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This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream there's a
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particular kind of dread that arrives around 11 o' clock on a Tuesday night, long after you've put the dinner dishes away. Your inbox has been emptied for the third, fourth, fifth time, and you experience what's not quite insomnia. And it's not quite fear or worry of something. But it's something closer to what a 17th century Puritan diarist would have recognized as the opening pages of what was called a dark night of the soul. The modern worker, lying in the blue glow of a phone screen, feels accused by an invisible tribunal whose verdict has already been entered. The accusation is always the same. There's always this nagging sensation, this little bit of guilt of there's more that could be done. I should be doing more. I didn't work hard enough. There's unanswered emails, or the side project that you need to do, or the renovation you've been promising to get done for the last five years, the promotion you didn't earn, the book you've never written. And all of it arranges itself into this silent indictment. And the modern worker stands condemned for the ordinary and very biological crime of being a person who sometimes needs to sleep. 24 hours is never enough. And even if you had more hours, that wouldn't be enough either. You'd find a way to fill them up. And this anxiety did not fall from the sky. It is not unusual, it's not unique to a person, it affects the working class as a whole. But it's also intentional. It has a birthplace, a lineage in American history, a list of architects whose names appear on everything from hymns to banknotes. And it is a living inheritance of a 400 year old theological experiment that took the ordinary human need for rest and joy, joy and pleasure, and recast it as spiritual decay. Max Weber gave this experiment its most famous name, which is called the Protestant Ethic or the Protestant Work ethic. And he argued that Calvinist fear of damnation had been transmuted over several generations into this disciplined pursuit of profit that built what we experience as the modern economic order, the most so in the United States. Such a different work life we have than all the other countries in the world. Weber understood that the factory whistle and the church bell were speaking the same language, funneling people into the same life. And what he could not have fully anticipated is how successfully that language would survive the death of the God who first taught it. That this ghost would outlive these parameters of faith, these doctrines and denominations of faith, but would still be integral to our economic system. What we're going to do is we're not going to talk about the Puritan work ethic in the abstract. We're going to talk about the chain of custody, if you will, the transfer of moral authority from the Puritan meeting house to the industrial time clock, from the revival tent to the corporate boardroom, and from the Sunday sermon to cable news segments in which a sitting congressman cites the second letter of Thessalonians in order to justify cutting food assistance. At every link in that chain, and for reasons that will show, the message to the American worker has been remarkably consistent. That work is holy, rest is dangerous, it makes you lazy, it makes you unworthy. And that a workers union and workers rights are suspect, that they might in fact be challenges to God and challenges to the hierarchical order of authority. The government program is a moral hazard. The poor are guilty of their poverty. In fact, their poverty is evidence of their guilt and their laziness, their failure to measure up. And the voice in the worker's own head, the one that refuses to let the body rest even when the body is breaking down, is the voice of a grandfather in a tricorn hat who kept a of his own virtues in a small book by his bedside. A man whose name you might know is Benjamin Franklin and whose ghost, four centuries after the pilgrim stepped off the Mayflower, has still not been laid to rest. Today we talk about how our work life in America is killing us. How we got it in the first place, how this idea of working until your body breaks became next to an altar of worship today on Flipping Tables. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. If it's your first time listening to Flipping Tables, welcome. My name is Monte Mater. I'm your host. I'm a former far right Christian nationalist who has since deconstructed. And I spend a lot of my time teaching the things that I've learned, everything from accurate American history to how we got here politically to religious deconstruction. And I'm also very blessed that on my podcast I have a lot of incredible guests come on from authors to professors, to activists, to Bible scholars, to really get to the root of what faith means when we take it into our own hands, when we. When we listen to our own thoughts, when we learn, when we dive deeper, when we challenge authority structures, when we ask questions. Because truth is never afraid of scrutiny. In fact, truth is often found in scrutiny. And if you're part of a system or a program that says you can't ask questions, it's because they don't want you to find what's underneath the very surface of what they're willing to show you. I'm really excited for this episode in particular, because this is something that is so true and so relevant in my life. I shared a story recently on my Instagram. I've been doing a lot of my own personal commentary about my life and my own fitness journey on my stories, and I talked about that. The thing that's been the hardest for me to unpack is this Protestant work ethic. This I have to be working all the time or I'm not doing enough, or I'm lazy, or I'm unworthy, or I'm this or I'm that. To the point where if I'm not working, even if my body's breaking down, I feel guilt, I feel shame, I feel lazy. I feel that I'm going to lose everything, the world's going to collapse around me, my career is going to collapse. None of that's true, right? It's not going to do that. In fact, the more I rest and the more I structure my day, the more I draw clear boundaries, the more productive I am, the better the quality of the content I make is. And I'm recording this after two days of being sick in bed, barely able to get out of bed because I had worked myself into exhaustion so far. And it felt like it was time to record this episode, even though this wasn't my intended first episode of the day. And we're going to talk about how theology was used to to create this ethic, how this ethic became work put into the industrial workforce, and how this ethic was used to fight against workers rights and workers protections in the United States. And how now we're seeing this type of theological framework being used to try to roll back workers rights and workers protections. Again, the reason we have a five day work week is because people fought for it, not because they were given it. The reason that we have the right to sue if our co worker, not our co worker, but our boss, harms us or puts us in a dangerous situation. The Reason we have OSHA is because people fought for it. Because previously it was believed that workers didn't have any rights. It was believed that you should work yourself to the bone. It's why the United States is so off balance. We have so many people that never take vacations. Not only do they not use their vacation days, but they can't afford to take a vacation versus we look at our neighbors in Europe who are taking four to six weeks of vacation every year. Their productivity is great. Their, their work life balance is great. They're happier in their families, they have more free time, more leisure time. But in the United States, we have not been able to overcome this yet. And I think that this is so relevant not just for people who grew up in really strong, like very, like religious communities that are very socially high controlled, but also anybody who grew up in the United States into, into our work culture. And so we're going to address it and we're going to start all the way back in the 1600s where this really started to take root, how it took place and how it evolved in America today. But what I want to say is that rest is resistance. Rest is about longevity. Rest is about having a full life. It truly should be that we work to be able to afford what we need to live, not that we live to work. And hopefully, maybe this will answer some questions for you for how we got here. Maybe this will give you some hope for the future. Maybe it will force you to challenge maybe some of your own work habits, some of your own habits around where you feel guilt and shame about not, quote, producing enough and maybe even for me, start to separate this idea that my value is somehow related to my productivity. So this story begins on a ship in the spring of 1630. Aboard the ship Arbella, an