The Apostle to Millionaires

The United States has a complicated relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the First Amendment to the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. On the other hand, the country’s past includes a litany of deeply religious people who frequently have held religious beliefs as a major identification. At times, different groups have entangled what makes a person “American” with their religiosity.

And that’s where this fellow comes into the story.

This is the Reverend James W. Fifield Junior (1899-1977), and he played a key role in fusing Christianity, free market politics, and American-ness that galvanized business leaders and many Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian Christian ministers to join philosophies and forces, paving the way for the modern Christian alt-right movement that exists today.

Although originally from Missouri, Fifield moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, making a new start in southern California like so many others at the time. Fifield headed up the First Congregational Church there, and quickly drove membership up, largely among the wealthy. He was known as “the Apostle to Millionaires”.

Unsurprisingly, then, Fifield preached a kind of Christian libertarianism that overtly condemned the New Deal spearheaded by FDR. By this point, the president had succeeded in promoting many socialist policies that ate at the profits of America’s rich and assisted public programs to help out during the depression.

Fifield was the founder and president of a group called Spiritual Mobilization, which was funded by many corporate leaders and propagated a message emphasized ethics of industriousness and free-market individualism. All of this Fifield tied to “American-ness”, with the idea that opposing any component of Christianity, America, or strident capitalism would mean to oppose them all.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower came to office, the country was primed for a new direction that identified America as “one nation under God,” which at the time was an innovative use of the phrase.