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What's up y'all? Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.

My name is Brad O'Nishi and our shows hosted in partnership with the Cap Center.

Today we're doing another installment of X Evangelical Apologetics.

And today I want to talk about the idea that Christianity and capitalism go hand in hand.

Many of you I think have heard this from time to time.

I know some of you in our Patreon feed and Discord have mentioned that with family members and at church,

this was a common refrain.

The idea that individual ambition, private property and the free market are all sort of baked in to a biblical world view.

So let's talk about this and see if that holds up.

One of the things I like to do and one of the reasons I like history so much is to figure out where ideas came from.

And in this case, there's a pretty clear conception in an American history as to where we got these ideas that free market capitalism and Christianity go together.

If you listen to the Orange Wave and I'll just say today I'm going to do a brief episode.

But if you'd really like to dig into this, I'm going to give you two suggestions.

One, listen to the Orange Wave, especially the first two episodes.

And you will really get a nice explanation as to the history of everything I'm going to talk about today.

Number two, in the second episode and the third episode of the Orange Wave, I interviewed Gerardo Marty, who is a sociologist of religion.

The Gerardo Marty has written a great book called American Blind Spot, where he talks a lot about this history.

And here's what Marty says and here's, well, here's what he sort of argues.

And again, if you want more of this, either pick up the book or listen to the Orange Wave or do both.

But essentially what Gerardo Marty shows us is that in the mid 20th century, in the wake of the New Deal, there were a lot of business magnates who were very interested in promoting the interests of capitalist entrepreneurs.

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