“The White Man’s Burden,” His Man Friday, the Jesus Nobody Knows, and What Johnny Cash Really Knew
Some words are like woven tapestries. The top side displays the design and beauty intended by the maker to be seen. The underside is the chaotic negative of the visible side, holding the whole picture together, not meant to be seen.
Words are formed to weave certain ideas together so as to present a glossy picture, underneath which we are not supposed to look. (Movements, communities, cultures, and social structures can be like that too. It is from these that words and their meanings emerge.)
For example, when I was a child, the word “colony” conjured images of a quaint, old-fashioned village where ladies in bonnets churned butter by hand, men plowed and planted the fields with horses, and cherubic children played games rolling big wooden hoops atop cobblestone streets.
The word “reservation” once held similarly rosy associations for me. As a youngster, my family often visited friends who lived on land that went by this name. I thought of that place as special, set aside as an honor as one does in order to dine at a fine establishment.
The same is true of the word “empire.” Once upon a time, it was a word linked to fairy tales and magic carpets. Later, I came to associate the word with strength and power used for the good of all. “Empire” could be used, for example, to describe a successful business enterprise. For a time, I lived in “the Empire State,” home of one of the largest cities in the world and what was once the tallest tower in the world, the Empire State Building. Some empires had more sinister associations—like the Star Wars franchise’s The Empire Strikes Back. Always the word possessed mythic proportions.
The power and influence of empire is not merely the stuff of fairy tales and myths, however. It is very real and is often exerted in the most ordinary ways. At a conference table. During a meeting. In a hallway exchange. In an email.
Empire building is almost as old as humanity itself. In its oldest and most literal sense, “empire” refers to political dominions made when one nation or state takes over another. We tend to associate these kinds of empires with ancient history, from the various Chinese dynasties to the Roman Empire, to the Mongol and Ottoman Empires, and so on. One cannot read these names without being reminded that, no matter how mighty they might be or how long they might last, empires fall. Such empire building isn’t just a relic of the past, however. Russia recently invaded the neighboring nation of Ukraine in a modern-day act of barbaric empire building. Every day there are new reports of horrific atrocities being committed against ordinary, innocent people by a violent aggressor.
Most empires are built this way: through violence, blood, and terror.
But sometimes empires are built more subtly: through coercion, trickery, or deceit. Sometimes empires are built in the name of progress, tradition, or religion. Sometimes all it takes is a network of good ol’ boys (whether literal or metaphorical). Sometimes empires are built simply through clever marketing. Sometimes they are built through all of these methods. Whichever way they are made, empires expand by dominating—rather than loving—their neighbors.
The first empires were land empires. As postcolonial literary critic Edward Said notes in Culture and Imperialism, “Everything about human history is rooted in the earth.”1 Various terms express the different manifestations of empires: “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism,” for example. According to Said, empire refers to a relationship of domination; imperialism refers to the practices and attitudes of domination; and colonialism refers to the implantation of settlements on another’s land.2 Even if the relationship changes (e.g., a nation is freed from occupying forces), imperialistic postures and perspectives can linger long afterward. As Said says, the struggles of empire are not only about land but also “about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”3
Empires aren’t established only on land, however. They are also established in our hearts. This is actually where they begin.
The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire—Until It Does
Throughout most of history, empire building was led by rulers and governments. During the first wave of British expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the age of exploration was booming, European countries, especially those with ready access to the sea, were discovering the wealth to be gained from bringing goods such as spices, dyes, sugar, and cotton from faraway lands back home. Colonization of these lands, usually by private companies, followed. In fact, the United States is described as “the first new nation” to come “through a colonial, not a social revolution.”4 Later, in the age of New Imperialism that began in the latter half of the nineteenth century as European nations participated in the Scramble for Africa, expansion was led mainly by merchants, not monarchs. Modern empire building became not only the work but even the dream of ordinary men. It still is.
The American colonies began, of course, as British ones. Following the loss of those colonies, England’s growth into the world’s biggest empire in the following century represented a stunning comeback. The British Empire would become the largest political empire in human history. At its peak, near the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Great Britain ruled one-quarter of the territory around the globe and one-quarter of the earth’s population. Across the planet, one in four people was the subject of Queen Victoria. The old saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was literally true: at every point in a twenty-four-hour day, it was daylight in at least one of the British territories.5
This was—not coincidentally—the age of evangelical expansion as well. It was almost inevitable that British imperialism would be thoroughly entangled with evangelicalism. Indeed, it was. And because it was, it still is. European expansion into other lands was often justified, even promoted, by claims that it would bring Christianity to “pagan” lands. The explosion of missionary societies in the nineteenth century took place within the larger context of exploration and colonization. In America, early colonists declared the conversion of the native people to Christianity as a reason, even a justification, for settling in the new land.6
What, You Too?
