I’ve said more than once over the years that the role of the church in society in analogous to the role of the personnel department in a business — to keep everybody in line. I realized that when I learned that the meatpackers fought Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle not with facts, or even political skulduggery, but by paying pastors all across the country to distribute more than one million handbills denouncing Sinclair.
Well, what do you know? A piece in the New York Times documents how cynically the churches have allowed themselves to be used by the oligarchs.
Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.
[ … ]
In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call, but three deserve special attention.
[ … ]
The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.”
Seriously: DO NOT miss this piece. And those of you who still submit to the weekly berating, realize this: They’re laughing at you, just like the people who rent-out your eyeballs to television advertisers.