American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern
consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an
engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible
Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist
Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of
fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and
president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the
framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and
evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those
underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their
"corporate evangelical" framework was a modern individualism
understood primarily in terms of economic relations.
Conservative evangelicalism and modern business grew symbiotically,
transforming the ways that Americans worshipped, worked, and
consumed. Gilded Age evangelicals initially understood themselves
primarily as new "Christian workers--employees of God guided by
their divine contract, the Bible. But when these ideas were put to
revolutionary ends by Populists, corporate evangelicals reimagined
themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their
beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional
creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering
the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal
theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time
religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but
uniquely dependent on it.