Often overlooked in this rationale for colonization was that the roots of Christianity go back at least to the earliest centuries in some of these “pagan” lands. Christianity came to North Africa, for instance, in the first or second century, and it was established in Ethiopia by the fourth century. The Eastern Christian tradition goes back at least as far. One friend of mine can trace his own family’s Christian roots in India back to the first centuries of the church. He says that “the Indian Christian tradition was so well established by AD 325 that the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea had at least one delegate from the Indian Church.” His ancestors’ faith, he wants to make clear, is not “a colonized one.”7
Such oversights of evangelicals (both then and now) are the working out of a social imaginary built on an imperialist worldview that provides “a structure of attitude and reference”8 that leaves out as much as it leaves in, one that reflects what Said describes as an “imagination of empire.”9
An example of such a deficient imagination is powerfully illustrated by a story Willie James Jennings tells in The Christian Imagination. The story centers on a simple, everyday event: neighbors chatting with neighbors in their yard on a lovely day. Yet, this otherwise uneventful scene reveals the workings of a social imaginary centuries and generations in the making.
The incident takes place when Jennings, who was twelve at the time, and his mother are outside their home working in the garden. The Jenningses are Black. Two white men enter the yard and introduce themselves as members of a nearby church. They tell Mrs. Jennings about their church and share the gospel with her. What is striking to Jennings, even as a young boy, is that the white men have no idea who the Jenningses are, no idea that his father is the pastor of their own church in the same neighborhood as the white men’s church, or that his mother is “one of the pillars” of their church, and most inexplicable of all, that the men seem to assume that Mrs. Jennings is not a Christian. The men leave shortly after Mrs. Jennings patiently explains these facts. Looking back on the event as an adult, Willie Jennings does not attribute the visitors’ error to malice. Rather, he writes, it merely “signaled a wider and deeper order of not knowing, of not sensing, of not imagining.” Even so, this inability to know, sense, and imagine, Jennings explains, reflects “a sinful division” within the Christian faith.10 It is evidence for what Jennings calls a “diseased” imagination. The division Jennings points out developed through an imagination colonized by the notion of empire.
In fact, the spread of the gospel during the missionary age is so intertwined with the West’s expansion through imperialism that it is almost impossible to imagine an evangelical movement that is not an empire-building enterprise, not a movement rooted in political and cultural domination, and not propagated by the power of money, business, and capitalism rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. (It is almost, but not quite, impossible to imagine such a movement; it is possible because such a movement is there in Scripture in the early church.)
The idea of empire is so embedded in the modern Western imagination that it has shaped our understanding of nearly every facet of life, from how we conceive of and measure success, to how we develop national policy, to how we teach history, to how we orient and order our personal lives, to how we think the gospel is to be advanced. Because evangelicalism was so connected to the British Empire, imperialistic practices and attitudes are seldom far from the evangelical imagination. Names of events, organizations, and movements such as the Salvation Army, Pioneers, the Billy Graham crusades, Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru), the original crusades (of course), theonomy, Christian nationalism, and all forms of dominionism reflect the spirit of empire building within evangelicalism.
This triumphalist spirit of empire was cultivated on an individual level too. “Do great things for God!” was for a generation (or two) of evangelicals not just an encouragement but an expectation that became a mandate. One younger friend who grew up evangelical told me she had the sense that if she didn’t grow up to do something great or radical, then she would have failed as a Christian. (Thankfully, she knows better now.) These mantras, perhaps unintentionally but certainly negligently, ignore the truth that ordinary kindness, commonplace service, everyday work, and faithful love also usher in the kingdom of God.
The elements that define the evangelical movement—particularly its emphasis on conversion and activism—fit naturally into the expansionist spirit that defined modernity from its beginning. Expansion of knowledge, landholding, power—this is what made the modern age modern.
