Creation Care

The Christian & the Business World #8: The Redemption of Corporate America

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People were praying and studying the Scriptures before the Titanic rammed the iceberg.

Life was normal—and then disaster struck. Many good Christian people died that night, taken down to a watery grave in a ship designed with hubris and shortsightedness.

I say this because I want people to understand that God did not save every Christian aboard the ill-fated “unsinkable” ship. Jesus put it another way:

Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?
—Luke 13:4 ESV

What does all this have to do with business practices in the 21st century?

If we are not prepared, if we’ve no answers, we cannot count on escaping the natural outcome of the business trends of our times. Given how the Church in America is ignoring many damaging business practices, many will surely go down with the figurative ship when it finally strikes the iceberg.

We simply can’t ignore the problems anymore.

As we’ve seen in this series, the Industrial Revolution helped Social Darwinism gain traction and change the entire structure of the world economy. It also took parents out of their home to work in a remote factory/business, ultimately harming the family unit in the process by creating fracture lines that were never intended by God.

The Church’s response to these upheavals has been one of initial assent and reactions to problems after the fact instead of decisive actions ahead of the trends. This has led us to a day in which many Church and parachurch organizations simply mouth the status quo when it comes to work and employment issues that confront the average Christian employee.

Plenty of fingers point in thousands of directions by well-meaning Christians attempting to out the causes of the cultural death-throes we see around us. Yet the fact that our business practices may be a major component of the downward spiral is never questioned by Christians. Christian authors write Christian books about how to be Christian business leaders without ever questioning if the fundamental structure of business itself is hopelessly broken. Well-known pastors hold up Christian business leaders as examples, particularly to men, but never ask if the very system those leaders uphold is deviant at its core.

You can plate a 1975 AMC Pacer in 24k gold, but underneath all that gilding it’s still an ugly, undependable wreck of a car.

Folks, it’s not about the right to have a “Footprints in the Sand” poster in your cubicle. It’s not about being able to hold a lunch-break Bible study on company grounds. It’s not about adapting wisdom from Solomon to your job. All those are incidentals that ultimately will not make a shred of difference unless we get to the heart of today’s business practices and the Darwinian engine driving them.

The litany of corporate ills brought about by Darwinism is lengthy, but I’ll highlight nine for further comment:

1. Selfishness & greed

2. Expediency

3. Globalization & consolidation

4. Offshoring, outsourcing, and H-1B visas

5. Age-ism

6. Downsizing

7. The forced elimination of the Middle Class

8. Unnatural family situations that lead to stress and family breakdowns

9. Corrupt business practices adopted as models for the Church.

I noted in the second installment in this whole series (Economic Systems) that I believe that capitalism is the best economic system we’ve got—when it’s governed by a Christian worldview. That latter part is critical. But Christianity no longer informs business practices, Darwinism does. And at the heart of Darwinism is selfishness.

One of the most popular Darwinian tomes of the last fifty years is Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The title alone says it all. Darwinism’s main goal is for an organism to pass along its genetic material at all cost. In a corporation this means that the corporate “genetic material” is more important anything. And that “anything” can include ethical behavior, loyalty to employees, and environmental responsibility.

A study several years ago tracked the outcome of a structured game played with multiple players. There were two ways to win the game: an individual player could try to gain more chips than his two closest competitors combined (win-lose), or all players could cooperate toward a common goal that allowed each person playing to meet winning conditions (win-win). Gordon—Greed is Good!In trial after trial, all the participants tried the win-lose scenario of cornering the market on chips. Because the win-lose scenario was easier to play but almost impossible to achieve, no one ever won the game. Even when individuals began noting this, they still played the win-lose scenario simply because the other players were. Now the win-win scenario required some foresight and thinking to achieve, but could be accomplished far more easily than the win-lose outcome. Yet time and again players refused to play the win-win game even though it was actually more challenging and fun to play. A clear winner and loser were necessary. Darwinism’s conceit is that it speaks to the natural, unredeemed man fluently, while Christianity speaks a language only a few understand.

Because of this, Darwinism plays well in America because our country’s story is founded on people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps—at least that’s the common interpretation. But historians will tell you that the American story is truly one of outstanding cooperation toward common goals. Yet we hear the “self-made man” mantra over and over to the detriment of the real story.

