Christianity and capitalism - a match made in hell. In my previous posts I described how business magnates and the Republican Party found Jesus. Let's take a deeper look at why Christians are so ripe for manipulation by capitalists and the GOP.
Journalist and Harvard divinity grad Chris Hedges encourages us to ask why the Prosperity Gospel so delights American corporations like Tyson Foods that they are willing to place fundamentalist chaplains in plants, or why Purdue and Wal-Mart would feel moved to support far-right religious institutions like Liberty University or Patrick Henry Law School. Why did corporations send millions to the Judicial Crisis Network or the US Chamber of Commerce to support the elevation of a Christian zealot like Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? Writes Hedges, “These corporations don’t give a damn about abortion, gun rights or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman… they know that the Christian Right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny.” The Christian Right is a useful investment. Churches can get away with saying things that would be completely dismissed if you heard them directly from business. They add a cloak of respectability and supposed neutrality to propaganda messages that could easily be ignored if they came from another source. This is a very old trick.
The heady comingling of faith and business interest has positive benefits for both republicans and mainstream Christians. Consider the hostility that exists among some strains of conservative Christians for environmentalism. There is a common attitude in the Christian right that humans are called to exploit all the resources of the earth because they were put there by God for us. (To be fair, it is right there in chapter 1 of Genesis.) In any case, the thought continues, it doesn’t matter if humans are destroying the earth because the second coming of Christ will end the world as we know it anyway, probably very soon (Saint Paul, who died in the year 65 thought Jesus would come back during his life too). Or perhaps, another justification goes, humans ruining the earth’s ecosystems is just part of God’s plan. There are some, like Father Robert A. Sirico, founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty (sponsored by ExxonMobil), who characterize left-leaning environmentalists as idolatrous because they substitute nature for God. Republican Senator James Inhofe echoed this sentiment while promoting his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future when he said “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.” Of course, not all Christians are anti-environmentalists. Kyle Meynaard-Schaap, an organizer for a group called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action talked to a reporter about this mentality, noting “It’s a convenient theology to hold, especially when we are called to drastic, difficult action.”
Convenient, and profitable. Why do oil companies spend money on the Acton Institute or other organizations like the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship? Because investing in a pro-business, pro-development mentality toward Christian stewardship will reap dividends down the road for them and their shareholders. Could the tendency of conservative Christians to support deregulation and tax cuts be their way of paying back the mighty corporate patrons and wealthy donors who sit amongst them in the pews and vote for the same Republican Party? Both sides know they need one another so they play nice. Practicality and self-interest play a role in this drama. And so we get a subtle moving of the goal posts over time to the point where even non-rich people proclaim that Jesus is a capitalist and the bible supports free market economics. Or as Reverend Mitch Hescox of the Evangelical Environmental Network said, “It’s much easier for people, rather than being challenged by the Bible, to find some version of the faith that matches what their pre-existing belief structure is.”
Let’s ask ourselves: Why does the major party that is most devoted to the concerns of the rich and corporations also profess to be the most committed to Christ and the 10 Commandments? In What’s the Matter with Kansas Thomas Frank says that it is all about getting elected and reelected. He writes, “As we have seen, conservatives grandstand eloquently on cultural issues but almost never achieve real-world results. What they’re after is cultural turmoil, which serves mainly to solidify their base.” Religion is used to score political points. This is why the pro-life agenda of protecting unborn children is so much more potent from a campaign standpoint than lowering the capital gains tax rate. It’s easier for Churchgoing folk to rally around an issue like protecting the unborn than it is to get them charged up over cutting taxes that only rich people pay. From the Republicans’ standpoint it is always better to vote religion than to vote policy. Because most churchgoing folk aren’t rich. But their religious values can be manipulated as a weapon of division.
But in the end, the true value of religion to business and the rich is that it can be whatever a believer wants it to be. Faith does not require logic or reasoning. Many religious questions come down to faith. Why do bad things happen to good people? Have faith. How is it possible for God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to be three different beings but also the same one? Have faith, my son. Do babies and dogs go to heaven? Have faith. There is frequently no right or wrong answer because religion is about asserting belief. Discussion over. It doesn’t matter what you think or what your logic says because you have your beliefs and I have mine. No one has to prove that capitalism is the world’s greatest economic system when the faithful are guided by their ministers to believe that it is so. It’s a far cry from the kingdom of heaven, but good Christians don’t seem to care anyway.
It is ironic, though, that the Republican Party claims to be most aligned with Christian values and the bible. Religion uses emotional language to short circuit reasoning and intellect. But if we use our brains, we can see through what the Republican Party is doing. The irony is that the Republicans are perverting the very message they claim to embrace. Their core pro-capitalist agenda follows precisely the opposite message of the philosopher they claim to champion and love. Christ’s message is most definitely not to love thyself, it is to love thy neighbor. This internal contradiction embedded within the core identity of the modern Republican Party is their greatest weakness.
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Let’s make them pay.
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