English lawyer named John Winthrop preached a sermon to the Puritan emigrants who were about to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And the sermon, later remembered by the title A Model of Christian Charity, contained the line that would become one of the most frequently quoted passages in American political rhetoric. We still hear this used to justify that America was a Christian nation. It wasn't. But the sermon was dug up as one of the things to say that it was. Even though our founding documents say otherwise. Winthrop warned his congregation that they would be a city upon a hill and that the eyes of all people are upon us. What is left, often remembered, is the thread that he embedded inside that promise. If the colony failed to keep its covenant with God. Winthrop, continue, continued. The Lord would withdraw his present help from Us and the Puritan experiment would become a story and a byword through the world. The city on the hill was not an invitation. It was a performance review that had eternity at stake. If you fail, you're damned. And the stopwatch began to tick. The theological anxiety that drove Puritan settlers has often misunderstood, been misunderstood in the centuries since their arrival. They did not believe, as the popular caricature sometimes suggests, that hard work would earn them a seat in heaven. They believe something a little different and a little bit more frightening. They believed in the doctrine of what was called predestination, the Calvinist conviction that God had already decided before the foundation of the world who would be saved and who would be damned and that no human effort could alter your divine placement. The practical problem of this conviction created, of course, is devastating, because if you're. If the group has already been chosen and it's not you, well, what's the point? Because a sincere Puritan could never know whether or not she belonged among the elect. She could only look for signs. And the most reliable sign, according, according to the ministers who interpreted this doctrine for their congregations, was a life of disciplined, productive, visibly diligent labor. The worker who rested, even briefly, risked discovering that she had never been chosen in the first place. Weber called this the worldly asceticism of the Calvinistic tradition. And asceticism just means a strict self discipline. Abstinence led life away from worldly pleasures such as a lot of fasting, celibacy, vows of poverty. And this is often used to achieve spiritual, spiritual or religious or mental goals. He identified this strange alchemy by which a theology obsessed with the next world produced a population obsessively productive. In this one, it's very handy, right? You're so concerned with the afterlife that you're not necessarily concerned with the world around you while you're here, but you are obsessively productive to get to that afterlife. This logic ran backwards from what an outsider might expect. A Puritan did not work hard in order to be saved. A Puritan worked hard because the saved were, by divine design, the sort of people who worked hard. And therefore anyone who failed to work hard had grounds to fear that they were not among the saved. Idleness was not just a vice, it was a diagnosis. And that diagnosis could mean an eternity in hell. The ministers of early New England made this diagnosis explicit. They made it quite loudly and firmly. The English Puritan divine Thomas Watson, whose body of divinity circulated widely in the colonial pulpits, described idleness as, quote, the burying of A man alive. End quote. And he called the idle man, quote, a devil's cushion on which he sits and takes his free ease, end quote. John Cotton, the most influential preacher in early Massachusetts, argued in the Way of Life that every Christian was required to have a calling, a specific vocation in the world, and that a man without such a calling cannot spend his time in any good way and could, quote, give no good account of his time, end quote. The Puritan God in Cotton's account, was an accountant who expected a full ledger at the close of each working day. The ledger was to be audited by angels with stern faces. And of course, you would face that ledger at the end of your life. This was not a theology of human flourishing. It was a theology of surveillance. And it produced in its adherence a condition that contemporary clinicians would come to recognize as something close to what's called religious scrupulosity, which is essentially a subtype of obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety in which the sufferer becomes tormented by an inability to measure up to their own moral adequacy. A psychiatrist named Osborne, who's traced the history of this condition through the writings of Martin Luther and John Bunyan, has argued that Calvinist emphasis on visible signs of election, that pre election into heaven created ideal conditions for this kind of a pulse compulsive self monitoring that the 20th century would eventually rename generalized anxiety disorder. The Puritan worker in this reading was not merely devout. She was often, in the most like actual clinical sense, sick with worry. It literally created mental and psychological conditions being this sick with worry. And the sickness was being prescribed from the pulpit. It was this, this obsessive worry of, what if I'm not chosen already? What if I'm not predestined? And so you had to look at your life and make sure you had all the signs of being chosen, which caused people to become this obsessive about work and productivity. So obviously the economic consequence of this spiritual sickness was a labor force of extraordinary productivity. In our R.H. tawny's classic study, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he observed that the Puritan conscience had proved to be an unexpectedly efficient servant of the emerging market economy, supplying a work discipline that no whip and no statute could have achieved on its own. If you can get a worker to police themself, you don't need an overseer. And if you can convince them that they are not worthy and that somehow their spiritual well being, their destiny, is tied to their work, you don't need a whip, you'll get them to whip themselves. The worker who fears for her soul will not strike, will not slow the pace of the line, and will not ask for less. Tawny understood, as Weber had before him, that the Protestant work ethic was not simply a religious doctrine that happened to have positive economic effects. This is a labor discipline dressed in sacred clothing. It is essentially using the. Using religion and faith and eternity to guilt people in to producing more, to working harder, doing more, and it typically doesn't benefit them in the long run. This is clothing that's been tailored from the beginning to fit the needs of those who owned the fields, and they would own the mills and would own the factory. It has always been to profit, profit the owner, not the worker, the same way the Constitution was built to profit land owning white males, not the workers who worked on the land that they owned. There was, however, a heretic that the Puritan authorities would put on trial. In the autumn of 1636, a midwife named Anne Hutchison began holding religious meetings in her Boston home, at which she taught a doctrine that the Massachusetts leadership found intolerable. Hutchinson preached that salvation came through grace alone, freely given by God, and that nothing whatsoever about your outward works could determine that salvation, the daily labors of a diligent housewife or the industrious farmer, were, in the final theological accounting, irrelevant to the question of salvation. The historian Michael Winship, in his authoritative study of the crisis that followed, argued that the authorities reacted with such ferocity because they grasped immediately what was at stake. If Hutchinson was right that salvation came through grace, the colony's entire labor ideology would collapse. They would not be able to get their followers to self police, to self work so hard, to self flagellate to make them more money. If salvation was by grace, they had a lot of financial resources that they could lose. Because if grace was trul and the covenant of works was truly irrelevant, there was no theological reason to cut wood in January or plow the frozen ground in March. They would lose a workforce that was working so hard because they believed heaven was at stake. Hutchinson was tried before the General Court In November of 1637, convicted of sedition, and banished from the Puritan colony the following spring. The official charges against her were theological, of course, having to do with proper interpretation of sanctification and the nature of the indwelling of the spirit. But the underlying anxiety that drove the prosecution execution was economic and social. The first American anti work movement had been crushed in the cradle and the precedent had been