American business has undermined capitalism informed by a Christian worldview by substituting Darwinism at the base. Companies too often play like the individual at the game table trying to corner the market. “I win, you lose.” While some people may think this is the whole point of capitalism, rather it’s the whole point of the Darwinism that we exchanged for Christ’s mandate of “win-win.” By its very nature, Darwinism’s win-lose functionality creates a class-structured society and amplifies its extremes. At its most pure, Darwinism’s selfishness only promotes two classes: winners and losers. Win-win is off the radar.

The only possible outcome of selfishness is greed; the selfish can never have enough.

I read The Wall Street Journal nearly every day. Over the last five years I’ve noticed an astonishing trend. Time and again I would read snippets of corporate quarterly announcements that went something like this:

XYZ Industries today announced record profits for the quarter ending June 30th. The $107 million windfall is a 31% increase over this quarter last year. “Mining new markets has been the key,” said J.J. Shekel, CFO. “Our Asian strategy has allowed us to leverage niches in China that previously had been shuttered by internal government squabbles.” XYZ Industries also reported that it will undergo a 3,000 person reduction in force by the end of the year. “We must compete in a global space and only a leaner XYZ is able to do so,” Mr. Shekel concluded.

The WSJ usually has about a dozen of these little business reports every day. On one day alone, I counted three companies that reported record profits, but then added they’d be downsizing the very people that got them those record profits.

For the selfish corporate gene, nothing matters—even people—as long as the gene survives till next quarter. That’s a win-lose mentality. And its Darwinian rationale is always that the downsized employees will get on better somewhere else. And if they don’t, well, the company doesn’t want to hear about it because, well, it’s bad for corporate karma.

When XYZ Industries prefers record profits over its own people, expediency is at the base of the reasoning. “We made it with 7,000 employees; we can make it with 4,000.” No one is asking if a better way exists that might take time to achieve, but would be win-win for the company and ALL its employees. (I’ll talk about this win-lose devaluation of people when I discuss Jack Welch in the coming analysis of Downsizing.) Noted in the previous entry in this series, Binding the Business Strongman, the wholesale replacement of Christian workplace practices with Darwinian thought has rendered all business practices short-term. Companies are simply interested in what happens quarter over quarter. As long as they can demonstrate to shareholders that they’ve profited in a quarter, everyone looks the other way.

A Christian worldview doesn’t operate this way. Christianity is an eternal view; it is lasting and thinks about permanence. But the mantra of business today is “Adapt or die.” (Notice the Darwinian terminology!”) The obvious problem with this concerns what exactly needs to be changed and in what timeframe. The problem facing business is that the quarterly nature of business processes means change has to be implemented rapidly. This leads to natural short-sightedness and a “Me, too” practices mentality. Plenty of damage results.

Dell Computer is a perfect example of how to do it wrong. Long the high-flyer in the computer biz, Dell stumbled badly when it moved all its support call centers to India. However, knowledgeable business customers did not want to talk to a tech in India reading a pat answer off an internal Web page; they wanted to talk with someone who actually troubleshot computers and software. Nor did they like having their telephone rep call himself “Mike” when it was obvious his name was more likely Rajneesh. Dell’s business customers had a fit and Dell was forced to move at least one call center back to the United States in the wake of corporate customer defections.

The problem here is that Dell fell into the conventional short-term Darwinian wisdom. Instead of asking the Christian worldview question, “What is best for our customers long-term?” they asked “What is everyone else doing to save money right now and how quickly can we join that crowd?” And they got burned by it by insulting their most informed (and most cash-rich) customers.

This has been a considerable amount to digest, so I’ll cut it short here. We’ll continue looking at the rest of the list of issues in the next installment of this series, The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 2.

Previous post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #7: Binding the Business Strongman

Next post in this series: The Christian & the Business World #9: The Redemption of Corporate America, Part 2

The Christian & the Business World #6: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 3

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World War I stuck a dagger in the heart of Christian triumphalism and capped the rise of postmillennialism. The war over, America was ready to party for any and all reasons, yet it was the intellect that took the fore.

Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Sanger, Huxley, Russell and Darwin were in vogue. It was all the rage to talk “high and mighty,” and name-dropping of this theorist or that philosopher was commonplace. By now, German higher criticism of the Bible was catching on in the “enlightened” theology departments at the oldest Christian colleges in the nation—Harvard, Yale, and others founded before 1800—and was crushing the life out of true biblical thought there. (Today, it’s hard to believe that schools such as these were founded to produce godly pastors. We’ve learned the lesson of our lack of vigilance the hard way.) Science and philosophy provided every answer and there wasn’t a major city that didn’t feature some form of “World of Tomorrow” exhibit for the residents to explore. Old ideas died or foundered and new ones took their place. It was an age of rationalism in the midst of dance marathons.

Again, the Church had a response to the rationalism, but it was not the measured response of earlier days founded on solid biblical principles. The post-WWI Church found itself in the grip of a Jesus never before considered.

By the 1920s, it was possible to carry a business card and have it say nothing more than “Businessman” and no one would think twice about such a title. Investing in the stock market was a rich man’s habit and a lesser man’s gamble. More than a hundred years of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of corporate America had so benumbed the Church that when President Calvin Coolidge remarked, “The man who builds a factory, builds a temple. Jesus, CEOThe man who works there, worships there,” it wasn’t given much fuss.

Part of the reason for this lack of condemnation from the Church (apart from the fact that most conservative theologians were busy fighting the battle against higher criticism) was the runaway success of a peculiar little book written by one of the age’s most noted advertising experts, Bruce Barton. His 1925 title The Man Nobody Knows: A Biography of Jesus portrayed the Lord as the “founder of modern business.” And if Jesus Himself had been co-opted, neither would the apostles escape the grasp of the syncretism of business and Christianity, for Barton called them “the greatest sales force in history.”

Looking at Jesus more as CEO than Lord reflected an age when the front pages of newspapers were dedicated to the lifestyles of families such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and Gettys. Heirs and heiresses to these fortunes commanded center stage. The captains of industry were the role models for the little man. After all, the history of America was the history of pioneers and men who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Each of those wealthy families was headed by a self-made man who had cornered a market by going against the flow. They had a destiny to fulfill, power to grasp, and a dominant will that could take them anywhere. Some of them even went to church on Sundays, and churches were often the beneficiaries of their trusts and philanthropy. In many ways, they were portrayed as the saviors of their times.

Barton’s book was a phenomenon. The fourth bestselling book of 1925, it climbed to number one the following year. Ultimately, The Man Nobody Knows spent more than two years in the top ten. So popular was it that it’s still available for sale today—a rare feat for a non-fiction title from the 1920s. In the end, millions of men and women were intrigued by the “Business Jesus.” Their fears that Corporate America might just be rolling over them were allayed by the fact that Jesus Himself was a businessman. And so the faithful partnership the modern Church in America extended to business was set in stone, a permanence we still feel today.

1925 was a watershed year for another reason, except this one took place far from the reaches of the big city. John Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, violated the Volunteer state’s constitutional ban against teaching Darwinism in public schools. His trial garnered massive media attention when William Jennings Bryan, failed three-time Democratic candidate for President, signed on as the prosecutor in the case. Bryan became the champion of Christian fundamentalism when pitted against the defendant’s legal counsel, the avowed atheist Clarence Darrow. The trial was broadcast live and radio audiences ate up every second of legal chicanery and posing wrought by both sides.

We all know how the trial ended, but the battle had been lost years before. Darwinism had come to flower in Britain more than fifty years previous, so America was just another step in the long parade. In fact, Social Darwinism, the idea that evolutionary theory explains sociological constructs, had found its perch long ago in business practices. Some people had and some didn’t; prosperity was a function of superior breeding, intellect, and other less classifiable “genetic predispositions.” Natural selection supposedly explained this fact. The witness of the newspapers and their constant trailing after the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and Gettys cemented this in the minds of average Americans.

