Long before televangelists asked for “seed money” and corporate boardrooms added prayer to the agenda, a 1920s Madison Avenue ad executive looked at the New Testament and noticed at once that the “organizational chart” was missing.
Consequently, the world saw one of the most successful rebrandings in American history, a calculated, multi-billion-dollar effort by oil barons, ad men, and corporate lobbyists to draft Jesus Christ into the service of free-market capitalism. They merged faith with free enterprise and systematically erased the radical, anti-wealth Galilean of the Gospels and replaced him with a corporate CEO who views low wages as a ministry, the tax code as a threat to salvation, and the Sermon on the Mount as a liability in need of aggressive brand management.
Today we’re talking about the story of how American big business bought the pulpit, silenced the Social Gospel, and engineered the “Christian America” as we know it, and in this story, “evangelicals” means white evang…