The Literature of Empire
The novel developed alongside the rise of the British Empire as a literary form perfect for the expression of the newly emerging sense of the individual. This new, modern, autonomous self became a kind of colonizer of the world, at least of this particular corner of the world, achieving control over life in ways that before had been scarcely, if at all, possible: moving up in social and economic class, choosing a marriage partner, even adopting a religious practice or denomination.
Such agency is exerted over life in more subtle ways too, and these also are reflected in the form of the novel, not merely its subject matter. Through its use of narrative perspective and by centering on individual character growth, the novel embodies what might be called the “authority of the observer.”11 The colonist—whether the literal one in the empire or the metaphorical self of the modern novel or modern world—becomes a kind of authority. The “power to narrate,” Said says, is “one of the main connections between” culture and imperialism, yet the ways in which the injustices and cruelties of imperialist practices are enabled by the stories, art, and philosophies of the colonizing culture are not always recognized.12 The “enterprise of empire,” Said says, “depends upon the idea of having an empire.”13 Or, as William Blake once scribbled in the margin of a book, “Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”14
Perhaps no novel illustrates this “idea of having an empire” more than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which paints a picture of individual conquest that is both physical and spiritual (see fig. 14). Published in 1719, before the novel was widely recognized or accepted as a literary genre, Robinson Crusoe purported to be the true account of one Crusoe, written by himself, of the life he spent stranded on an island for twenty-eight years, where he built a one-man empire, fashioning two homes, cultivating crops, and raising livestock, not only surviving but thriving. Crusoe is a type of the self-reliant, self-made man. Significantly, Crusoe’s conquest of the land parallels his self-conquest, illuminating how tightly tied are the notions of political empire and spiritual empire.
Indeed, the vision of empire consumes Crusoe’s imagination while on the island. Despite living alone for most of his twenty-eight years on the island, he thinks of himself as ruler and emperor, at one point surveying the land “with a secret kind of pleasure (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession.”15 Later, upon rescuing and taking in a few near-victims of the native cannibals, Crusoe says, “My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I look’d.”16
Along with such notions of empire, Defoe’s Puritan theology, which also shaped the evangelical movement, is evident throughout the narrative in ways both subtle and dramatic. One of the dramatic moments occurs nine months after Crusoe arrives on the island (a time span laden with obvious meaning), when he becomes extremely sick. After a torturous night marked by a “terrible vision” in which a man with a spear descends from a “great black cloud, in a bright flame of fire” and threatens to kill him, Crusoe turns to a Bible he had salvaged from the shipwreck and begins to read. His spiritual eyes open for the first time, and he is born again.
Yet, despite this spiritual awakening and genuine conversion, Crusoe never comes to question the underlying assumptions of his slaveholding religion and imperialist worldview. He rescues one native from cannibals roaming the island and names him Friday. Despite referring to Friday as his “man” or “servant,” Friday is actually Crusoe’s slave. Yet, Crusoe believes only that Providence brought Friday to him in order that Friday might receive the gospel and be saved. Friday’s eventual conversion to Christianity and overall “improvement” reinforce the myth that enslavement was an “initiation” or “an apprenticeship in superior white ways and white culture,” even if an involuntary one. Such defenses reflect the fact that slavery “was about theology and money simultaneously.”17
Notably, the shipwreck that stranded Crusoe occurred during a slave expedition. But this is not the sin Crusoe recognizes and repents of following the night of his terrible dream. Indeed, the wealth Crusoe accumulates by the end of the story is the fruit, not of his own, but of slave labor. The power of a culture, of a social imaginary, is so great that it can indeed dull the conscience’s role in the conviction of sin. Crusoe’s (and Defoe’s) inability to see past this moral blind spot is but one example of this truth, one example within an infinite supply.
In addition to a defense of imperialism and slavery, Robinson Crusoe provided a template for personal testimony and evangelical missions for centuries to come. Its influence is immeasurable in this regard. The work became “a flag for empire and travelled in the luggage of merchants, missionaries and generals,” its influence long outlasting the British Empire itself.18 Two centuries later, James Joyce called Robinson Crusoe the “true symbol of the British conquest.”19
But Robinson Crusoe was also a symbol for the larger sense of modern empire, including the American empire. Crusoe’s ability to develop and cultivate a home in this island frontier foreshadows how “America itself would evolve and develop—by trial and error, perseverance, and attention to detail.”20 It is no surprise that Defoe was beloved by one of America’s most industrious, innovative, and self-reliant men, Benjamin Franklin.21
Most novels do not treat the theme of colonization as literally as Robinson Crusoe does. Yet, one cannot read Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or Charlotte Brontë—just to name a few—without breathing from their pages the air of British imperialism, even if unacknowledged. The ghost of British imperialism lingers into the twentieth century even in such a seemingly innocent place as C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The father of Digory Kirke, the boy who starts it all in The Magician’s Nephew, is at the series’ beginning working in India, which was still under British rule during the time the story is set.22
By the end of the nineteenth century, empire as a theme was often front and center for many British thinkers and writers.23 Perhaps the most influential literary expression of the modern imperialist spirit is Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden.”