There were other depths reached by Social Darwinism during this time. The growing eugenics movement championed by noted psychologist Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger (the founder of what became Planned Parenthood), and a large swath of Catholic and Protestant leaders (either frustrated postmillennialists or those who had succumbed to the liberal theology that had formed from higher criticism), openly worked to separate the genetically pure from the corrupted. The “corrupted” in this case were the usual suspects: immigrants, blacks, and the “lower classes,” in general. Those lower classes were usually determined by one thing: their business status. The vile classism that Social Darwinism fostered had started all the way back in the factories of Britain and had now come to signify the vile racism behind a “Master Race.”

It would be hard to imagine that eugenics and the Social Darwinism that had cultivated it would have been possible without the drastic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. If the United States had remained a home-based economy (and free of slavery uniformly), proponents of Social Darwinism would have found it harder to draw the distinctions they promoted simply because any imagined underclass would not have existed.

Instead, the disconnect between what the Bible said about God’s view of Man and what Social Darwinism proclaimed began to tear at the fringes of the Church. A typical churchgoer would mouth the words of hymns, recite Bible verses, and read the Scriptures, but when Monday rolled around it was off to work and the Darwinian dynamic that had subsumed most business practices took over. Some climbed the corporate ladder and some didn’t—to those with a conflicted worldview, the supremacy of Darwin over Christ seemed clear. Better to be a wealthy Darwinian than a poor Christian.

Even today, the fallout of this mentality reigns in Corporate America. People work eight or more hours a day in an environment controlled by a worldview that is, quite simply, anti-Christian, yet few understand the pernicious nature of the worldview governing most of our work. Most of today’s business buzzwords have a distinctly Darwinian source when examined closely. In Christian circles, particularly in men’s groups, the business mantra is to be a “leader.” However, more often than not, “leader” does not mean “servant,” but rather “the one who made it to the top of the food chain.” Jesus is looking for disciples and it is the nature of disciples to be followers. But the average Christian bookstore would quickly fold if it sold Christian business books that claimed to teach people (men especially) how to be good followers.

And so we come to 2005. The troika of the Industrial Revolution, Social Darwinism, and a Church crippled by biblical higher criticism, rationalism, and a dulled reaction time to the sociological changes occurring around it, have spawned the business environment we work in every day. Most folks are oblivious to the insidious nature of Darwinism at work and its stranglehold on most company cultures and practices. That stranglehold extends to the Church, too, as “Jesus, CEO” continues to be the predominant thinking among Christian business leaders and authors who write business books for the Christian market, their failure being the inability to question if the foundation upon which today’s work world exists is actually the wrong foundation. Worse still, if they’ve supported the wrong foundation for business, why are they co-opting that foundation for the Church itself?

In the next installment of The Christian & the Business World, we’ll examine modern business assumptions and what they mean for all of us who work. Look for Binding the Business Strongman in the next day or so.

Previous post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #5: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 2

Next post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #7: Binding the Business Strongman

The Christian & the Business World #5: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 2

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Children in the MillsJuvenile delinquency and young women falling prey to the vice of the city—both were created due to massive shifts in the work lives of Americans during the Industrial Revolution. Both saw the Church in this country rise to meet the challenge.

In the case of the young women, in 1877 a relatively new organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), stepped in to address the need. Seeing that many unmarried women were fleeing the farms in search of a better life in the city (or were part of the immigration stampede into the country), the YWCA decided to proactively deal with the problem of unskilled women moving into the city. Foresight proved them correct. The newly invented typewriter was a huge draw for women looking for decent work, and the YMCA started offering classes in the use of the device. These classes were remarkably popular and the pool of trained secretaries in the major cities was largely due to the YWCA. That organization also saw to the spiritual needs of the women, as well as to housing, medical provisions, and keeping oneself pure in a business environment that was so new that the rules were still being written even as the YWCA was teaching them.

The alternative for single women flooding into the city was often prostitution and the YWCA understood this. By meeting a great need, they were able to help keep women on a straight moral path and provide for food, shelter, and spiritual growth. This is the Church making the best of what could have been an awful situation.

This flight also contributed to the problem of delinquency. Once an important cog in the home economy, teenagers were left with nothing to do once farms were abandoned and factory reforms prevented the younger ones from working. Restless, farm-flight and immigrant children proved that idle hands were the devil’s play things. Crime rocketed up in the cities. The Church’s answer was a new idea: What if a ministry was founded that focused solely on the needs of youth?