set. Any theology that threatened to unshackle the Worker from the moral obligation of ceaseless, never ending labor would be treated afterwards as sedition, heresy. And the pattern would repeat itself in different forms under different names for the next four centuries. Every generation would produce an Anne Hutchison, and every generation would find a way to silence her. In 1748, a printer and inventor from Philadelphia published a small pamphlet called Advice to a Young Tradesman. And its author had already become famous throughout the English speaking world for the almanac he published each year under the pseudonym of Poor Richard. His name was Benjamin Franklin. And in that pamphlet he wrote a sentence that would outlive his Puritan forebears and reshape the moral landscape of American labor force for generations to come. Remember, Franklin instructed to the young tradesmen that time is money. He that can earn 10 shillings a day by his labor and goes abroad or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but six pence during his diversion or idleness, ought to not reckon that only expense has he really spent, or rather thrown away 5 shillings besides essentially saying that if you're not working the whole day, not all, even if you didn't spend money, you still lost 5 shillings because your time is money. The sentence deserves to be read slowly because it represents a theological revolution disguised as practical advice. It's a rebrand. It's a rebrand of if you're not working all the time, then you're losing money, bro. The Puritan had feared wasted time because time belonged to God and would be audited at the Last Judgment. And Franklin kept that work anxiety. He just kind of removed the auditor time. And Franklin's reformulation was no longer sacred because it belonged to all the Almighty, which Franklin didn't believe in. It was sacred because it could be converted into money. Time is money. Time is money. And what do we worship? We worship money. And every minute of idleness was a minute of capital allowed to evaporate into the Philadelphia air. Franklin became the embodiment of transition from a steeple to a stopwatch, a man whose ethical writings retained all the force of that religious injunction, that religious call, but quietly evacuating the religious content. And Weber, the researcher around this, used passages from Advice to a Young Tradesman as an opening exhibit in his argument that the spirit of modern capitalism that we know today is simply the ghost of this Calvinist conscience. Rebranded Walking in new clothes in 2026. The sin of idleness has become the cost of diverted capital. The examination of conscience had become the bookkeeping and bookkeeping of the counting house. Essentially, it's become this Idea that, yeah, in a lot of ways in the United States economic discussion, it's no longer tied to God, right? It's no longer tied to your salvation, but it's still tied to this idea of your worth, your value and the idea that if you're not working all the time, you deserve to be poor because you're losing money. Franklin's own autobiography describes the spiritual discipline he developed in order to track his moral progress. A small book which he listed 13 virtues and kept daily marks against his own failures. This kind of high level self policing here industry appeared on the list and Franklin defined it as resolution to quote, lose no time, be always employed in something useful, cut off on all unnecessary actions, which when you think about it, is such a terrible way to live that you never have time for pleasure or joy or entertainment or rest or community. That what he was doing was a secularized version of Puritan spiritual diary in which believers would record their struggles against sin in the hope of discerning whether grace was working in their hearts. Franklin had kept the ledger ledger and just changed the accountant. The God who had once watched over the Puritan conscience with terrifying patience, of course, had become this kindly grandfather at a writing desk, counting shillings, counting how much money you were pulling in. What was, what was the. The output of your. Your resourcefulness. And what's forgotten about the cheerful American celebration of Franklin as a democratic everyman is the material foundation that made his legendary industry possible. Sylvia Federici has shown in her history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that the ideology of the self made male worker has always depended on a parallel economy of uncounted female labor. It does not exist this. The self made male worker does not exist without the parallel economy of the uncounted female labor. And in the American case, enslaved labor. Franklin's own household in Philadelphia included enslaved people whose work sustained his independence. And his wife Deborah Reed managed the shop and the family for decades while Franklin traveled and wrote and dined with philosophers and the founding fathers in London and Paris. And the ghost who whispers lost time is never found again in the ear of the modern worker is whispering a lie of omission. Because Franklin's time was only his own, because other people's time was taken away from them. To make that possible. Franklin could not have done what he did without enslaved workers running his home. Franklin could not have done what he did without his wife running his shop and the business and the family affairs. To make that possible, the idea of the self made male workers requires uncounted female labor or enslaved labor or both. And before I get into how this transitioned in the 19th century, I'm going to take my first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you'd like to get these episodes ad free, you can subscribe to patreon@patreon.com montemater and get early access to merchandise, private pop ups with me as well as written reviews of the history of the Bible. Perception is often very different than fact, and in a world of conflicting, sometimes outrageous opinions, screamed very loudly and very confidently. The only way to know the truth of the matter is to be able to actually look at the data. Most working women in the US believe they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages. But many men have a different view. Most employed women, about six in 10, say men have more opportunities when it comes to earning competitive wages, while about 1/3 think neither gender has an advantage. And about 3 in 10 employed women say they have had personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender. Now, employed men very, very divided. About 4 in 10 believe men have an advantage when it comes to wages. About half think both genders have about the same opportunities. And 1 in 10 say that women actually have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 men say that they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender. Well, what's really true, as it turns out, especially last year with the rollback of dei, many investigations actually investigating claims that white men were discriminated against, we actually have the numbers. Last year, men's wages for the same careers with the Same credentials increased 3.7% while women's did not. Women on average earn about 80.9% of what a man earns, even if she has the same level of credentials, experience and time served on the job. It's really important that as these claims come out to us from all different social media platform, different news sources, different talking heads, that we're able to find the actual data, that we're able to look a little bit deeper and find what is the real answer to this question. As these type of claims, these type of conflicts, these type of cultural wars come to a head right before the midterms, it's more important than ever to be able to have reliable information that you can fact check and understand the truth behind the claims. And that's what ground news is for. Ground news takes hundreds and hundreds and thousands of articles every day, consolidates them into themes so that you can look at all of the coverage, coverage on a single story that you're following, that you can look at all of the coverage and also see who owns that media source. How factual do they tend to be, who's reporting on this and who's not so that we can have more informed conversations, more informed decision making, and more informed voting come November to use this resource that I use every single day, multiple times a day, you can get 40% off their vantage plan, which comes to about $5 a month by subscribing at ground news.com/tables now let's talk about how the in the middle of the 19th century, Franklin's secular version of the work ethic would be bolted to the wall of the American Factory. The historian E.P. thompson, in a landmark essay on time and work discipline under industrial capitalism, documented the violent process by which rural workers in England and New England were taught to subordinate the natural rhythms of their body and the