Christianity is big business. This session explores the well-established partnership between American evangelical identity, capitalism, and the corporate institutional logic of growth, recruitment, leadership formation, and development. Each author offers a unique entry point into the business of evangelicalism. This session includes papers that address American evangelicalism’s staunch commitment to Western capitalism, the ways in which this position is driven by anti-communist sentiment, and the implications for evangelical attitudes toward racial justice and conservative politics. It also includes papers that approach the theme from the corporate side. They examine the evangelical logic governing the subject formation and organizational practices that are not only present within the church but also outside of ecclesial space, in this case, at the heart of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
The political identity and activism of American evangelical Christians in the twentieth century has been given great attention in recent years, but far less attention has been paid to the actual theology—especially the biblical theology—animating these political concerns. In the 1970s and 80s, evangelical theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars fiercely debated questions of political economy, producing a multitude of popular books on the subject. This paper will explore the evangelical defenses of “Reaganomics” through an analysis of the biblical theological literature of the period—primarily Ronald Nash’s *Poverty and Wealth* (1986) and John Jefferson Davis’s *Your Wealth in God’s World: Does the Bible Support the Free Market* (1984). These texts, in their defenses of a capitalist political economy, illuminate the convergence of evangelical political and economic theologies, biblical hermeneutics, and accounts of work and vocation.
Jerry Falwell, Senior helped build the Religious Right as a reaction against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet when he preached about segregation and black liberationism, he was not so much rejecting the idea of black bodies in historically white spaces (although for a time, he did not allow African Americans at his church or school) as much as he was rejecting Martin Luther King's iteration of the Social Gospel. Falwell was a severe capitalist who saw any form of government regulation, especially the form that King was advocating, as part of a slide towards Soviet-style communism. He saw the Social Gospel itself, including the contemperaneous Civil Rights Movement, as part of a communist plot to take over America's churches.
Willow Creek is a paradigmatic megachurch, the blueprint for the “seeker-sensitive” and corporate-friendly church that became popular in late twentieth and early twenty-first century American evangelicalism. It presides over a global network of churches and partner organizations, at the center of which is the Global Leadership Summit, which Bill Hybels created in 1995. Founded as a workshop for church leaders, the GLS quickly exceeded Hybels’ initial plans, evolving into a kind of Davos for evangelicals. The GLS is the focal point of Willow’s influence on Christianity around the world. I argue that the GLS facilitates a dual revival that combines the theology and affective strategies of evangelical revivalism with neoliberal corporate leadership discourse in order to pump new life into businesses and churches for the salvation of the world. The salvific religion of the GLS is neoliberal leadership formation encased in evangelical affect. This is Willow Creek’s global imprint.
A distinctive feature of evangelical action, both in worship and in its creation of cultural products, is its appropriation of secular forms. Jill Stevenson identifies this appropriation as a signature method of what she calls “evangelical dramaturgy,” or the performative tactics used by evangelical media to shape the emotional responses of attendees. This paper asks what happens when appropriation moves in the other direction and technology companies, like Salesforce.com, adopt evangelical dramaturgies to structure their annual user conference. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews, I argue that North American corporations, such as Salesforce, now borrow from evangelicalism’s performance repertoire, and especially from strategies associated with seeker sensitive megachurches. Furthermore, the secular marking of evangelical forms allows companies to deploy them without anyone taking notice or taking offense, even as the company explicitly associates itself with indigenous or Buddhist philosophies and practitioners.