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.
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 brought to each. But from 1641 to 1700, 15,000 Africans were brought to North America and 308, 000 to the ‘British Caribbean.’ Similarly, trade from Dutch forts in Africa amounted to about 700 of the enslaved yearly between 1600 and 1644 but would increase sixfold by the late 1660s. Europeans generally enslaved some two million Africans during the seventeenth century, half of them from West Central Africa and most of the rest from the states abutting today’s Ghana and the Bights of Benin and Biafra.”
Highlighting the subtitle of his book, Horne makes a further point that what has been praised as modernity actually bears the stain of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. “The bloody process of human bondage,” he stresses, is “the driving and animating force of this abject horror.”
For many centuries, Christianity in its various forms was dearly held by commoners, nobles, and other elite citizens. But with the “discovery” of the new world, and the expansion of various empires to the Americas, trade and capitalism overshadowed the religious ideals of those in power. Political pursuits also ranked high among the leading colonists, who desired a new republic that was free of monarchs. And those monarchs were able to fill their treasuries with spoils from the new world. The Roman papacy too, which held the power to initiate the slave trade, and did, benefited greatly from slavery. In fact, between the years 1573 and 1826, publications that were critical of slavery were placed on the official List of Prohibited Books, or, as it is called in Latin, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Author John Francis Maxwell, who published his book, Slavery and the Catholic Church, in 1975, says that writers who were critical of slavery were placed on the index prohibiting their works without any particular errors being specified. All of their opinions were simply condemned.
While the Papacy and the Spanish Empire reaped rich rewards through slavery and their devastating conquests of the sixteenth century, England eventually superseded them both, not only in terms of conquest, but through their control and expansion of the slave trade as well. But this too would not last.
“London was a prime beneficiary of this [systemic] cruelty.”
Writes Gerald Horne.
“England had a 33 percent share of the slave trade in 1673 and 74 percent by 1683. Of that dreadful total, the Royal African Company, under the thumb of the Crown, held a hefty 90 percent share in 1690, but with deregulation and the entrance into this sinfully profitable market by freelance merchants, this total had shrunk to 8 percent by 1701. This political and economic victory over monarchy by merchants also undergirded the ‘popular’ politics they represented, which eventuated in a republicanism that scored its paradigmatic triumph in 1776.”
The colonists who desired a new “monarch-free” republic, in other words, established that very republic in opposition to Great Britain on the basis of commerce.
With the founding of the United States of America, world trade and commerce grew exponentially decade after decade, and the slave trade was used to increase the wealth of nations throughout the world. In fact, as monarchies weakened over time, merchants rose to prominence and amassed power and wealth through increased trade. The merchant class of England, comprised of both Catholics and Protestants, were opposed to the commercial restrictions imposed upon them by King James II, which primarily prevented the engagement of direct trade with North America. Growing opposition led to what is called the Glorious Revolution of 1688 resulting in King James II being deposed (not the King James known for the bible translation, but his grandson). Parliament also began to assume primacy over the Crown.
The spirit of revolution spread to the United States as well, when powerful colonists broke with the English monarchy and Parliament in order to trade with whomever they wished. This of course led to the historic events of 1776, when the American colonies severed political ties to Great Britain. Capitalism flourished thereafter. Of this, Gerald Horne writes:
“[A]s the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new [deity], with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its ‘efficient market theory’ supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star. Management theorists have sanctified capitalism in much the same way that clergymen of yore sanctified feudalism. Business schools are cathedrals of capitalism. Consultants are its traveling friars. Just as the clergy in the days of feudalism spoke in Latin to give their words an air of authority, the myrmidons of capitalism speak in a similarly indecipherable mumbo-jumbo. To this day, a Reformation—akin to Martin Luther’s of 1517—has been delayed in arrival. Actually, reducing the present to capitalism is somewhat misleading since today’s status quo represents a complex mélange of vestiges of slavery—the still exploited African population in the United States and elsewhere—capitalism, and the feudalism from which it emerged.”