seasons to artificial rhythms of the machine. This is not a gentle transition, and if you have ever wanted to throw an alarm clock out the window or felt like on a really weird sleeping schedule, this work ethic is why that system exists in the first place. Thompson showed that early industrial workers had to be broken before they could be employed, and that the breaking was accomplished through a combination of legal coercion, economic desperation, and moral instruction. The pulpit played a significant role in creating this idea that we have to ignore our body's normal rhythms, ignore the seasons, and be structured into a very unnatural work schedule. American industrialists of the 19th century understood that the factory needed a theology, and they paid for one. Daniel T. Rogers, in his history of the Work Ethic in the Industrial America, has traced how Protestant clergy of the Northeast were enlisted, often eagerly, in the project of disciplining the new factory with labor force. They gave sermons on the dignity of labor, the sin of drunkenness, the virtue of punctuality, and the moral danger of strikes. They literally taught from the pulpit that it was morally dangerous to strike became staple. They became staples of the Protestant pulpit in the mill towns from Lowell to Patterson. The worker who arrived late was not merely inconveniencing the foreman. You're in spiritual peril. The worker who joined a union was not merely rebellious. You were substituting the solidarity of men for the providence of God, placing your own soul in jeopardy. They literally taught that to join a union, to strike and demand more right rights was not rebellion against unfair work conditions or unequal pay or mistreatment. It was literally rebellion against God. We see this mirrored in the Umbrella of Authority with Bill Gothard later that a woman who challenges a system of abuse or manipulation or coercion or control isn't rebelling against a system built by men. She's rebelling against God. It's the same thing. The most famous preacher of this gospel was Henry Ward Beecher. He was a Brooklyn pastor whose sermons were read aloud in parlors across the country and whose op labor question carried the weight of divine endorsement for a generation of middle class Americans. During the great railroad strike of 1877, when federal troops were sent to American cities to break a walkout by workers whose wages had continued to be cut over and over and over during the depression of the 1870s, Beecher declared from the pulpit of Plymouth Church that the workers had no legitimate grievance and that a man who could not support his family on a dollar a day had only his expensive taste to blame. It's always the work was workers fault, never the person exploiting them. Heath Carter, in a study about the rise of the labor force focused social gospel, has shown that Beecher's position was not an outlier, but a mainstream articulation of this Protestant establishment's hostility to organization of labor in what was called the Gilded Age. Remember, the Gilded Age was great if you were rich. It sucked if you were a worker. The respectable clergy of the major denominations stood almost without exception with the owners against the workers. The churches were 100% behind worker exploitation, that the workers deserved it, they needed to suck it up and deal with it. It didn't matter how they were treating you. It didn't matter that wages were unfair, it didn't matter if they worked you to the bone. It didn't matter if you got hurt. You deserved nothing. That was the stance of the church by and large. This was carried over by Abraham verde in the 30s when he founded the Family, or known as the Fellowship as well, that still controls American politics behind the scenes. He believed that workers shouldn't have any rights because God had granted the owner's authority over the them. The respectable clergy of the major denominations again stood against the workers because they believed, or claimed to believe that the logic of the Protestant work ethic required them to do so. The theological argument against unions was very simple. It would prove durable enough to reappear literally in every labor conflict we've had for the next 150 years. If work was moral discipline ordained by God, and if each worker's relationship to that labor was a matter of individual context, consciousness, conscience, excuse me, then any collective interference with that relationship was a form of spiritual coercion and rebellion. The union organizer, with this theological reading in mind, was not a Fellow worker, but a tempter, a Satan if you will. A figure who sought to substitute the false God of class solidarity for the true God of personal industry. I'll read that again. They were a figure who sought to substitute the false God of cl, of class solidarity for the true God of personal industry. Think of how manipulative of like what a great manipulation of the gospel that is, that class solidarity, socialism. Are these false gods. How dare you rebel against the true God of personal industry. It's not that your. Your boss isn't paying you enough or that minimum wage can't get you an apartment anywhere in any part of the country. It's that you aren't working hard enough. Yeah, I know. You have two jobs. You're still not working hard enough. What an amazing twist on theology for the benefit of those again, those who own, not those who work. Strikes were not labor actions. They were rebellions against Providence, against God, and participating in them placed the individual soul at risk. The fact that this argument was almost always deployed in defense of the wealthiest parties in the country in any given dispute was treated as a. Oh, that's just an incidental coincidence rather than a reason for suspicion, rather than a question of who is this system built for? The Haymarket Affair of 1886 offered an early demonstration of how effectively this theological framing, this twisting, could be mobilized against workers during a moment of crisis. When a bomb exploded during the labor rally at Chicago's Haymarket Square and a group of anarchist organized organizers were tried and convicted and in four cases executed on evidence that later historians have said almost univers was completely insufficient. These, these people were framed. The Protestant establishment of the city treated the verdicts as a providential vindication of social order. See, See what happens when you strike? God punishes you. See, see, look at these socialists. Look at antifa. Look at these. You unions, look at them. Defiance against God. They use it as proof. Even though now we can look at the evidence and recognize those people were framed. The men who had been hanged were framed as enemies of Christian civilization. And the broader labor movement in which they had been associated was cast as a theological threat rather than an actual expression of a valid worker class grievance. Carter has demonstrated how the Chicago clergy in this period use their sermons to reinforce the conviction that labor, quote, radicalism, demanding workers rights was radical. At one point, getting paid fairly, having workers protection, having days off, having days off was considered radical at the time. They called it labor radicalism and godlessness and said they were the same thing. And the association would remain a fixture of American religious imagination for at least two generations afterward. But it would also carry over into just the secular economy. The pullman strike of 1894 offered an even clearer illustration of this pattern. George Pullman, the railroad car magnet whose model company town south of Chicago had been celebrated in the religious press as an experiment in Christian industrial paternalism. As in what that means is, oh, look at this, look at this great man just, you know, bestowing his grace upon us. And yes, he's working people hard, but look at it's trickle down economics. Essentially he responded to the economic downturn of the 1890s by cutting his workers wages while refusing to reduce the rents. He charged them for company owned housing. That's, that is, that is what trickle economics actually looks like. Like if someone's trickling on your head, they're peeing on you is essentially what it is. He was praised in the religious press for what he was doing. He cut his workers wages knowing that it was a huge economic downturn, but did not reduce the rents he charged them. And this is why. So I don't know if you saw recently, over the last couple years, Elon and a couple other, you know, multi billionaires are wanting to create company owned housing company towns. And this is what happened in the first place. Place because they pay you, they also control how much rent you get. They control what you have access to. So when things take a downturn, they can keep your rents the same but pay you less. And then as you get behind on your rent because you also have to feed your family, you then become indebted to your employer. That's what happened here. It's what they want to create again because they believe they have a God ordained right to treat their workers however they want, that it's God's divine providence that's reason they own their businesses and therefore they have the right to do whatever they want to the worker who needs to shut up and take, take it. When the workers went on strike, Pullman refused to even meet their representatives. And the American Railway Union under Eugene Debs called a sympathy strike that eventually paralyzed rail traffic across the country. Strikes work and the only way to create effective change, and it doesn't matter if it's labor or politics, is to hit them in the money. I'm serious. It is the only thing that historically always works against fascism, against the mistreatment of workers, against exploitation, is to hit them where it hurts, which is their mischief. Money. Eventually in the United States, to change the systems that we have, we have to do major consistent economic strikes.
