Have you ever heard of “biblical economics”? At first blush, you might presume that the phrase must involve the application of love-thy-neighbor moral teachings to business practices and economic policy. There is indeed a long and varied tradition of applying various principles associated with Christianity to matters of economic concern. Some American Protestants of the late nineteenth century, such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, promoted a “social gospel” that encouraged Christians to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and oppressed working classes. Dismayed and outraged by conditions in urban slums, especially among immigrant communities, they fought for workers’ rights, the end of child labor, and a more just and equitable distribution of wealth.
The Catholic Worker Movement of the early twentieth century likewise promoted a social teaching that sought to advance social justice and prioritize the needs of the poor and other vulnerable populations. Latin Americans of the 1960s developed a “liberation theology” that insisted that Christian teaching must begin with the plight of the marginalized and oppressed. And prominent Black theologians from Martin Luther King Jr. to the Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas have underlined the ethical obligation of Christians to fight for racial equality and other forms of social justice.
Today, some Christian groups carry on this traditional concern with economic justice and join in the struggle against exploitive practices such as offshoring, money laundering, and other forms of tax evasion. The Joseph Centre for Dignified Work, a project of the London church St Katharine Cree, published a booklet, titled A Theology of Financial Transparency and tied to an exhibition on the same theme, which denounced the “250 billion [pounds] diverted from 79 countries through bribery, hidden ownership, embezzlement and the unlawful acquisition of assets,” and asserted that “financial transparency is ultimately a matter of Justice rooted in who God is and how human communities are called to flourish.”
Current events are awash in the same. Pope Leo’s recently released encyclical included a sharply worded critique of the widening wealth gap and warned that an economy based on artificial intelligence could create “‘second-class’ humans.” And the Texas Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton is unfolding as a public debate over the meaning of the faith: Is Christianity a religion of empathy and neighborly love, as Talarico asserts, or one of religious authoritarianism?
But if you have spent time with MAGA-aligned Christian nationalist groups, you will have noticed a radically different vision. According to the people who brought us Donald Trump, Christianity appears to have two main lessons for the economic world. The first is that God does not want the government to assist the poor or to support the rights of the workforce, and He hates even more any attempt to regulate the “free market.” In short, God is a tough-love leader, a hard-right-winger in economics. The second lesson is that the workplace is a mission field, and faithful men and women in charge have an opportunity—a duty!—to evangelize their employees.
There are perhaps as many historical precedents for this brand of top-down, tough-love biblical economics as there are for the more just versions mentioned above. In the Middle Ages, it was called feudalism. In the United States in the nineteenth century, proslavery theologians such as Robert Louis Dabney and James Henley Thornwell updated the plan with the suggestion that the great task of America’s ultra-Christian slaveholders was to keep the federal government away so that they themselves might deliver a saving gospel to the benighted people thankfully removed from Africa.
In twentieth-century America, enterprising evangelists such as James W. Fifield Jr.—whose funding sources included Gulf Oil and Chrysler—and Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, spread the message that American business leaders have a friend in Jesus, who positively abhors New Deal programs to support labor rights and fortify the social safety net, as well as anything that carries the slightest whiff of communism.
Rousas John Rushdoony, the extremist theologian godfather of Christian Reconstructionism and one of the masterminds behind Ronald Reagan’s absorption of the religious right into the Republican Party, synthesized the version of biblical economics that prevails on the American right today. Drawing explicitly on America’s proslavery theologians as well as anti–New Deal reactionaries, he celebrated the system that America’s founders allegedly created not as a democracy, but as “a development of Christian feudalism.”
The First Amendment, he suggested, was really about a freedom for the Christian religion and a freedom from any kind of government that might otherwise prevent right-minded Christians from ruling in righteousness without fear of interference from bleeding-heart do-gooders, New Dealers, and other Communist sympathizers. Rushdoony churned out doctrinal works arguing that “capitalism is supremely a product of Christianity.” He cast public education and other government-funded public services as socialism, which he denounced as “organized larceny; like inflation, it takes from the haves to give to the have-nots.” In the 1950s and 1960s, when he was cranking out his tomes, Rushdoony might have looked, to most Americans, like a marginal figure. With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, his intellectual descendants reached the commanding heights of the nation’s political economy.
