Capitalism: A New Religion

The harlot daughters of the mother church begin to spread across the American colonies and carve out individual paths to eventual separation from the old world. Slavery, meanwhile, thrives as a result of increased trade created in a new market system, which, with the establishment of the United States, gives rise to capitalism, a new and far-reaching religion.

Show Transcript

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

Last Episode Next Episode All Episodes

Part 30: Capitalism: A New Religion

The American colonies were all commercial ventures on the part of England, intended to prop up their burgeoning empire through slave labor. To facilitate this expansive endeavor, forests were cleared, and the fields they yielded had to be tilled. That required settlers. Christians of various denominations were attracted to the new world and therefore migrated to different colonies, spreading their European culture and custom, which subsequently established the foundations of what would become America. The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Maryland, and the Dutch Reformed in New York. Lutherans from Sweden, Huguenots from France, Baptists from England, and Presbyterians from Scotland later settled the colonies as well. What is little discussed today is that each and every one of these Christian groups were steeped in the barbaric culture of colonial slavery. They each depended on Israelite slaves in order to eke out an existence or else thrive on American soil, including the Puritans, who sought to establish a “new Zion” in the New England wilderness, and failed.

With all of these various Christian groups clustered throughout the colonies, denominationalism began to emerge as a way to define the church as it then existed. The term denomination was popularized around 1740 at the time of the Evangelical Revival, spearheaded by men like George Whitefield and John Wesley, but the concept was well-cemented by Puritans of the mid-seventeenth century. The term differed from sectarianism, which implied that a particular sect was authoritative and enjoyed direct access to the Redeemer, and that sect alone. Sectarianism was exclusive, whereas denominationalism was inclusive. The argument that was eventually proposed (which amounts to conformity) was that a Christian group, being called by a particular name, was merely part of a larger group that comprised the entire church. And the church held all denominations. Of course, this view has since changed, and what Christianity has reverted to is sectarianism, even though each group still refers to itself as a denomination.

While Christianity was sorting itself out in the colonies, England was digging its heels into the slave trade and growing into a behemoth thereby. Author Gerald Horne wrote a book titled: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century America and the Caribbean. In that book, Horne wrote:

“[I]t is the seventeenth [century] that stands out conspicuously as the takeoff for London’s involvement in the nasty business of enslavement, which simultaneously delivered bounteous profits that set the stage for a racializing rationalization of inhumanity, while setting yet another stage for the takeoff of an enhanced capitalism. A recent study revealed that before 1581 there were no enslaved Africans brought to what was referred to as the ‘British Caribbean’ and ‘Mainland North America.’ From 1581 to 1640 there were scores br