As I imagine is true for most of you, modern conservative Christianity is one of those features of the political landscape that seems always around, and always annoying when it is not infuriating. For those of us with some familiarity with the Bible and Christianity, it is also baffling: how is it that people whose primary concerns appear to be abortion, contraception, homosexuality, prayer in schools, evolution, feminism – and now, support for tax cuts, cuts to social programs, and for more military funding – what part of this in any way reflects the Gospel of love, compassion, forgiveness, and service proclaimed by Jesus? I’m not alone in this – many mainstream and progressive Christians have commented on this, with no visible effect, proving (as if we needed any more proof) that confirmation bias is real and always at work.
This was not on my mind the other night when, like many people, I was trying to understand racism in America and find ways that felt right for me to become involved in the struggle. I was listening on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2OnqiSOZAo&t=3952s) to Rev. William Barber, a moral giant from North Carolina and tireless crusader for social justice, founder of Repairers of the Breach and a modern Poor People’s Campaign https://www.breachrepairers.org/ discuss the five interlocking problems that they believe must all be addressed together to heal the deep problems in the United States. These problems include systemic racism, poverty and economic justice, environmental restoration, militarism and the war economy, and, curiously, the conservative Christian right.
The last one got my attention: out of all the other problems in this country, why include this in the top five? When Dr. Barber finally spoke about it, the reason for including them became clear: the conservative Christian right provides one of the primary justifications for the maintenance of poverty and systemic racism in the country. And here, history is important.
The social programs of the New Deal were not just reflections of basic human fairness and decency, and not just good economic ideas, they were also in accordance with the Social Gospel beliefs and work of Francis Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, and of Harry Hopkins, who had a hand in every New Deal program and ran several, and of Franklin Roosevelt himself. The Social Gospel movement believed that Christians had a moral responsibility to work for the improvement of society through application of the Biblical principles of fairness and justice. They took the message of Jesus seriously and brought it into the political world.
I know this is shocking to learn, but corporations and their mouthpiece, the Chamber of Commerce, hated the New Deal and its social programs, labor rights, the minimum wage, all of it. They were desperate to find ways to discredit it and to stop it, and in their hour of need, they came upon a preacher from California named James W. Fifield, Jr. Fifield had created a gospel fusing Christianity and capitalism, forming a “Christian libertarianism” that was hostile to the New Deal programs and the Social Gospel from which it drew support. When they heard it, corporations poured money into promoting and popularizing this new religion, it spread like wildfire in the Communist -fearing climate of the 1950’s, and the conservative Christian right was born. Kevin Kruse describes this genesis in detail in his book “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America”; you can read a summary in his article in Politico https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030 Trust me, it is even worse than it sounds.
So the much-balleyhooed conservative Christian right is not some long-standing, organic development out of the mainstream Christian tradition. Instead, it was a modern, cynical creation born of corporate America’s desperate desire to discredit social programs, beat back labor rights, and protect their profits. And their so-called “traditional values” date all the way back to 1950 and the coffers of General Motors and Sun Oil. This new religion soon attracted figures like Jerry Falwell, lurched to embrace increasingly conservative social positions, and has continued to provide a handsome and ongoing return on investment to its corporate founders. (While the media and others commonly refer to the conservative Christian right as “Evangelicals”, and many in the conservative Christian right are indeed Evangelical, James Fifield was not an Evangelical and there is nothing about traditional Evangelical theology and beliefs that compels the radical social/political beliefs and positions of the conservative Christian right. This is truly a new religion.)
The antagonism of the conservative Christian right toward social programs that are intended to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and lift up the poor, and their support of tax cuts, militarism, and conservative positions across the board are well known. But less obvious is the religious support they provide for maintaining poverty and structural racism.
An important component of this new religion created by James Fifield was the idea, called by Rev. Barber a “twisted form of Calvinism”, that good Americans who live according to certain moral standards will prosper and those who do not will be poor. People are poor because they have not lived good lives. And so social programs that allowed people to improve their lives were, not just bad policy, they were evil because they allowed people to get up without meeting certain moral standards that God demanded.
“It is a slaveholder religion for the 20th century,” says Rev. Barber. And indeed, it is a powerful religious tool for keeping poor people in their places and poor, and especially poor Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and colored people, who have experienced hundreds of years of racist oppression, resulting in grinding poverty. Rev. Barber suggests that the god of this religion is money, which is certainly consistent with its origins and its embrace of the Prosperity Gospel (God wants you to be rich.)
This capitalist Calvinism is in fact the religious version of the Narrative of Black Pathology (and similar narratives for other poor people), and together they provide the foundation for the dismantling of social programs and the maintenance of poverty and systemic racism in this country. The language of the “immorality” of social programs is widespread, and owes its genesis to James Fifield, who essentially cut Jesus out of his new religion. Rev. Barber is leading what looks much like a revival of the Social Gospel movement, although like Martin Luther King, he includes all who are motivated by fairness and justice, whether religious or not. And we are all waiting to see if mainstream and progressive Christian churches are finally going to walk the talk of the Jesus of compassion and justice they proclaim, as so many did in the Civil Right era. This looks like Round 2 of capitalism versus Jesus, and it seems a battle for the heart and soul, not just of the nation, but perhaps of Christianity as well.