Kipling is best known for The Man Who Would Be King (1888), The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), and the poem “If—” which remains a favorite for school graduations and recitations. Kipling, born in India to British parents, is considered the “poet of British imperialism” because of his insightful treatment of both British colonizers and natives of colonized India. Kipling was heavily influenced by evangelicalism. The grandson of Methodist clergymen on both sides of parents, and schooled early in life by strict Calvinist guardians in England, Kipling exhibits these influences through his works’ heavy didacticism as well as a musical rhythm reflective of church hymnody.24
Kipling first began writing “The White Man’s Burden” in 1897 but didn’t finish the poem until 1899, when the start of the Philippine–American War inspired him to publish it as an encouragement to the United States to assume colonial power of the Philippines (which it did).25
“The White Man’s Burden” is a potent expression of the spirit of modern imperialism, presented as more complicated than simply a raw grab for power and land. Indeed, it famously portrays as a “burden” the duty of the “white man” to “civilize” non-white nations and peoples. Here is the poem in its entirety:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!26
Note how these verses portray imperialists not as barbarians storming the gate but more like kindly neighbors knocking on the door to deliver a casserole. Their burden is taken up not for something as “tawdry” as power (the “rule of kings”)—no, not for such low purposes as that! Rather, the colonizer sacrifices the “best” of their people, who suffer in order to “serve” the “need” of the “captives” through the “toil of serf and sweeper.” It is the white colonizers, not the oppressed natives, who wear the “heavy harness” to “wait” on the “wild” and “sullen” people who are “half devil and half child.” The colonizer acts not out of greed or desire for gain (oh no!) but, on the contrary, to “seek another’s profit, and work another’s gain.” When the colonizers grow weary and long to be free from the work, the poem exhorts them to liken themselves to Moses leading the people out of slavery, to ignore the people’s expected grumblings, and to remember that those they conquer will judge not only the colonizers but the colonizer’s God. (Those poor, poor colonizers who suffer so!) The multiple layers of xenophobia and racism in the poem are compounded even more by its exaltation of the white colonizers.
This is the one-two punch of the spirit of imperialism. While the imperialism of the nineteenth century was first motivated primarily by the desire for economic profit, it also, Edward Said argues, “allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated.”27 “The White Man’s Burden” powerfully expresses the “white savior complex” that has too often characterized both America and the evangelical movement. This phrase describes how even well-intentioned believers who are formed by imperialist ideas tend to try to “rescue” other people rather than empower them. It undergirds the prevailing tendency of evangelicals to confer greater honor on those who evangelize and disciple on foreign soil than on those who do so over backyard fences or neighborhood coffee shops or local homeless shelters and schools. There is something more romantic about bringing the gospel to virgin ears, to those who have never heard it, than sharing it with those who’ve turned a deaf ear because they grew up within a community or culture that portrayed a distorted or perverted version of the gospel. Evangelists have little honor in their hometown.
The “Burden” of Big Business
Conquering lands and peoples is not the only way to build an empire.
The spirit of empire building permeates modern culture, modern American culture in particular, and that includes American evangelicalism. The connections between empire, evangelicalism, and entrepreneurialism are not by chance. Just as evangelicalism was enmeshed with modern colonialism, so, too, the empire of business colonized evangelicalism.