This year’s SWC 2026, a Christian business conference at the Doubletree by Hilton Orlando Theme Park Resort in Orlando, Florida, might have at first seemed like any of the thousands of business conferences that take place every year. Most attendees seemed happy to network with other business owners, enjoy collective worship, learn about new products and services, and hear from a roster of successful business-oriented speakers. SWC stands for “spiritual world citizens,” and indeed, the program drew a racially and geographically diverse cohort. Much of the event, like any other business conference, was about bonding with the like-minded in the hopes of generating new business opportunities. But it soon became clear that a key purpose of this conference was to encourage employers to use their economic muscle to “influence the unchurched,” according to the organization’s mission statement, and bind their employees more firmly to a form of the faith with a conservative or reactionary version of biblical economics at its core.
Anchoring the event was a group that calls itself America’s Christian Chamber of Commerce, which was initially founded in 2003 as the Central Florida Christian Chamber of Commerce. Onstage in a black business suit, yellow blouse, and high-heeled sneakers, founder Krystal Parker, the organization’s president and CEO, radiated positivity and can-do energy as she described how the organization has expanded in recent years to encompass over 30 state and regional chapters. “I believe that relationships are the strongest currency that we can ever have,” she said. “I really want to encourage you to think boldly, think strategically, write down what comes into your heart or spirit, and don’t miss what God is trying to do this week.”
Though her tone was cheerful, subsequent speakers conveyed the impression that that group feels itself to be surrounded by enemies. Kevin D. Freeman, who authored Pirate Money: Discovering the Founders’ Hidden Plan for Economic Justice and Defeating the Great Reset and hosts a series called Economic War Room on Blaze TV, the TV network founded by Glenn Beck following his exit from Fox News, followed Parker onstage. Freeman’s message, delivered in a rapid-fire patter, was that righteous, God-fearing people are at war with Communists who want to lead them down the road to hell.
“In essence, the battle is between a communal system and capitalism. Evil, demonic communism. America is different because we’ve developed free market and personal responsibility,” Freeman told the crowd. “The bad news is that too many have forgotten and we have enemies ready to take us down.”
As Freeman continued, the paranoia grew thicker. “You need to prepare now because we’re facing four enemies, powerful enemies: the red, the green, the blue, and the yellow. The red is Communist from China, the green is Islamist and sharia law, the blue is globalist and ‘one-world government,’ and the yellow are the traitors and fools in our country selling us out.” The enemies list expanded to include the World Economic Forum, the “mayor of New York,” and even Richard Nixon, whom he castigated for taking the U.S. off the gold standard, doing deals with China, and visiting Saudi Arabia, unleashing what he called “the green horse.”
“They’re building mosques everywhere around us in Central Florida,” Freeman intoned. When they are not opening the door to sharia, he suggested, the traitors aim “to take over the economy and create a one-world government.”
Eventually it became clear that the real enemy was the American people themselves. “You know we don’t live in a democracy? We live in a constitutional republic!” he said, drawing applause from the crowd. “Democracies can only last 250 years. Because people will vote themselves benefits out of the treasury. And all democracies will be followed by dictatorships and will always fail.”
Though Freeman may sound like just another nut careening in from the fringes of American conspiracism, he has the backing of major players in today’s Christian nationalist movement. The first 13 pages of his book Pirate Money feature a long list of endorsements from, among others, the late Charlie Kirk, whose Turning Point USA has proved a vital vehicle for youth recruiting and voter turnout; Chad Connelly, a key player in the Council for National Policy and founder of a powerful faith-based voter turnout operation called Faith Wins; former U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann; Rick Green, a close associate of the Christian nationalist history-spinner David Barton; Justin Hawkins, the director of the “Socialism Research Center” at the Heartland Institute, which has received money from fossil fuel interests; and Dr. Cindy Jacobs, a leader of a fast-growing religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.
Freeman has been a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour, the traveling conspiracy-ridden roadshow drawing thousands to megachurches around the country. His work as a radio host includes interviewing a roster of MAGA-aligned figures, who generally nod along as he peddles his message that “the dollar-based framework is about to fail” and that “state-based transactional modern pirate money (gold and silver) is the answer! It is the gold (and silver) bullet to stop the Great Reset.”
Subsequent speakers at SWC 2026 circled back to the main agenda: that business leaders have a right and a duty to “advance the kingdom,” mainly by “inviting” their employees to convert to righteousness in the workplace. Taking the stage in business casual attire, Bill Yeargin, CEO of Correct Craft, a boating and manufacturing company with global operations, explained that “our mission is building boats to the glory of God.”