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debs, who is the union leader, called a sympathy strike again that would paralyze rail traffic and federal troops were called in against Remember, the feds don't serve you, they serve whoever's in charge. Feds were sent to American civilians to break the strike. Debs was thrown in jail and the Protestant press of major cities lined up almost unanimously on the side of the company that was exploiting these workers. The few Catholic and immigrant Protestant pastors who sided publicly with the workers were treated as embarrassments to their denominations and false teachers. Their sermons were often edited out of official records. In that period. The respectable churches had chosen their side, and it was never going to be the side of the worker. And let's talk about how the clergy was able to use this theology to do. To demonize labor during this time and. And the logical structure of the argument that they were making. When a minister declared that a striking worker was guilty of the sin of covetousness, right? Wanting more, wanting what his neighbor had, he was invoking the 10th Commandment in a way that assumes that the existing distribution of wealth is divinely ordained and that any attempt to alter that distribution amounted to the rejection of God. It's saying. It's saying that if you acknowledge wealth disparity or mistreatment, economic unfairness, you're rebelling against God. Do you see the through line? How. How this plays out into the hierarchical structure of the family? The same theology being put into the labor force, the same theology across the board that tells people to accept less because, well, that's just the way God wants it. How convenient for the wealthy business owner that that's how God wants it. I don't believe in a God who thinks that you should be able to exploit your workers, that people should be treated unfairly, while those at the top hoard wealth at the exp. Many. I don't think that that's a good God. That sounds like a God created by a rich guy who wants to make sure that God protects his coins. The minister declared That a union organizer was guilty of the sin of discontent. He was importing a com. A concept from the puritan tradition of spiritual examination, where dis. Discontent with one's station in life was treated as evidence of a failure to trust God's wisdom. I mean, yeah, you don't have any rights and you're essentially a working slave, but you should be content with that. When a minister declared that a labor action was a conspiracy against social order, how many social media comments against socialism are you thinking right now? It's all the same thing. It's all the same argument. He was activating this older Calvinistic horror of disorder as a sign of the devil's handiwork. And I want to talk about this for a second. Calvinism really pushed this idea that order above all else, order was more important than equality. Order was more important than righteousness. So disrupting a hierarchy, whether that's again, in the family that has an abusive male at the head of it, or whether it's around wealth disparity in the workforce, the order was more important than equality. So they didn't care if people were getting mistreated. They didn't care if you were homeless. They didn't care if you were being abused, Whether you're a woman married to a man or a worker, worker who's serving a corporation, they didn't care. As long as order existed, they thought that that was better than equality. That's where this terror comes from in Christian communities. They have this fear, and that's. This is really what it is. We have to be honest about what it is. It's this fear. It's this terror of what happens if this system that I'm familiar with doesn't exist anymore. What if this order that quote has always been disintegrates? And instead of thinking, well, man, maybe something great could come out of that. Maybe we could make the system better. Maybe it could be better for everyone. They will respond in panic and terror about an old system falling down because to them, disorder is the worst sin possible. And we've traced these rhetorical moves through this emotional force. And theology has been laid down centuries earlier. So this started in the 15 and 1600s and then was able to be commuted into industry and translate to now deployment in labor disputes allowed for clergy to frame narrowly, narrowly economic questions as questions of ultimate spiritual significance and. And a. A moral reflection of the worker, not the moral obligation of the owner to treat their workers fairly. So the worker who asks for a raise is not negotiating right for what they. What they're worth. You're rebelling against the order of the universe again. How often have we heard this type of theology deployed for everything? Everything from the careers, the type of careers a woman should choose, right? What, what's socially acceptable for a lady to work in? Everything from that to the structure of the family to accepting what we see in the workforce, accepting, you know, unfair pay, accepting poor health insurance, accepting no time off, accepting too much overtime, accepting having to work on your days off or always being on call. So this same period that we're talking about here in the late 1800s, 1890s, the same period witnessed a rise of countervailing tradition within American religion that's been largely kind of glossed over. So Catholic workers, drawing on the European tradition of social teaching that would eventually be cod in the Rerun Novarum issued by Pope leo VIII in 1891, organized mutual aid societies, parish credit unions and labor schools that explicitly rejected the Protestant equation of poverty and sin. So during this time, while Protestant theologians are essentially enforcing the owner's rights to abuse workers, the Catholics are doing something different. They're building mutual aid societies, credit unions, labor schools that directly contradicts this. And the Catholics are saying, no, povert and sin are not connected. Someone who's poor isn't sinning. It's not their fault. And also Jewish workers in the garment trades of New York and Chicago drew on a rabbinical tradition that treated the payment of a fair wage as a biblical obligation rather than as a matter of private charity. If you are a corporation or you're an owner, they believe that you were biblically obligated to pay a fair wage. It wasn't charity to pay your workers fair. And the Jewish tradition built some of the most effective unions in American labor history. Carter, this, this, the investigator who's really laid out a lot of this history for us argued that the story of American religion and labor cannot be told honestly without including those traditions. Because what the Catholics and the Jewish community started doing was much, much different. Because they demonstrate that the anti union Protestant consensus of the Gilded Age was a choice. It was a deliberate choice. They took theology, they took the gospel, they twisted it to benefit the richest in the nation, to benefit the wealthy class. That was not the only reading of scripture. The theological resources for a different answer have always been available. They chose to benefit the rich because it also made them rich. The choice to ignore them was made by people who benefited from workers being exploited. Exploited. And In June of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay in the North American Review that would give a name again to this new industrial order. The essay was called wealth, though it would soon become universally known by the title the Gospel of Wealth. Right, he's, he's creating, he wants. Carnegie's extremely wealthy. He wants to create a system that benefits him, that profits him, that makes him even wealthier. And what he's going to do is he's going to pull God into the church chat and create a theological underpinning to justify his money grab. In this Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie argued that the accumulation of vast private fortunes was not moral scandal or greed, but providential blessing. Because God in his wisdom had chosen to entrust the stewardship of the nation's resources to the most capable of administering them. How many corporations have we had to bail out with our tax dollars? American citizens can't get health care, but we can bail out the banks and the airlines and the r richest in the nation comes from this ideology. Well, they're just, they're just the best at administering it. Donald Trump is extremely wealthy. How many bankruptcies has that man caused? But he was able to grab his bag and run. And it all comes from Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie said that the rich were not adversaries of the poor. They were their divinely appointed trustees. God has chosen me to take care of you as I see fit it. The tax to, to and to tax the fortunes of the industrious in order to support the poor was to interfere with the workings of Providence itself. How many? We just saw the big beautiful bill last year. You and I pay a higher effective tax rate than Elon Musk does. All of this comes from the Gospel of Wealth. This idea that if we tax the wealthy, we're, we're going to disrupt the whole social order. We're going to bring. No, what we'll do do is we will create a more fair distribution of wealth that would put more wealth in the hands of the many than the hands of the few. People in the United States who can't buy homes or groceries are not lazy. Many of them are working multiple jobs. But this whole idea that somehow taxing the fortunes of the industrious at like the people who own so much, who make so much, and the reason they're not taxed as much is because they don't make a strict income in the W2 sense. They make it through actual assets, but taxing them fairly, asking them to pay their fair share, is sin, comes from Carnegie's the Gospel of wealth, which was written in such a way to protect his own wealth and to grow it. Carnegie wrote in a quote that would be used in sermons for the next 30 years, that the only way to help the poor is to make them work. To give a man something for nothing is to make him a. A beggar. None of this is true. True, right. People were working. People were working. Carnegie was creating an illusion. He was saying that these workers who were going on strike weren't working. They were working so much that if they got ill, they could lose everything. These were people that didn't have days off. These were not idle workers. There were no social protections at this time to eat. You had to find a way. Carnegie built this essay on a lie. What these workers were asking for was for fair treatment, fair pay, to not be exploited in their rents in a company town. Days off, workers protections. They were asking for completely reasonable things. But Carnegie pitched it as well. If you ask me to pay my fair share of taxes, you're just, you're just giving it to people who aren't working for anything. We hear that now. Do you hear the same lines, the same rhetoric trick in the conservative movement now where, oh, you know, we got to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare checks? No, it actually has been proven to actually help people get on their feet and make them productive members of society, not sitting there on a couch taking in wealth. The biggest welfare queens in this country are major corporations and people like Elon Musk. That's who the welfare queens are. Carnegie's essay leaned heavily on these theological assumptions that the Protestant establishment, of course, had been cultivating for two centuries. Centuries. The assumptions found their most popular expression in a lecture delivered more than 6,000 times between 1890 and the First World War by a Baptist minister and Temple University founder named Russell Conwell. The lecture was called the Acres of Diamonds, and its central claim was that opportunity for wealth lay within the reach of every American who was willing to work hard enough to find it. Oh, my God. Are you hearing the rhetoric? You can be rich, too, if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We have so many people defending the billionaire class because within them is embedded this idea that they are this close to being a billionaire, that if they just work hard enough, they can get it. So many of us, most of us, are much closer to being homeless than we are to being billionaires. Much closer. And the reality is that when you live in a system that exploits you, that doesn't pay you fairly, that denies you health care, access to the education you need to get a good job, you will not Become a billionaire, the billionaires will get rich. You will not. This sermon was preached. This sermon in this lecture was told to enormous audiences in language that admitted no exceptions and no qualifications. It said that, quote, there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings or by the shortcomings for someone of someone for whom he is responsible. If you're poor, it's your fault. Poverty is the result of political and policy choices. Political and policy choices can change that. But according to this lecture, poverty was not a social condition produced by economic forces and bad policy. It was a moral indictment issued by the individual's own character. And the remedy was not a union. It wasn't legislation, it wasn't working at workers rights, but a change of your heart and just a little bit more efficient effort. Kate Baller, who wrote an amazing history on the American prosperity Gospel, has traced how Conwell's doctrine migrated through the 20th century into revival tents of the Pentecostal healers and televised studios of the mega church era. Oh, we've heard this right. Anybody who's gone to a church, especially mega churches, this, this rhetoric has survived every theological change in fashion because it served the same permanent function in every generation. Generation. It explained suffering without requiring any adjustment to the social order, without any change in policy. And it kept the rich, rich. The poor were poor because you lack faith, you lack diligence, you lack character. And the solution to the poverty is not to demand that the powerful change, not to demand equality of demand from the powerful, but a conversion of heart. Give your tithe to God and God will bless you a thousand. You just need to give a little more. Buy me my third Bentley. You just need to give me a little more. Bowler has documented how this theology was weaponized against generation after generation of working Americans, many of them the very people whose labor sustained the churches that were teaching it to them. This has all been built on a lie. And the reason that we have perpetuated it is because it benefits the wealthy, it benefits the elite, it benefits the mega church pastor. It does not benefit the wealth worker. The social gospel, which is associated most closely with the Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbush and a generation of what would be considered progressive Protestant clergy attempted to reframe the problem of poverty as a systemic failure rather than an individual one, Rauschenbus says, and his and his allies argued that the teachings of Jesus Christ required Christians to confront the structural sins of industrial order, including exploitation of workers, workers, the degradation of women's labor, the Crowding of immigrant, immigrant tenements and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few families. I agree. I don't think there's any way that you can read the teachings of Christ without that, without that challenge to the social and religious order that demonizes and subjugates people. For a brief period, the social gospel seemed to offer genuine theological alternative to the Carnegie doctrine, because what Carnegie wrote was a doctrine doctrine. It was a doctrine from a really rich guy who wanted to use God to keep himself really rich. And Carter has argued that the movement had substantial workingclass support, particularly among Catholic and Lutheran immigrant communities, whose pastors were often sympathetic to labor organizing and whose congregation filled the ranks of the new industrial unions. Catholic workers drew additional support again from that encyclical Rerum Nova Verum, that issue from Pope Leo Leo VII, 8th, which had defended the right of workers to form unions and receive a living wage. You have the right to be paid a living wage. I can't believe that that's up for debate still. And if they had explicitly rejected the equation of poverty with personal sin, but the social gospel lost the public relations war, it could have taken hold, but it didn't. The more powerful, better funded, more aggressively marketed theology of individual responsibility had the institutional backing and the money behind it that Rainbouch could not match. We still see this. Now. The reason so many