Success in business is the natural (or at least hoped for) fruit born from the famous Puritan work ethic. Thus, a close relationship between evangelicalism (the child of Puritanism) and the empire of business is not surprising. Indeed, upon setting out to America on their “errand into the wilderness” (the title of a famous 1660 New England Puritan sermon), the Puritans soon turned to “clearing that wilderness.”28 In 1701, Cotton Mather wrote in “A Christian at His Calling” that a Christian has two callings: first, a general calling to serve Christ and, second, a personal calling to a “particular employment.” A Christian is therefore, Mather said, “a man in a boat, rowing for Heaven. . . . If he mind but one of his callings, be it which it will, he pulls the oar, but on one side of the boat, and will make but a poor dispatch to the shore of eternal blessedness.”29 This metaphor of two oars, an image that served to “reconcile God and Mammon,” would become, arguably, “the essence of the American idea.”30 Despite Mather’s insistence that the prosperity that might naturally result from pious living should never take primacy over religion, Mather seems to have fallen prey to the “enchantment” of seeing prosperity as evidence of God’s blessings—as did many after him. As American prosperity grew, money and “the desire for money” replaced religion, family, and even class as America’s “organizing principle.”31
Thus, the American enterprise was born. And the prosperity gospel was not far behind.
The rise of the business empire is connected to improvement, and with that innovation, individualism, and entrepreneurship.
The connection of evangelicalism to entrepreneurship isn’t coincidental. Because of their religious beliefs and practices, evangelicals’ ancestors within the dissenting movements in England placed them outside not only the established church but often the law itself. This meant they were prohibited from working in government service and many other professions. Exclusion from these positions led many dissenters to turn to a field that was open to them: trade and commerce.32 Handed the lemons of legal, political, and religious exclusion, our evangelical forebears made lemonade stands.
The open-air preaching pioneered by John Wesley and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century was its own kind of innovation. In fact, it’s difficult today to comprehend just how radical the methods of Wesley and Whitefield were during their time. Performed across both England and America, their itinerant preaching not only brought religious revival but revolutionized evangelism itself and the industry that later sprung up around evangelism. Outdoor assemblies allowed many more times the number of people to hear than would have fit inside a church (just as social media today grants a far wider reach to those who have a “message” to share). In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney’s “anxious bench” became one technique among the “New Methods” devised by revivalists of the Second Great Awakening to encourage conversions through emotional appeals. By every account and by every measure—number of conversions, increases in church membership, establishment of new congregations—these revivals birthed new, genuine believers in dramatic numbers.
Thus was born what Martin Marty calls the “evangelical empire,”33 one in which evangelicals “dominated all cultural institutions, including the public schools and universities.”34 While the United States has been considered by most to be a Protestant empire from early on, evangelicalism in particular became a “kind of national church or national religion.”35 Modern-day rallies, crusades, and megachurches (the entirety of what some today refer to as the “evangelical industrial complex”) owe their existence to the innovations of these founders of the evangelical movement.
Today’s entrepreneurs and business leaders fill the roles once held by prophets, priests, and poets. Many of these entrepreneurs and business leaders are evangelicals and operate within evangelicalism. It has even become common for pastors today to refer to themselves as “leaders,” a trend that became pronounced in the 1980s and ’90s when conferences, publications, and websites began aggressively selling the idea of the pastor-leader.36 This word choice is an odd one for pastors given the association throughout the New Testament of leaders with corruption and worldly authority—not to mention Jesus’s words that in his kingdom those who want to be first shall be last (Mark 9:35). In contrast, the words in the Bible often translated as “pastor” (etymologically related to “pasture”)—as seen in Ephesians 4:11, or “shepherd,” which recurs throughout the Old Testament—are metaphors that connote the caring, nurturing, tending, and feeding that are commanded throughout Scripture of those who hold that office. The word “leader” doesn’t preclude these actions, but it markedly shifts the emphasis.
As the lines blur, so do the roles and the callings.
One central figure who helped to bring about this emphasis on entrepreneurship in the church is Dwight L. Moody. Along with proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, this famous nineteenth-century revivalist and Bible college founder preached the gospel of hard work. Moody’s own life served as proof of his thesis. Born into a poor farming family, Moody ended his formal education at fifth grade. He converted to evangelical Christianity while attending Sunday school as a young man and from that obscurity became one of the most renowned revivalist preachers across England and America. By developing innovative and ecumenical methods of evangelizing and by targeting youth, working-class adults, and immigrants for these evangelistic efforts, Moody changed American Christendom profoundly. One of Moody’s most significant impacts on evangelicalism was in marrying business models to Christian ministry. It’s a marriage now so common that it’s almost impossible to imagine things any other way.
In Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, Timothy Gloege describes how a number of “corporate evangelicals” connected with D. L. Moody transformed American evangelicalism into a religion “that was not only compatible with modern consumer capitalism but also uniquely dependent upon it.”37 Building on evangelicalism’s “individualistic religious assumptions,” this network of evangelical businessmen applied the “metaphors of industrial work” to Christian life and practice. In true business fashion, this brand of evangelicalism emphasized “empirically measurable outcomes” even in matters of faith.38 Yet, this corporate support did not necessarily come because these businessmen believed in Moody’s message. Rather, they saw in that message their own best hope for domesticating the masses that made up their workforce.39
The founding of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1886 was Moody’s most lasting material legacy. The school was organized and run by the principles of business that Moody had learned over the years, and the institution targeted and attracted students from the working classes. When Henry Parsons Crowell, the founder of Quaker Oats Company, was appointed in 1904 as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Moody, a position he held for forty years, he brought to the school the same techniques he had used to make Quaker Oats one of the most trusted brands in America: “trademark, package, and promotion.”40 In this way, as Timothy Gloege details, Quaker Oats Company’s “guaranteed pure” trademark—one of the most successful in American branding—was transferred to the broad fundamentalist-evangelical spirit that was overtaking working and middle class America.41 Thus, Moody Bible Institute “pioneered the idea that religion was something to be consumed rather than practiced.”42 Moody brought into the evangelical imagination the paired primacy of theological education and a business mindset, a set of values that has been passed on for generations and virtually defines evangelicalism today. It was Moody who shifted the fashion among pastors from clerical dress to business attire.43
This “consumer orientation” that took hold in twentieth-century evangelicalism, focusing on individual choice and minimizing denominational and academic ties,44 has never lost its influence. It continued evangelicalism’s shift away from the community and authority of the church toward a personal relationship with Jesus—but made even that relationship take on more of the flavor of a business relationship (which is just a hop, skip, and a jump—perhaps not even that—to the prosperity gospel).
The language Gloege uses to describe the evangelical culture carved out by Moody, his supporters, and those who succeeded him is illuminating. He says their approach employed an “interlocking set of metaphors” drawn from the corporate world that “functioned as a set of unexamined first principles”45—or in other words, a social imaginary.
The Jesus Nobody Knows
You might begin to wonder whether corporate values have become an idol when Christ himself is cast as “the grandest achievement story of all!”46 This is how advertising executive Bruce Barton puts it in his 1925 bestselling book, The Man Nobody Knows, which portrays Jesus as a business entrepreneur, whom he describes in the book as an “executive,”47 a “leader” with winning “personal magnetism,”48 the “founder of modern business,”49 and “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem!”50 whose parables are “the most powerful advertisements of all time.”51 The book’s narrator (a thinly disguised Barton) describes the book’s provenance in his exposure as a boy to portrayals of a Jesus who was “pale,” “flabby,” “sad,” and not a “winner” like Daniel, David, and Moses.52
Largely forgotten now, The Man Nobody Knows was tremendously popular and influential when it appeared. It went through dozens of reprintings and received accolades in sermons, newspapers, and even from President Calvin Coolidge.53 The Man Nobody Knows may be the book nobody knows today, but its enormous influence advanced ideas and values that have lasted a century.
By the middle of the twentieth century a “generalized religion” informed by evangelicalism and characterized by “the old theocratic and imperial language” linking God and America had been firmly established.54 During the Eisenhower administration, “In God We Trust” became the official American motto and was stamped on all US currency. (It was only in adulthood that I learned this addition had been made so recently in American history, a realization that was so startling that it was one of the many long-dormant seeds that brought forth the fruit of this book.) It was also during the Eisenhower years that the first National Prayer Breakfast was held, an annual event in Washington, DC, that draws movers, shakers, politicians, and celebrities from across partisan (and religious) lines to offer or hear generic prayers offered up on behalf of the nation. In 1976, a Newsweek cover story declared that “the emergence of evangelical Christianity into a position of respect and power” was the “most significant—and overlooked—religious phenomenon” of the decade.55 Even more recently, one historian claimed that evangelicals “oversee what is arguably the most powerful religious movement in the United States and one of the most powerful around the globe.”56
This twentieth-century syncretic religion—a mixture of patriotism, business, capitalism, and consumerism—came to be seen as part and parcel of “conservative, traditional ‘old-time religion.’”57 Such mixing of Christianity with the ways of the world was, at least in part, what the fundamentalist movement in the earlier part of the century had been resisting by staking out their claims for the fundamentals of the faith. But by the mid-twentieth century, fundamentalists, too, became divided over whether doctrinal purity or political power was more important.58 This division, within both the fundamentalist and the evangelical camps, continues to play out today, and the lines between the camps are ever blurred and shifting.
