Download Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism AudioBook Free
In the annals of the Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1886 by shoe salesman transformed revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody, Timothy Gloege confirms an answer to why Religious ethics seem to move hand in hand with free-market capitalism. Taking the account back again to the roots of modern fundamentalism as it arose within the cultural and cultural context of the Gilded Time and the Progressive Period, Gloege unveils longstanding associations between Chicago evangelicals and business and shows that the marriage between modern business and the so-called "old-time faith" developed symbiotically, forever altering the American spiritual surroundings. By 1920 a shifting coalition of businessmen, midlevel bureaucrats, and ministers experienced forged a remarkably resilient form of traditional evangelicalism that deviated in key respects from traditional Protestantism and this embraced modern consumer-oriented ideas and strategies. In the bottom was evangelicalism's thoroughgoing individualism, demonstrated prominently in the privilege it gave to an individual marriage with God as the fact of an authentic beliefs. This individualism aligned with key developments within capitalism and facilitated a remarkable confluence of business and spiritual ideas resistant to the influence of Darwinian science's basic orientation toward aggregated populations conditioned naturally or nurture. For these evangelicals, to struggle capitalism was to struggle the foundations of evangelical orthodoxy. Assured pure from both liberal theology and populist literalism, this is a new form of old-time faith not simply appropriate for modern consumer capitalism but distinctively reliant on it.