Despite many years of research, I have not been able to pin down the exact date that a genuine youth-only ministry within a specific church first hit the spotlight. The first parachurch youth ministry of consequence was, interestingly enough, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Britain in the 1840’s, created by George Williams specifically to address the vagrancy of young men who, in this case, did have jobs in the factories, but were without family or away from home and were missing a fulfilled life. The YMCA grew rapidly and spread to America, only to be depleted by the Civil War as young men marched into battle. After the war, one of the major proponents of the YMCA, which was by all accounts not beholden to any one church, was evangelist Dwight Moody. His fame helped spread the YMCA vision of “The improvement of the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.”

From the parachurch YMCA, the focus began to drift back to churches in smaller locales that couldn’t afford a YMCA; some started their own ministries to youth. This helped further propel the whole concept that youth were a new ministry demographic. All this came about through the societal changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. By the time Youth for Christ was popular in the 1940s, the idea that youth ministry was essential to the Church was a given.

But there are larger issues at work here.

Training women to have meaningful work in order to avoid a dissolute life is the Church meeting a practical business need while fending off corrupt social forces. On the other hand, youth ministry had its start in changes in the social fabric in Britain and America, then extended those to the spiritual. There is a very subtle distinction here.

Youth ministry’s long-term effect has been to take a family already fractured by societal changes caused by business practices coined during the Industrial Revolution and fracture it even further. While there is no doubt that on a granular level youth ministry has been effective in the lives of individuals (I include myself here), studies by researchers like George Barna have shown that, on the whole, the net effect of youth ministry today has been negligible on the spiritual and emotional welfare of youth. Christian youth are so much like their peers who don’t aspire to any Christian leanings as to be virtually indistinguishable. This is further proven by the horrendous attrition rate among Christian young people once they hit college. The majority come out of college completely stripped of whatever Christian faith and practice they possessed going in. Obviously, one must ask why this is if youth ministry were truly equipping youth to withstand the barrages of our cultural death-throes. We must consider whether the youth ministry model that was initially developed more than a hundred and sixty years ago is still valid.

The problems of youth ministry are compounded by the fact that it eventually sought to distance itself from conventional, whole-family ministry. In its infancy, youth ministry attempted to make the best of a bad situation in the lives of youth living far from home, but this is no longer the case. Most youth ministries in churches today appear to pride themselves on the fact they offer teens a chance to get away from their families and hang out with other teens. The net effect here has been that the typical youth minister has become the substitute parent for many teens. Since youth ministry tends to have its own separate teaching component, the incidental effect has been that parents have abdicated the Christian teaching role for their teens. This further alienates family members and leads to a loss of parental authority and respect.

The Industrial Revolution was responsible for the initial splits within family. The home economy that kept both parents at home working, supported by their children, was disrupted by changes in work emphasis and the rise of big business. Dads started working distantly and were gone for most of the day. This put added stress on moms to hold the family together. As work shifted to the cities, young people heard the siren call and left their traditional responsibilities behind. For farm families, this shattered the procession of farm life from one generation to another and hastened the move to cities. Youth moving to the cities encountered vice and the Church responded.

The larger question here that is left unanswered is whether the response of the Church was correct.

On the surface, the YWCA’s training of young women for secretarial work in light of the rise of business in the cities is admirable. They certainly addressed the need and were smart in doing so. But that larger question looms, particularly in the light of more than a hundred years of wisdom asks whether the Church missed the big picture for the details.

Even today, the Church is not asking whether the Industrial Revolution broke something, not only in society, but in the Church. In many ways, the Industrial Revolution was already in its maturity before the Church responded to it. Worse, still—and even today—no one in the Church in America is asking if the Industrial Revolution has a fundementally evil component that the Church swallowed without thinking. The Church certainly responded to the most obvious societal ills created by the Industrial Revolution as we have seen in part here, and while that was admirable, the results have been mixed.

In the next installment, The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 3, we’ll examine the “Jesus as CEO” concept that gained popularity in the 1920s and 30s along with Social Darwinism’s pernicious effects on the Church and business.

And thanks for reading this series!

Previous post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #4: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 1

Next post in the series: The Christian & the Business World #6: The Industrial Church Revolution, Part 3