A brief history of Class and Christianity in the 20th century: Part One
How rich businesses helped Evangelical churches to disguise class discrimination behind a facade of Race, Abortion and Homophobia.
A brief history of Class and Christianity in the 20th century: Part One
In the 1960s and 70s, in the wake of Brown vs. The Board of Education, wealthy Evangelical churches saw a chance to capture racist Christian dollars by providing them with segregated schools through the establishment of Christian Academies. These would be private schools run under the auspices of churches where white Americans could be assured that their children would enjoy a quality education free from interaction with people of color and Jews. Because they operated under the umbrella of the church they benefited from non-profit status, making them lucrative and great income producers. People like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson saw income not only from the tuition charged, but growth in their congregations as families who’s children attended these academies started attending the churches operating these schools.
In 1970 the IRS challenged the tax exempt status of private non-profit schools which discriminated against students based on race and religion and these academies lost their non-profit status, though it wouldn’t be enforced until 1978. Some of the wealthiest American business people, such as those in the fossil fuel industry from Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, saw an opportunity to curry the favor of what they perceived as a monolithic voting base which could be swayed to support the causes they were concerned about, so they approached these churches on the grounds that they too felt that taxation was punitive and, in a Faustian deal, the wealthiest and most influential Evangelical churches in the country agreed to support these industrialist and business causes if these wealthy donors would support Pro-life and Anti-gay causes.
In their informal alliance they got behind the Reagan presidential campaign seeing the former actor as being both Pro-Christian and Pro-Business, and once he was elected they decided to formalize their alliance in 1981 through the creation of the Council for National Policy (CNP). Once created they started setting about getting right wing Republican candidates elected, seeing moderate Republicans as impediments to their goals, and continue to work in this capacity to this day and they’re contributing to the widening divide between the two biggest political parties in America, all but ending bipartisanship.
Just as the National Association of Manufacturers did with James W. Fifield’s proto-prosperity gospel messaging, some of the biggest corporate leaders in the country succeeded in scaling the operation up several hundred fold. No longer was it one influential preacher with a network of church leaders, it was almost all of 1980s Evangelicalism willingly preaching lower taxes and reduced regulation and the business leaders would pretend that they cared about the concerns of these churches and fund them getting their religious messages out to the public.
Parallel to all this were the poor Evangelicals who couldn’t afford to send their children to private Christian Academies, who lived and worked hard along side people of color while their children attended public schools. They didn’t care as much about race, and the churches were all too happy to shift their focus from the color of people’s skin to the “horrors of homosexuality” and the “abomination of abortion”. The biggest leaders of Evangelicalism were buying private jets, multiple houses, expensive cars and three piece suits worth at least two months wages for most of their congregants. And as long as these pastors kept convincing their congregations that taxation of the wealthiest Americans and government regulations were the impediments to their rising out of their low to middle class status, the money flowed to them from the CNP. So in the shrinking middle class of America of the 80s, where two income households became the norm due to the economy, a different approach was needed to generate political concern in Evangelical circles and we witnessed the births of the “Satanic Panic” and “Trickle Down” economics. Invented were the overt and literal demonization of an imaginary “Other” group, all the while a mythical oppressed wealthy class were painted as having their hands tied by taxation that limited their ability to share their opulence with those living paycheck to paycheck.
Simultaneous with the rise of a mainstreaming of Prosperity Gospel preaching we were being presented with “Champagne wishes and Caviar dreams” in the form of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. Reagan had invented the “Welfare Queen”, the CIA was facilitating the importation of thousands of pounds of Cocaine for which they obtained support for their covert empowerment of insurgent combatants fighting for regime change in Central and South American nations...in stark opposition to the “War on Drugs” being overtly waged domestically. A spotlight on poor communities provided the illusion that millions of Americans struggling to keep their heads above water weren’t actually “poor” because there was always someone doing far worse than them. Most of all a message was crafted that implied that the reason life was so hard was because the Federal Government had grown bloated, and that social programs which comprised a minuscule fraction of the budget compared to the growing military spending were causing our economic ills and needed to be cut. (At it’s height, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” missile defense, was funded to the tune of $4 Billion a year and yielded zero defense benefit against a nuclear attack)
Prosperity Gospel preachers were teaching more and more that the impoverished were suffering the result of a lack of faith because God wants everyone of prosper, so being poor was a choice they made. Right wing media was shaming people utilizing the social safety nets like Food Stamps and Housing Assistance, while people like Donald Trump were being profiled for their luxurious lifestyles. The one binary which was being ignored was Avarice vs. Charity. “Greed is Good” became the creed of thousands of upwardly mobile scions of old money, copies of “The Art of War” tucked under their arms and the collars of their Izod shirts flipped up. Churches, for the most part, were observers of all this and not participants in making economic or social change, and all over the country people were entertained by prime time soap operas that let them vicariously participate in the lives of the super rich who lived in “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest”.
Throughout the 1970s HUD built an average of 100,000 public housing units a year, under Reagan the fastest growing “public housing” in America was the prison system.