment of people. Sins, for Fifield, consisted of abstract policy initiatives like increasing the number of federal agencies and increasing government bureaucracy. While there have long been ties between Christian theologies that uphold the economic and political quo – surely going back to the Constantiniazation of the Church in 313 – this iteration, long before Jerry Falwell entered the scene, kicked off the 20th Century’s seamless coordination between Christianity, commerce, and conservative politics that was then called “Christian Libertarianism” (p. 7) and today is known as Christian nationalism. 

The theology Fifield and others were immersed in was based on several points that frankly lack any sound biblical support. But these points sure do sound familiar to me. Again, looking to Dr. Kruse, some of their assertions include: 

• Looking to governmental programs to help people creates a ‘false idol’ of the government,
• Critiquing capitalism and pointing to the sins of the wealthy, causes those in lower socio-economic classes to covet their neighbor’s wealth, and
• The Social Gospel’s belief that government programs that help poor people are a means of implementing Jesus’ emphasis of prioritizing care for the poor was actually a perversion of Christian teaching. The single greatest teaching of Jesus was salvation of the individual and therefore, any political or economic system that would be endorsed by Jesus are ones that emphasize this kind of individualism. And that system is free market capitalism. 

Once again, Fifield is not focused on treatment of people as either meriting righteousness or wickedness. Fifield is quite focused on the theoretical and not the personal. Thus, to faithfully follow Jesus is to push for unregulated markets and to allow capitalism to go unchecked. Faithfully following Jesus has very, very little with treatment of the most vulnerable among us. This brand of theology was repeatedly hammered into me as a young Christian, discipled in evangelicalism. It was a given. Unquestioned. But as I and many others with any level of curiosity came to find out, this theology is more socially shaped than biblically-based. More than anything, this brand of inwardly-focused personal salvation at the expense of the welfare of the poor and marginalized has done tremendous harm and led to a practicing indifference to many people experiencing suffering on the part of evangelicalism. 

As I came to find out at the young age of 22, the idea of accepting Jesus Christ as your own personal Lord and Saviour never really appears in Scripture. Yes, Jesus cares deeply for every individual person. I believe God is intimately aware and deeply concerned over every aspect of our lives (though I believe God does not give a single whit about who wins or loses sports events). But salvation was not meant to be individualistic. More times than not in Scripture, salvation happened among groups of people and without exception, salvation was always and everywhere tied to collective liberation. It is impossible, biblically speaking, to be sanctified in grace and ignore the suffering, oppression, and inequality that exists. This just does not happen in Scripture. It does happen every day in the United States however. 

Though Jesus lived long before industrialization, Jesus did not seem to believe that societal change occurs solely through individuals. At the very beginning of his public ministry, in Luke 4, Jesus references the Year of the Jubilee, which was the law prescribed in Leviticus that mandated every 50 years debts were to be forgiven, slaves set free, and the land redistributed so that there would be no generational poverty. And even though Jesus lived under foreign government oppression, Jesus chooses neither violent revolution nor political acquiescence. Instead, Jesus calls his followers to build a new world – a new Kingdom – which innately conveys a prophetic denouncement of the current political and economic status quo. 

James Fifield, in his insistence that business leaders were not to blame for the crash of the economy and the immense suffering that many people experienced during that time, missed an opportunity to share a gospel that not only looks forward to the building of a new world where all people are allowed and able to contribute economically and politically, but also carries with it the need to repent in our parts in sustaining and benefitting from the old, unjust world. Where there has been suffering and we profited off of it, where there has been separation between the rich and the poor and we have gained privilege from it, and where there has been suffering and we have willingly ignored it and remained in our comfort, we cannot authentically join in the building of the new world until we repent of our complicity in the old one. 

James Fifield never called for that. In fact, he called for the exact opposite of that. The truth is that over the last 100 years we have had far too many James Fifields in the church in the United States. And we have had the economic devastation to prove it. Whether it was 1929, 1981-1982, 2001, 2008, or the one we are about to enter into as a result of the moronic economic policies of this current administration – all of the harm done to so many people was and is being done because we have failed to hold those who benefit from cruel and idiotic economic policies accountable. The Fifields and others in the church have failed to invite to repentance those who design and benefit from harmful economic policies and the church has directly financially benefitted from our lack of faithfulness. But the grace of God is evident in that while the church has done much harm, we still have the opportunity to join in the building of the new world. But we must begin with an honest acknowledgement of our complicity in the harm being done in the old one.