There's a Behind The Bastards two-parter on How The Rich Ate Christianity (I'm on mobile and lazy so you'll have to websearch for it.) It reveals all.

TLDR / RANT There were a bunch of industrialists who were really sore about FDR's New Deal. And yes, this is to say they liked the US public living in shantytowns and eating flour paste and boot leather. This is the futue Bezos and Musk want for you!

So the New Deal happened and Disney and Ford and Edison and other industry bros went to their volcano clubhouse to build a plan to sell capitalism to the people. (If it weren't for the New Deal, the public was looking at Lenin's project with intense interest.)

In walks James W. Fifield Jr. who made himself a Protestant cathedral, the first megachurch. Fifield was way in debt so he appealed to millionaires by preaching a version of Christianity that downplayed all that charity and mercy stuff in favor of calvinist virtues of hard work and being rich means God loves you.

And this worked. Fifield payed off his church. Meanwhile the industrialists poured money into their young propaganda project that mixed this new supply-side Christianity with American Exceptionalism and the Red Scare.

Enter Jerry Falwell in the 60's. Falwell was super sore about the legalization of interracial marriage and the end of segregation. Friends of Falwell had schools they wanted to be white-only, which just became illegal. So, he forged the Moral Majority, a bloc of Republican voters who (Falwell checks his notes) hate abortion.

The Moral Majority got Reagan elected by a landslide (a real landslide, not what Trump did in 2024) at which point all the election regulations were deactivated so that lobbyists could openly bribe candidates and buy elections.

By then Christianity mostly looked like the White Nationalist Evangelism we see today. It's essentially a monarchist ideology that people who have power (money, real property, etc) should be able to keep it all and use it however they want. And it says so in the bible (no matter what the scholars say).

Also in the 1980s, the Republican intelligentsia totally knew their policies, e.g. the prison industrial complex, would lead to the very precipice of fascist one-party autocracy that we're staring down in this moment in December, 2024. So any of the big-name Republicans who are saying the GOP has too far, are totaly complicit. They toed the line even in the aughts when the George W. Bush administration was totally seizing power and pushing the limits of decorum...and torturing people.

They knew, and did it anyway, for money and power. And those who never-Trumped still believed in the policies that would hand their party over to new charismatic autocratic strongmen. They're lying to us, or maybe they're lying to themselves.

Anyway Christianity today is a warped subversion of what it was a century ago. And it shows us that money really can control minds until we all love Big Brother like Winston.