The Money Cult by Chris Lehmann

Author:Chris Lehmann [Lehmann, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-509-4
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Diamond Dogma

So while the British social Darwinist Herbert Spencer might have commanded the bulk of the age’s elite intellectual attention on questions of economic achievement and cosmic design, the nation’s new class of business titans found much more accommodating explanations of their right conduct and metaphysical dominance coming from the prophets of the popular religious mind. And perhaps no one was better suited to champion the abundant supply of, well, spiritual supply than the celebrated Mind Cure apostle and Baptist minister Russell Conwell, the author of the best-known sermon of the age, “Acres of Diamonds”—an undeniable foundation text of the modern Money Cult.

While it’s always misleading to typecast a given thinker as the Zeitgeist on horseback (to borrow Hegel’s famous—if apocryphal—characterization of Napoleon), one would be hard pressed to find a better spiritual candidate for the distinction than Conwell. The Baptist preacher was, first of all, heir to the rich postmillennial tradition of New England reform: Conwell was raised by a devout Methodist family in Lexington, Massachusetts; the family home was a stop on the Underground Railroad; and the young Conwell regularly encountered fugitive slaves en route to eventual freedom in Canada. John Brown and Frederick Douglass were also guests of the elder Conwell, who ran a country dry goods store; Russell Conwell told a magazine profiler that his family prayed nightly for the deliverance of the captured Brown before he was hanged, and that his father considered selling his store to help fund the abolitionist’s defense.

At the urging of an area preacher, the overachieving young Conwell was enrolled in a preparatory boarding school, the Wilbraham Academy, and sold books door-to-door to help pay his tuition—an early tutelage in both the rigors of self-made young manhood and the art of salesmanship that would prove decisive in his later career. After the Civil War broke out, the nineteen-year-old Conwell, by then matriculating at Yale, enlisted in the Union Army in 1862, and his Berkshires regiment named him an officer in recognition of his precocious leadership skills. On furloughs home, the young officer would deliver rousing recruiting speeches; upon his discharge, he followed the example of his great provincial frontier hero Abraham Lincoln and was admitted to the bar, eventually launching a successful practice in Boston. He also was a well-known writer of popular biographies, including campaign-supported life studies of Republican presidential candidates James G. Blaine and James Garfield. In 1881, when an aging and shrinking Lexington Baptist congregation sought his legal assistance in liquidating their decrepit church, Conwell heard them out, but then quixotically proposed restoring the building instead. Finding this too great an undertaking, he set about demolishing the structure and raising money among Lexingtonians to erect a new one in its place.

Somewhere in the midst of this campaign, Conwell, who had felt an increasingly strong calling to the ministry after he’d abandoned his youthful Methodism for collegiate agnosticism, resolved to become a preacher. It’s revealing that, like other preachers and publicists in the emerging Money Cult tradition, he

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