Americans demonize unions, demonize strikes, demonize fair pay, demonize taxing the wealthy is because the theology of individual responsibility won over the social gospel. That's the reason, it's the reason so many, so many Americans get triggered by the word socialism without really understanding what it means is because we have been so indoctrinated to benefit the wealth wealthy instead of ourselves, our own lives, the goodness and the success and the richness of our own lives that we've bought into it. It is amazing how in the United States, the poor and the middle class, especially conservatives, have been weaponized to fight for their own disenfranchisement. The rich don't have to lift a finger. They've programmed us to do it for them. This is. They use their money to crush the social gospel. It was the result of a sustained and well financed campaign by the same industrial interest, the same wealthy people who benefited the most from the theology of individual responsibility. And that campaign was about to enter a new and far more ambitious phase. Because here's the reality is that, is there, is there personal responsibility? Yeah, of course. For your own life. You got to be careful what you spend on. You got to make sure you don't put yourself in the debt. But that can exist with also understanding that exploitation is not a divine right. But this would enter a new kind of spiritual mobilization. In the war on the New Deal. The Great Depression posed an existential threat to the Protestant work ethic. The Great Depression was a very clear showing that the policies of the time were not working. We are headed for one of those ourselves. Now these policies don't work. Giving more and more money to the wealth via tax breaks or whatever it is has never worked. It has never trickled down. It has never benefited the poor and the working class. The reverse does. Making the wealthy pay their fair share and writing tax law that benefits the middle and lower classes. When 25% of Americans in the Great Depression were unemployed through no faults of their own, it was bad policy. And when millions of people who had worked hard their entire lives found themselves standing in breadwinner headlines through no lack of character, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the argument that poverty was a moral failing of the individual. And again, in the US we are headed for another one of these because we have again enacted, through things like the Big Ugly Bill, we've again enacted these huge tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy while taking them from the poor and the working classes. We are on this same downward spiral. It happened the first time in the 20s, it'll happen again in the 30s, if you know, I mean, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with this huge expansion of federal relief programs, its creation of Social Security and the establishment of a federal minimum wage and the legal protection of the right of workers to organize under the 1935 National Labor Relations act represented a direct challenge to this entire structure that's been constructed since Winthrop aboard the Arbela. If the government could provide for the unproductive quotation marks, then the sin of idleness was no longer automatically fatal. Because understand that the wealthy and the people that benefit from this exploitation would rather you die than provide a system that could make sure you don't. They don't care. Their bank account secure and that's all they care about. If workers had the legal right to organize, then the union was no longer a rebellion against Providence. It was a right and it is a right. The architects of the old order understood this threat to their money money, to their ability to abuse people, to their exploitation. And they responded with a campaign of religious counter reformation that is so sophisticated and so ruthless that it's only like it is only recently started to get the historical attention that it deserves. This is where the family originates, the family under Abraham Verde and the fellowship originates. In this opposition to the New Deal. They knew that their wealth was at stake because listen, they knew that system would work, work. They knew that people would understand that you can work your butt off and also have a safety net because sometimes you lose your job through no fault of your own. They knew that there could be a. Created a system where foundational social services, basic human needs and human rights could be met. That it would make them. They wouldn't stop being rich. They would just not get rich as fast. And they didn't want that. They would rather you die than provide that. Kevin Cruz, who did the study One Nation Under God, has documented this in detail how American corporate leaders in the 30s and 40s deliberately, deliberately set out to recruit Protestant clergy as allies in the war against the New Deal. The central figure in this effort was Congregationalist minister from Los Angeles, James W. Fiffield Jr. Who founded an organization called Spiritual Mobilization in 1935 with the explicit goal of persuading American pastors to preach against the economic policies of the Roosevelt administration. If you grew up with this idea that Social Security is evil, evil and workers rights are bad, and Medicare and Medicaid are evil and all these things, you've been conned. You've been conned by James W. Fiffield Jr. Who's trying to make sure your life isn't as good so that this rich guy can get richer. Because pastors were recruited to teach this. Because when you can convince the religious and the faithful who are concerned with their eternal soul, that, that this thing that you have, this labor rights thing is tied to their eternal salvation, you can change their mind. Fifield's message was blunt and unembarrassed. He called the New Deal pagan statism. How familiar does that sound? He described it as a false idol that taught American people to look to the government rather than to God for their help and argued that the entire architecture of federal relief amounted to theological error with catastrophic consequences for the American soul. How many times have we heard something, something in that vein? And let me tell you something. That man made bank off of this teaching and so did the pastors. If you have not read Eviction by Matthew Desmond and Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond, you need to read them you this. It really ties into all of this. Because poverty is not a problem in the system for them. It's a feature feature. Because when you're poor and impoverished, they control you because you'll do a lot just to survive eviction. The homelessness Crisis. The housing crisis is not a bug, it is a feature. Because when you can't afford to own, who does the system benefit? It benefits the owner, not the renter. They get control. The more impoverished they can keep you. We also, we've also seen in history fifields organization was generously funded by wealthy industrial. So he creates this religious institution to recruit pastors to teach against the New Deal, to teach against workers rights. It was funded by wealthy industrialists, including executives from General Motors, United States Steel and the dupont family. Why he's protecting their wealth. Who understood the strategic value of dressing their economic interest in the language of the Sermon on the Mount. In a study on the businessman's crusade against the New Deal, we've traced a paper trail of the effort through the archives of the national association of Manufacturers and shown that the recruitment of clergy was a calculated PR strategy rather than an organic grassroots development. This was not clergy sitting in their home, praying, preparing a sermon and being like I believe this is what God told me. This was industrialists and corporations actively going out and recruiting clergy to. To side with them. The NAM understood that the American parish minister was the most trusted figure in most small towns and that a carefully worded sermon against Social Security would reach a voters whom direct corporate advertising could never touch. Real smart. Sinister, but smart. The sermons were not always written by the ministers themselves. They were often supplied along with pamphlets and suggested scripture passages, even draft orations by public relations firms acting on behalf of industrial clients, meaning the industry owners. The dupont family, whoever it was, would write the sermon, give you a pamphlet pamphlet with the suggested scripture, so that these sermons would sway their congregants to oppose what would benefit them most and claim that that was what God wanted. The same God who in the Old Testament said that every seventh year you should take a rest year to give the land rest. Every seventh year you should forgive debts, that you shouldn't charge interest on loans, that everyone should get a day of rest. That's Old Testament God. You're telling me Old Testament