But two prominent figures changed their identities decidedly over the years from fundamentalist to evangelical: Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell Sr.
Billy Graham Rules
As Frances Fitzgerald recounts in The Evangelicals, Billy Graham had a conversion experience during a revival in his native North Carolina as a teenager. Later, attending Bob Jones University and then Wheaton College, Graham began to preach while he was still a student, leaning into his natural persona as an earthy, bumbling country preacher. He eventually became a full-time evangelist, and several weeks of tent revivals in Los Angeles in 1949 led to sudden fame and the start of his world-famous crusades held across the globe.59 Slowly, the rural, southern minister transformed into a more urbane, sophisticated, businesslike one.60 Eventually, invitations over the years to speak with several US presidents gave him the title “pastor to presidents,” and Graham came to be considered one of the most admired men in America.61
Graham also helped build some of the most influential evangelical institutions of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. These include the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Fuller Seminary.
Like Moody, Graham preached a message of “rugged individualism,” saying it was “individualism that made America great.”62 (Incidentally, the campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” was first pledged not by Donald Trump but by Graham’s friend Ronald Reagan in his speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination as their presidential candidate in 1980.63) As Graham and “his neo-evangelical allies” came to reject the fundamentalist label in favor of the evangelical one, they also became concerned not only with evangelism but with the formation of “a coherent social and intellectual framework” for the evangelical mind.64 For Graham, this framework manifested politically in his vocal opposition to communism, an issue that brought American evangelicals together, rallying them around Reagan, whose famous 1983 “Evil Empire” speech was delivered, not incidentally, to the National Association of Evangelicals.
It was now empire against empire.
The Falwell Empire
Perhaps the biggest evangelical empire to date is one founded by a man born to an obscure, rural family of small-time businessmen (including at least one bootlegger): Jerry Falwell Sr. Falwell grew up in what Susan Friend Harding, a scholar of American culture who studied Falwell close-up and extensively, describes as “a fundamentalist culture that privileged only two types of Christian masculinity: the preacher and the businessman.”65 Falwell, the founder of Liberty University (which long touted itself as the world’s largest Christian university66), successfully combined both. By applying “worldly means to soul-winning ends,”67 Falwell eventually amassed a multimillion-dollar enterprise (today worth billions) that took the gospel all over the world and gained the support of generations of evangelicals. It is an empire that is formidable by every worldly measure.68
It is also “an immense empire of words,” Harding argues in The Book of Jerry Falwell, “a factory of words, a veritable Bible-based language industry . . . a hive of workshops, of sites of cultural production, that smelted, shaped, packaged, and distributed myriad fundamentalist rhetorics and narratives.” This point is interesting in itself, but even more so because of how it connects to the word-centered nature of the evangelical faith. Of course, such a successful evangelical empire would be driven by words. Yet, ironically, many of Falwell’s words were not written by him but by teams of ghostwriters.69 This is, of course, an all-too-frequent practice among evangelicals, one that is well-documented.
What does it mean that a culture founded on authenticity, subjectivity, and individual authority so readily devours words produced by nameless souls working behind the curtain? This is a question evangelicals must grapple with as long as we say we believe in the necessity of genuine, individual conversion for salvation.
Perhaps it’s not so much ironic as it is emblematic. To be a product of a subculture—to inherit unthinkingly, uncritically, and assumingly all its images, metaphors, and stories—is to plagiarize a faith.70 It brings us back, full circle, to the condition the first evangelicals sought to redress by emphasizing genuine conversion over cultural Christianity, authentic faith over borrowed belief, and honest truth over institutional power.
From televangelism to real estate holdings, to amusement park takeovers, to an educational program that spanned kindergarten through a doctorate, the spirit of entrepreneurialism was infused through all that Falwell established. Televangelists and their “electronic empires” (which were businesses as much as ministries), Harding writes, were “harbingers of an emerging political economic order in which the stakes were collective identities, cultural ideas, and symbols as well as profits, markets, political power, and lost souls.”71 Despite constant appeals to conservative values and tradition, such entrepreneurialism is inherently connected to novelty and to advancing the “new and improved.”
