Part I (here) summarized some of the doctrines and political ideas of evangelical Christianity in the US.
Right-wing Christianity did not just grow by itself. It was promoted in stages by the direct intervention of the US bosses.
During the economic crisis of the 1930s, many big capitalists resisted the Roosevelt “New Deal” social welfare programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security. Speaking to the US Chamber of Commerce in December 1940, the head of Armstrong Flooring Co. said that the “only antidote” to Roosevelt’s program was “American patriotism and religious faith.”
At the same meeting Congregationalist minister James Fifield told these industrialists that ministers could be recruited to attack social welfare legislation. He and the minsters he organized argued that the New Deal was encouraging people to violate God’s commandments by “coveting” the wealth of the rich and trying to steal it from them. Christianity was individualist and concerned with individual salvation, they said, not social welfare. Collectivism is “unchristian,” Fifield claimed, and capitalism closely matches Christian values.
Fifield headed the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. The board of this wealthy congregation included some of the biggest capitalists in California, and was attended by right-wing movie industry figures like Cecil B. DeMille.
Using his church as a base, Fifield projected a national organization called Spiritual Mobilization, generously funded by the biggest US capitalists. This organization targeted ministers, including some Catholics and Jews, with the message that the New Deal glorified the state and denied God. Distributing pamphlets, books, magazines, and organizing sermon contests with cash prizes, Spiritual Mobilization claimed 12,000 affiliated ministers by 1948. Ministers all over the US gave sermons praising capitalism and individualism, attacking social welfare laws and rejecting the Social Gospel as “Pagan.”
The 1950s saw a decisive turn in the US government’s use of religion. The words “In God we trust” were written on all US money and “under God” was inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance recited by school children. An annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast was started. Religion was mobilized on a massive scale to promote anti-communism and the Cold War against the Soviet Union and China.
This officially promoted religiosity was vague, and not necessarily Christian. It claimed that religion was the foundation of the US government, and that God commanded obedience to that government, combining nationalism with religion. The bosses’ intense anti-communist propaganda and the widespread fear of nuclear war led many toward religion.
Billy Graham
The specifically Christian content of Cold War religion was supplied by Christian celebrities like evangelist Billy Graham. From the 1950s on, Graham held a series of “crusades” in the US and abroad, preaching to large crowds in sports stadiums. Although designed to recruit converts, the crusades were mainly attended by church members. Graham’s message was as much anti-communist as religious. He declared that communism is “against God, against Christ, against all religion …. motivated by the Devil himself.”
Like most evangelicals, Graham endorsed sexist ideas from the Bible: “As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands” (Eph. 5:24). He claimed that by nature women need strong husbands, and husbands have a psychological need to “express their authority.” Contradicting this, he sometimes said that he believed in the equality of the sexes.
Also, like most evangelicals, Graham supported the war in Vietnam. Other evangelicals asked Graham to say that opposing segregation and racial discrimination was a Christian duty, but he refused. Graham liked to appear with US presidents and often hung out with Nixon. In the spring of 1970, Nixon invaded Cambodia and US college campuses exploded in rebellion. Nixon could not find a college where he could speak without protestors, so Graham provided one by inviting him to speak at his crusade at the University of Tennessee. Nixon spoke there to a huge crowd with little opposition. After the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, Graham abandoned politics and his influence declined.
Graham was replaced by evangelists who used television on a large scale and pulled in a lot of money through direct mail. Some of these, like Jimmy Swaggert and Jim and Tammy Baker, were destroyed by financial or sex scandals. Baptist Minister Pat Robertson, who made an unsuccessful try for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, heads a syndicated TV show that now supports Trump.
Next issue: The “Moral Majority,” Liberal Christianity, and Religion under communism.
Front page of this issue
