Originally published at: Why capitalism and consumerism play so well with Christianity in America | Boing Boing
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You missed the major reason it plays so well, it’s because the modern version was basically invented to play well by corporate America. Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America details how American, puritan Christianity was shaped and molded to promote (rampant) capitalism and consumerism.
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Christian capitalists believe in building bigger needles to fit their camels through.
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A simpler explanation of the symbiosis between capitalism and religion, christianity foremost, is that both are at their cores faith-based constructs.
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Then why would Christianity, a religion founded by someone who advocated giving away possessions to follow him, be foremost? Do you think it’s more faith-based than other religions? That makes no sense at all…you are dismissing instead of trying to understand.
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I’ll add that it also ignores just how varied Christian practice actually is in reality… This is not the only way in which scripture is approached nor should it assumed to be the “correct” way of approaching the religion.
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I just remembered this, from US History, summer 1990:
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It always kills me how hard it is for so many people to accept this. For some reason, the YouTube algorithm decided I might want to watch a video yesterday that purported to explain/describe all Christian denominations in 12 minutes. And the algorithm was probably correct, because I did watch it because I wanted to see how this channel was possibly going to accomplish that, given that there are literally dozens of Christian denominations. Well, the way they did it was to dismissively declare that any denomination that didn’t follow the Nicene Creed, among other things, wasn’t actually Christian.
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Dozens? I can probably throw a rock and hit churches for dozens. It’s more like tens of thousands.
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I was erring on the conservative side. I have no idea how many there are. It also depends how you want to define a “denomination”. There are tons of unaffiliated evangelical Christian churches. Are they collectively one denomination, or is each church its own? Dunno. Anyway, I said dozens because I knew I could back that number up if necessary.
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Oil is where it gets really concentrated, and consecrated.
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The Christian test of salvation is not so much “did you obey my precepts, did you support my temples, did you sacrifice to me” but “did you have faith”. If I were to speculate on the uniqueness of this requirement, I would be in severe danger of confusing comparative religion with Pratchet’s Small Gods, so I’ll just leave it that.
Capitalism, as an economic system, doesn’t reward you if you merely believe in it. It rewards you if you happen to have the economic wherewithal to predict market demand, and the luck to be right. Theologically that’s quite distant from Luther’s conception of faith.
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Except it’s not. Faith vs. Works is one of the sets of contradictions in the bible. Some denominations pick one, some pick the other.
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…Are you under the impression that Luther speaks for all Christianity? Because the whole of modern European history was kind of shaped around not that.
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Eh, if you define faith broadly enough, the observation that “markets and religion are both faith based concepts” becomes pretty meaningless pretty quickly.
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That’s fair enough but as pointed out, Luther hardly speaks for all Christians on faith versus works. It’s not helpful to counter one misconception with another.
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“A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labor, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.”
–Max Weber.
Catholics picked works and were thus doomed to become bad capitalists, and Protestents picked faith, and thus were exalted. Of course Weber further differentiated amnong Protestants to pick Calvinists, who, if I recall correctly, have certain ideas about predestination. Read into that what you will.
Maybe God operates through the invisible hand of the market to reward his lucky followers and government interference restrains the free hand of god himself. Yeah, I suppose that’ll work for propaganda purposes.
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