Named CEO of the Year by the Orlando Business Journal and the author of a book titled Mindset Matters, Yeargin spoke in calm, measured tones. The best leaders “don’t chase rewards,” he said. “They chase impact.
“As a leader of business we can reach people we never would have reach anywhere,” he said. By “reach” he meant simply evangelizing in the workplace. The bottom line for him was that “we have about 250 to 300 people a week that go to our Bible study.… We have people accept Christ and people are baptized in our lake at the plant.” Though Yeargin insisted that no employees were under any pressure to attend or participate in the soul-saving, his discussion seemed completely out of touch with basic workplace realities.
Religious liberty was a central theme among presenters and exhibitors at Orlando. Several insisted it is perfectly legal and constitutional for employers to “express their faith.” What looks like religious freedom to employers and bosses, however, may look rather different to employees in a precarious economy.
Several other speakers were there to convey the message that there are many legal and constitutional paths that permit employers to “express their faith.” A “kingdom sponsor” of the Orlando conference, as it happens, was LifeWise Academy, a fast-growing organization that offers “release time”—Bible study in public schools on steroids. Other sponsors included Corporate Chaplains of America, an organization that offers chaplains to serve as a faith-based “management resource” for “dealing with employees’ personal life issues” in employment settings, including those that are religiously diverse; and the Christian Employer Alliance, which aims to shield its members from “insurance coverage for drugs, procedures and services that violate deeply held religious convictions.” Yes, another way for employers to express their faith, one learned at the conference, is to deprive their employees of health care coverage for things of which the bosses disapprove.
Some speakers exhorted the crowd to “reclaim the mountain of business.” The reference here was to the Seven Mountains Mandate, popularized within charismatic Christian movements that assert that conservative Christians should dominate the seven “mountains,” or key features, of culture and society, which they cast as “taking dominion back from Satan.”
Also present at the Orlando event were representatives of the legal juggernauts of the Christian nationalist movement. A representative of Alliance Defending Freedom introduced a couple that claimed they were persecuted because they wanted to “live out our values” in the workplace. In the exhibition hall I picked up a 79-page booklet, published by Liberty Counsel, titled Abortion In Our Water: Chemical Home Abortions & the Disposition of Aborted Fetal Remains. Also on display was Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver’s book Take Back America, in which he writes, “Government is the least efficient system possible when it intrudes into the province of free enterprise,” and declares that America needs religion—his religion—because “a human-based system is a recipe for chaos.” When these and other groups talk about “religious liberty,” which they do loudly and often, they are invariably concerned with the freedom of one variety of religion, imposed on everybody else.
Under the semi-invisible hand of these activist groups, biblical economics is now a central feature of organizations across the Christian nationalist movement. Turning Point USA, now under the leadership of Charlie Kirk’s widow, is a case in point. TPUSA, according to its own promotional material, is “committed to educating, training, and organizing students to promote freedom.” As cha at Union University puts it, “Turning Point USA believes that every young person can be enlightened to true free market values.” A survey of the group’s videos leaves little doubt about the nature of those “values.” In essence: The rich deserve every penny they have; the poor are responsible for their own misfortune; and government should never, ever step between man and the sacred marketplace. Not surprisingly, TPUSA is funded by, among others, the Bradley Impact Fund, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, Foster Friess, and various Koch brothers–affiliated groups, such as the Foundation for Economic Education, DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund.
The end state for which the MAGA-inflected version of Christian feudalism is prefigured in one of the eeriest books of our time, Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Owned by America’s wealthiest family, Walmart is also the nation’s largest single employer, with approximately 1.6 million employees. From the outside, it doesn’t look like an especially friendly place for the workers of the world. It routinely uses market power to depress workers’ wages, impose harsh working conditions, and oppose any form of worker representation or rights, even as it steamrolls small producers and impoverishes entire communities so consistently that it has given us a new term for the strip-mining of social capital: the “Walmart effect.”
From the inside, however, as Moreton shows, it is clear that Walmart sees itself as a paragon of a Christian corporation. From its start in the Ozarks—a massive plateau spanning several states and a stronghold of fundamentalist Christian belief—the organization offers its employees plenty of opportunity to exercise their (conservative Christian) faith. The company has faced high-profile gender discrimination lawsuits; Moreton suggests the company reflects an evangelical “complementarian” view of gender order in its hiring and promotion. Members of the Walton family, which controls Walmart, have donated millions to conservative organizations, and are especially robust in their support for “school choice” initiatives that drain funding for public education by diverting it to private, religious, and charter schools.
