In 1991, David Koch (rest in piss) narrowly survived one of the worst air accidents in Los Angeles history. He said the incident was formative for him, that God had (unfortunately) spared him, giving him a new lease on life. He thought he should be more philanthropic, did some good stuff like donating a truckload of money to various hospitals, public spaces, and museums, but also a shitload of awful stuff, like buying more than enough candidates, airtime, and astroturf groups to promote the bullshit climate change denial network and racist Tea Party insanity.
My pet theory is that the plane crash was caused by a time travelling assassin, knowing the devastation Koch would enact, and simply failed in their mission. The next year in 1992, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, another more subtle time travelling assassination attempt, this time aimed at his junk. Like the Terminator franchise, the cancer came back 27 years later like the original cast and finished the job.
Koch was one of the most objectively evil political figures we’ve seen in quite some time; almost a perfect villain. One of his greatest assets in hijacking American society was to latch on and amplify a decade long project: the merging of the evangelical right and capitalism.
The religious right’s transition to revanchist consumerism makes more sense if you view evangelical Christianity as a political identity rather than a coherent set of religious beliefs. Capitalism has many, many contradictions built into it, but requires us to either be ignorant or ignore them entirely. Yet it still claims that it in itself is a rational, logical system functioning much like an automatically self-correcting machine rather than a specific ideological project.
Evangelical Christianity does something unique and powerful to capitalism: it gives capitalism legitimacy that, within the system itself, resists any sort of debate, critique, or revision. You do not vote for God, faith does not operate on a market system, the very nature of religious belief is one of intentional non-critique in service of a greater, more connective sense of the self. God says so, and why does God say so? Because he does.
Your guilt can be erased for only a small donation to the televangelist, the online grifter, the “pro-life” political party. The merging of the evangelical church, capitalism, and the Republican Party is practically complete, which each of these forces providing valuable justification and support for each other. Religion provides capitalism with a moral imperative, God wants you to be rich, tithing is Biblical. Capital provides the church with funds, resources, and marketing gloss. The Republican Party provides institutional legitimacy for both. Make no mistakes, the Democratic Party and liberals subscribe to this model as well, with their candidates making performative church trips, but they try to be a bit nicer about it, more New Testament hand-in-hand in tone.
In the Year of Our Lord 2019, the megachurch, prosperity gospel, and a new desperation in the waning religious right reign over the land. Our giant toddler President signs Bibles during disaster trips, waves the Good Book around mockingly, and can’t even state one single verse he actually likes. Why can’t he think of a single verse? Easy, he doesn’t give a shit, he panders, and the hooting, oinking masses at his rallies love nothing more than to be pandered to. Nothing matters in Trump World, he’s a feeling, a vibe. His congregation has faith their stupendous dumbass will magically wave his hand, turn loaves into manufacturing jobs, water into coal runoff, and even resurrect the dead spectre of a Great America.
The evangelical right’s embrace of Trump is on the surface perplexing: a rapist, a pathological liar, perpetually unfaithful, vain to the Nth degree, a grotesque goblin who perfectly represents, from what they’ve described, a degenerate pop culture that sags its pants and watches wrestling. He’s everything they’ve claimed to hate for decades. Here’s the secret: they don’t actually hate that stuff at all. They love all of it. It’s weaponized against a liberal elite that has dominated the culture more so than their listless, sterile hymns and fake piety.
The path of accepting Trump wasn’t a blinding flash of light on the way to Damascus. It was a decades long process of intertwining the political and the religious. The Cold War looms over this entire transformation of “separation of church and state” to an apocalypse cult. The Soviet Union, officially state atheists, were seen as a threat to the God-fearing West in a political, economic, and now religious way. “In God We Trust” appears on our money and state motto in 1956. Of course it’s on the money. Why wouldn’t it be? A religious motto every time you pull out cold hard cash to do a capitalism.
Billy Graham and the following crop of right-wing grifters eager to build a monetary empire on the bedrock of faith leads us into the hypercapitalism of the 1980’s. The televangelist appears. Now you can get your God on from the comfort of your couch! Capitalism must innovate, and since evangelical Christianity is a brand, it too must intensify. It’s gotta go big brand.
Prosperity gospel has been with us longer than you realize. It’s not a mid-2000’s invention, that was just when you started seeing Joel Osteen books at Target. Prosperity gospel is, in a way, the actual religion of the United States. Individualism, upward mobility, wealth in a better place, these are practically the words of evangelical pastors. You have a personal relationship with God, you are “upwardly mobile” in the sense you are going to heaven, and in God’s house there are many mansions. Hey, who doesn’t want a palatial Hollywood estate in the clouds?! The ostentatious lives of megachurch pastors speak for themselves.
(By the way, the liberal version of this is the New Age movement.)
The Protestant “work ethic” (aka blind subservience to capital) can be transplanted quite cleanly onto capitalist accumulation. The sacrifice in the present for rewards in some afterlife, work hard now and it’ll pay off later. It often never does. You just end up busting your ass, breaking your back, and some other asshole gets a Houston mansion.
Both capitalism and evangelical theology are hierarchical, non-democratic, and atomizing. You are a child of sin, you are poor. The priesthood of money, the economists, will show you the way. The financial talking heads, the prophets, warn of doom or rejoice in prosperity. The stock market operates on feels over reals. The dollar has value because of the faith put into it. To call this a rational, scientific system is kind of a joke when you boil it down.
The final form of this transmutation is the megachurch. If you haven’t been inside one, let me give you a tour. It’s like a shopping mall, a concert venue, and a food court all wrapped up into one. They’re the size of airplane hangars, filling the seats will thousands per week, putting on a spectacular light show with Jumbotron TVs and live bands. It’s entertainment more than anything: a charismatic, energetic preacher gives you some child-level religious teaching while bouncing around the stage. There’s often a coffee bar, a bookstore, restaurants, etc, most of which are staffed by volunteer workers. People have even described to me the process of “shopping around” for a new church, like it’s a new yoga class or septic tank company.
If you want to be truly damned, here’s an article about how you should run a church like a tech startup or something. I read this article with the exact expression of Ethan Hawke’s character in First Reformed.
Christ erupted when he discovered money-changers in the temple. He kicked over tables. He absolutely refused the crass consumerism intertwined with the sacred. Now it’s just Sunday for hundreds of thousands of people. To be fair, the megachurch is not the standard, its scale and popularity are a recent invention, it’s just that its influence stands out. The philosophy that drove its creation exists in many smaller evangelical churches. The same hatred, greed, hypocritical double standard, callous narcissism. It’s all there, there’s just not a fog machine.
Religious socialists have their work cut out for them in distinguishing themselves from this grotesque apparatus. Small community churches and religious groups have been vocal in their support for refugees, the undocumented, the homeless and working poor, anti-racist action, true to the table-flipping radical nature of the New Testament Jesus. They put their ass on the line and I am extremely here for that.
But hey, it’s 2019, let’s put a church inside of an old dead mall, because why the fuck not.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.