God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War chronicles the lives, businesses, and ministries of several Christian corporate leaders, whose religious and political activism between the 1920s and 1940s laid the foundations of the modern religious right. Challenging prevailing scholarly opinion that evangelicals—“fundamentalists,” as they were known then—remained apolitical and otherworldly in the Interwar period, this book carefully outlines how Christian businessmen such as R.G. LeTourneau and Herbert J. Taylor, leading figures in this account, grappled with the expand ... More

God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War chronicles the lives, businesses, and ministries of several Christian corporate leaders, whose religious and political activism between the 1920s and 1940s laid the foundations of the modern religious right. Challenging prevailing scholarly opinion that evangelicals—“fundamentalists,” as they were known then—remained apolitical and otherworldly in the Interwar period, this book carefully outlines how Christian businessmen such as R.G. LeTourneau and Herbert J. Taylor, leading figures in this account, grappled with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and during World War II. While on their factory floors and in their boardrooms they folded evangelical principles into manufacturing and managerial strategies, in their church spheres they financed evangelical causes and pushed clergy to tap laymen’s proselytizing energy. At the same time, they brought their conservative theology to bear on critical political issues such as taxation, government regulation, labor unions and workers rights, and the challenge, as they saw it, to uphold private enterprise against “big government” and the spread of socialist and communist subversion. The ideas and institutions they advanced in this political moment served as a base from which post-World War II religious and political conservatives would spread their gospel.