Interestingly, as Moreton points out, Sam Walton, the company founder, was not a fundamentalist himself; he and his wife attended a branch of a liberal Presbyterian church. But he soon recognized the advantages of incorporating strands of fundamentalist ideology into his corporate practice. Though the underpaid masses who work at Walmart aren’t quite serfs, and the Walton family aren’t quite the lords and ladies of the castle, one can see parallels with the medieval political economy: In a sense, this is feudalism for the modern world—and the logical destination of the biblical economics of the MAGA movement.
The MAGA version of neo-feudal biblical economics has inspired some resistance from many active Christians who remain committed to the love-thy-neighbor vision of faith. Steven Schneck, President of Catholics for the Future, a recently formed political action committee concerned with advocating for the Catholic social justice position in public life, explained his position to The New Republic. “The very heart of Catholic social justice teaching is the idea of the common good. And hard-right economics that celebrates the individual in competition with other individuals hoping for some God-blessed success is fundamentally contrary to the Catholic idea of the common good,” he said. Schneck pointed out that Jesus spoke about the poor more than any other group in society. “For us Catholics, the measure of any economy is how the poor are treated. Not the GDP.”
Schneck has especially stern words for the plan to have business leaders turn their workplaces into mission fields. “As a good Christian, I’m an evangelist too. I would like to bring people to the God I believe is my savior,” he allows. “But I think it is fundamentally wrong to leverage people’s jobs and salaries in this kind of exploitive way.”
Josh Burtram, the lead pastor and founder of River City Underground church in Richmond, Virginia, who describes himself as a conservative Republican and collaborates with veteran Will Wright on the podcast Faithful Politics, offered a similar perspective from an evangelical slant. “The prophets do not treat economic exploitation as a secondary social issue. They present it as a theological crisis,” he told The New Republic. “They expose how distorted theology can sanctify injustice. False religion gives people moral permission to exploit others while imagining themselves faithful to God.”
Is Christian economics about loving thy neighbor, or is it about loving thy boss? From a wide historical perspective, the battle between these two versions of Christian economics seems like an eternal one. For those not practiced in the theological arts (I certainly am not), the dispute doesn’t appear to be resolvable on purely religious grounds. Who am I to say whether either of these two schools, or any of the innumerable others that claim descent from Jesus, is the authentic religion? It does, however, seem possible to judge which group is winning the day at any historical moment. And the obvious factor in deciding the battle, as ever, is money.
The proslavery theologians, for example, were the undoubted victors in their heyday, and their success surely had something to do with the fact that the slaveholding class had accumulated a degree of wealth hitherto unparalleled in the U.S. political economy. The God-and-country warriors of the postwar period, on the other hand, though influential, exercised substantially less power in a period of relatively economic equality and expanding civil rights.
At the moment, the religion of money-is-power is clearly in ascendance. Russell Vought, a big believer in MAGA-style biblical economics and a self-identified Christian nationalist, has been leading the charge for feudalism within the Trump administration. As head of the Office of Management and Budget, he has overseen the slashing of federal funding for social welfare programs, ending environmental protections, shuttering regulatory agencies, loosening career protections for government employees, and deregulating corporations.
His work draws from support from a sector of the superwealthy (the same sector that funded his work on Project 2025), and it, in turn, contributes to rising wealth inequality. According to the Federal Reserve, the amount of wealth held by the top 1 percent of Americans increased at more than double the rate of the bottom 90 percent in the first nine months of last year. We can be confident that a sizable share of this wealth will trickle into the organizations that have lifted Vought to power and are vigorously promoting the tough-love version of biblical economics.
With that in mind, I asked Schneck what he made of the economic terrain in the present theological conflict between the hard-right version of biblical economics and the social gospel. He knew right away what I was talking about. He knew all about the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from the besieged billionaires to the infrastructure of the Christian nationalist movement, which has married hard-right economics with reactionary positions in the culture wars. Then I asked him what his budget was. He hemmed at first, from some sort of embarrassment. Then, reminding himself that to be among the meek was no shame in his understanding of his religion, he confessed. “We’re on about $80,000 a year,” he said.
This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
