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Monday, April 27th, 2015

How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Author:     Kevin Kruse
Source:     Alternet (U.S.)/Basic Books
Publication Date:     April 21, 2015
 Link: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Stephan:   Here is a an excellent essay that describes how the corporatist Theocratic Right was created by corporations so that low information frightened evangelical Christians could be manipulated into becoming foot soldiers for their cynical corporate masters, and socially progressive policies could be sabotaged.  What has resulted from this now more than half century old strategy, I believe, is the most ignorant toxic social force in America; the source of many of the nation's most pressing problems.

evangelicals-conservative-republican-christian-evangelical-v-politics-1334629973The following is an adapted excerpt from Kevin Kruse’s new book,  One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015).

In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers: titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life, and Sears, Roebuck; popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher-historian Will Durant; even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention’s end: Reverend James W. Fifield Jr.

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. Roosevelt’s […]

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