Strictly speaking, entrepreneurialism occurs in the context of business and financial risk. And Falwell’s enterprise was nothing if not risky. Attraction to entrepreneurial risk-takers is as American as apple pie, not only in the realm of business but in the business of religion as well. Thus, Harding argues, the skepticism that surrounded Falwell from the start was actually “part of what made it work so well” because that risk created “the grounds for a leap of faith” by donors and supporters through their sacrificial giving. By participating in the risk, supporters became vicarious entrepreneurs. Any opposition to the effort—whether from national politicians or disgruntled locals—simply leveraged the power of the risk in favor of the risk-takers. As Harding explains, by “harnessing the generative power of his opposition,” Falwell turned criticism into donations, and those donations turned his ministries into a multimillion-dollar empire.72 It’s the same culture-wars model that continues to empower many today, although it happens more often now on social media platforms than in pulpits. Opposition farming yields abundant crops.
As the founder of a megachurch, a political organization, a private school, and a university, Falwell was one of modern evangelicalism’s greatest entrepreneurs. The satisfied customers are legion. For many years, I was one of them.73 But, as Abraham Joshua Heschel warns, religion that “survives on the level of activities” rather than genuine faith creates a religion of “institutional loyalty.”74
To be sure, institutional ministries have done good that only God in his omniscience can fully measure. But I’ve also seen up close the harm done when people are counted as less important than the institution. It would be impossible to calculate in human terms how much good it takes to offset the damage done when empires built in the name of Jesus put his kingdom second to their own.
Some have come to see the culmination of Falwell’s efforts nowhere more starkly than in the overwhelming support by white evangelicals (chief among them Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr.) for an entrepreneur-in-chief, former president Donald Trump.
The Evangelical Elect
In 2016, when Trump announced his intention to run for president, many Americans “saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business.” However, this persona was largely the making of Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s The Art of the Deal, the 1987 bestseller that made Trump a household name.75
In a New Yorker profile of Schwartz, who attempted to get to know Trump better than anyone did in order to ghostwrite the memoir, Schwartz asserts that Trump showed little if any commitment to any framework of thinking or ideology. Struggling to capture in the book a coherent picture of Trump in his many relationships, negotiations, and deals, Schwartz, writing in Trump’s voice, explains, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”76
Not only was the book by Trump not even written by him; it wasn’t even his idea. According to Schwartz, as is too often the case in the publishing empire, the book was the idea of the publisher who, seeing rising interest in magazine coverage of the real estate magnate, aggressively pursued the project with Trump.77 Trump the celebrity, who became Trump the president, was a product made in America’s business empire—and bought by the evangelical empire. And as always, we get what we pay for.
Our Empire of Dirt
In 2002, Johnny Cash—who was raised a Baptist and baptized at age thirty-nine in the Jordan River—recorded a cover of “Hurt,” a song originally performed by the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails (a name said by some to be a reference to the nails used to crucify Christ). Cash transformed a song seething with unsettling, quiet rage into one of the most haunting and soulful songs in modern music. His performance deservedly won numerous awards and nominations. Even Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who wrote the song, admitted, “That song isn’t mine anymore.”78
If you’ve not heard Cash’s rendition of the song or viewed the accompanying video, stop reading now and go do both. I will wait here while you do. Even if you have, go—listen and watch again.
Notice those lines that disavow it all, all that he has done, acquired, and accomplished. You can have all of it, he sings, this “empire of dirt.”
Here is one of the most successful, iconic artists of the modern day—who has won so many awards that there’s an entire Wikipedia page just to list them79—counting it all as dirt, or as the apostle Paul would say, dung (Phil. 3:8). Notably, the Hebrew word adam, the name of the first person God created, means “earth” or “ground”—or “dirt.”
All empires of man are empires of dirt in the end. That includes whatever it is of evangelicalism that is of man, not of God. The kingdom of heaven is not an empire.
Though his life was tumultuous and often troubled, Cash embraced a devout and genuine, albeit flawed, Christian faith through the end. Poignantly, that end—the end of Cash’s earthly empire—took place just months after filming the video for this song. The video spans a bittersweet retrospective of Cash’s life, highs and lows alike. If he could do it all over, he sings, he would “keep” himself. One can’t help but recall Jesus’s piercing question in Matthew 16:26: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
The song closes abruptly with Cash singing regretfully that if he could do it all over again, he would “find a way.”
Rather than an empire, Cash sings, he seeks a way.
I imagine that the way he seeks is the way of Jesus.80