God. God was preaching the exploitation of workers. The Old Testament also talks about paying unfair wages and says that it's a crime. And then the same Bible where Jesus in Matthew 25 says for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me something drink to drink. I needed clothes and you clothed me. There was, there was no work requirement there. It said you simply provide people's needs. That, that Bible, I don't care if it's Old Testament or New Testament. It doesn't Align. So they had to manipulate it to align and give these sermons to these preachers along with suggested scriptures to sway the religiously faithful. The Protestant pulpit for the better part of a generation and even now has been a subcontractor of the American boardroom to make the rich richer. The theological arguments produced by this alliance we can. They're so clear now when you, when you can see them written out in this way, in kind of the strategy, you see how all the way from the 1600s it's carried over to. To now. The old Puritan vocabulary was adapted to serve new corporate purposes while preserving this appearance of continuity with religious tradition. J. Gershom Machen, the founder of Orthodox Presbyterian Church and one of the most intellectually respected conservative theologians of his generation, declared that, quote, historic Christianity is in conflict at many points with the collectivism of the present day. And the New Deal represented a drab utilitarianism at which all higher aspirations are lost. Lost. Heber J. Grant, the seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, warned in his October 1936 conference address that federal relief programs would reimpose what he called the curse of idleness on a people who had been taught by their faith to abhor dependence. And he declared that government make work projects were a menace to the character of our people. Norman Benson Peel, not yet a celebrity author of the Power of Positive Thinking that would come later, but he was already influential. Publicly criticized Roosevelt's indifference to religion during the late 1930s and told reporters that the country needed either a new president or a new constitution. The congressman and Baptist min Minister Charles Eaton, speaking during the House debate on Social Security Act of 1935, warned his colleagues that the legislation would place American industry and individual liberty under the control of a federal bureaucracy greater than anything to be found in rail, Russia, Germany or Italy. He said it's going to be worse than Hitler is what he said. Hitler's in control at this time. Wild. And none of that's true. The da. We've. We've now had Social Security and Medicare and welfare and none of that's true. None of that has been true. In fact, the more we fund social programs and we make sure people have their basic needs met, the more productive they are. But right same thing with Russia Communism. The comparison was not a rhetorical flourish. We still use today. Like you, we have seen in his first 100 days what Zoran Mamdani has been able to do like real meaningful action. And guess what? The rich have not fled New York. Crime is down they had the lowest Q1 recorded crime in history since they started recording it. Crime is down, down. Like tenants are getting their needs met. Right? Landowners are not able to be slum lords anymore. Potholes are getting fixed. They already got 2k. So universal child care for children that are 2. He's done that in a hundred days and guess what? Everybody's benefiting. But we've been. But as soon as you look at any of his videos, you'll see some person with an American flag and a bald eagle being like crime. Same rhetoric, different era. For the spiritual mobilization generation, the welfare state was not merely bad policy. It was the first step towards totalitarianism. And opposing it was to be understood as the sacred duty on every Christian minister. Totalitarianism, how does that happen? Well, that happens when you put production and wealth in the hands of a few and subjugate everyone else. That doesn't happen with social protections, welfare program programs, Democratic socialism, A track distributed by Spiritual mobilization to approximately 7,000American ministers in the early 40s declared the country's movement towards dictatorship had already begun to erode the traditional checks and balances. And it called on the clergy to resist what it described as creeping socialism that was perverting the central principles of Christianity. How we see that happening now too, don't we? We, we, we, we're watching our checks and balances melt, fall apart, crumble by the same people who are consolidating power but claiming they're doing it in the name of Christ. Because wet wealth redistribution against social protections is actually the opposite of consolidating power. It's dispersing it. But they have always fought against dispersing power and wealth. And this campaign against the New Deal would succeed beyond the wildest hopes of its founders. Yes, of course, the New Deal did go through, right? And Americans desperately needed it. But by the early 50s, the association between conservative Protestantism and being anti union, anti welfare, pro corporate politics became so natural in American public life, it still is today, that few observers could remember a time when it had been different. Matthew Avery Sutton documented in 2014 how the rise of modern evangelicalism in this period was shaped at the deepest level by the fear of a statist Antichrist whose arrival was prefigured in the administrative agency of the New Deal. So many of you that grew up in the church and are like unpacking a lot of this are like, wait, what? I remember all of this. I remember them saying this. Darren Docek has traced how this political theology migrated with the post war population boom from the Bible Belt to Southern California where it fused the emerging conservative movement and the spiritual backbone of what would become the Reagan Coalition. Coalition. This all sound familiar? Because remember the most successful wealthiest economy, fastest growing economy in the history of the world, in the history of the world was from 1948 to 1972. Why? Because the tax distribution on the wealthy was much much higher. They paid their fair share. And because the wealthiest 1% only controlled 8% of the nation's economy economy which is still a lot right in, in the best economy that the that history has ever known, they now control 31%. They control 31 of the economy now because Nixon slowed that economic growth by taking off the pressure off the wealthy and corporations and then Reagan reversed it. Since Reagan we have watched wealth disparity skyrocket. And the reason that the middle and the lower classes are struggling is not because they're not working hard enough but because the wealthiest in the country control so much of the economy. And what makes it even worse is that the top 10% in this country control 67% of the economy. Which means the rest of us, the 90% between all 90% of us us, we only have 33% of the economy. That's the problem. It's not work ethic, it's system. And it's because of Reagan. And we're going to do some coverage on him in a bit because gross. The Puritan covenant of works had completed its long journey from the meeting house to the precinct office and the old anxiety about the elect had been successfully converted. Converted into a political program. A political program that was mobilized to help people work, vote and fight against their own protection and self interest. And before I get to the right to work crusade, I'm going to take my second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. You can get these episodes ad free as well as a bunch of bonus content on patreon.com montemater so this Christian anti union movement, remember this organization founded by spiritual founded that was called Spiritual Mobilization that was paid for for by wealthy families and corporations rebranded anti union legislation as a matter of religious conscience. The Taft Hartley act of 1947 which permitted individual states to pass so called right to work laws prohibiting union security agreements was sold to the American public as a defense of individual liberty against the collectivist threat of compulsory union membership. Hear me now, if you're someone who's scared of unions, unions save your ass. Unions protect protect you. The clergy again played a significant role in this marketing effort particularly in the southern and southwestern states where right to work laws passed most easily where the influence of labor unions had always been the weakest, what states are the poorest? That should tell you something. The argument, which was repeated in countless pulpits across the region, was that requiring a worker to join a union in order to hold a job was a violation of the worker's sacred freedom of conscience, an intolerable imposition on the individual soul direct relationship with God.