This new religion of capitalism and profit, which saw money-worshippers catering to the whims of the worldwide market system—as they do to this day—speaks to Yeshua’s words in Matthew 6:24:
[24] “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve Elohim and money.”
When we get to Revelation 18, which depicts the fall of Babylon and the end of the worldwide beast system which allowed her to live luxuriously, we see that the judgment meted out by Yah is largely aimed at the financial markets. These markets are fueled by merchants of the world, whose trade is disrupted, down to the efforts of the craftsman. Even mills are silenced, demonstrating the completeness of the demise of capitalism. And this corrupt financial system isn’t going to be replaced by another one, as part of a feared secular new world order; it will be replaced by Yah’s government and economy, as prophesied.
The seventeenth century, therefore, witnessed the rise of capitalism, which exists as the world’s most popular “religion” today, and others, beside Gerald Horne, are starting to realize that fact. The oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, the Nation, had this to say of one such person:
“Eugene McCarraher’s new book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, offers a different rendering of our modern age—one in which the mysteries and sacraments of religion were transferred to the way we perceive market forces and economic development. The new world that capitalism created, McCarraher argues, is characterized not by disenchantment but by a ‘migration of the [set apart]’ to the realm of production and consumption, profit and price, trade and economic tribulation. Capitalism, in other words, is the new religion, a system full of enchanted superstitions and unfounded beliefs and beholden to its own clerisy of economists and managers, its own iconography of advertising and public relations, and its own political theology—a view of history and politics that is premised on the inevitability of the capitalist system spreading across the world.”
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery was keenly examined by two editors, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Their book, Slavery’s Capitalism, reveals that slavery, which was America’s main engine for growth, was foundational to our modern economic system. In other words, absent the brutal period of enslaved Israelites, the world we live in today would not exist. The book actually opens with the following:
“During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States. Such a claim is at once self-evidently true and empirically obscure. A scholarly revolution over the past two decades, which brought mainstream historical accounts into line with long-standing positions in Africana and Black Studies, has recognized slavery as the foundational American institution, organizing the nation’s politics, legal structures, and cultural practices with remarkable power to determine the life chances of those moving through society as black or white. An outpouring of scholarship on nineteenth-century public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, popular culture, and patterns of everyday life leaves little doubt that the new United States was a ‘slaveholding republic.’ In comparison, only a small segment of recent scholarship has grappled with the economic impact of slavery.”
Put another way, it was a widely accepted fact that slavery was an American institution which shaped its politics, laws, and culture, based largely on racial identity. But not until very recently has the impact of slavery included the formation of the modern economy.
“Only in the past several years has scholarship on finance, accounting, management, and technology allowed us to understand American economic development as ‘slavery’s capitalism.’ And only now is there enough momentum to leverage some basic facts—that slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads and factories, that foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands in Louisiana and Mississippi, that the highest concentration of steam power in the United States was to be found along the Mississippi rather than on the Merrimack—into a fundamental rethinking of American history itself.”
In our LKP Documentary, Salt of the Earth, I stated: “Like salt, Hebrew Israelites have long been the backbone of many economies, especially during slavery, where we were bought and sold, and produced to fuel economic growth as much as salt.” That is no exaggeration. Israelites were a collective commodity in those slaveholding days, even a kind of currency if you will. In America, the old historic narrative would lead many to believe that there was a sharp North-South divide that saw the North shunning the South over slavery and having nothing to do with the peddling of human flesh.
New York City, infamous for being an important component of the triangle trade, dug its heels into flesh-peddling in 1626, when 11 souls captured in West Africa were brought to New Amsterdam against their will in heavy irons and forced to clear land, construct roads and unload ships. The lot at 74 Wall Street, nestled between Water and Pearl Streets, is now home to a towering condominium, but it was once a key auction block. Slave ships used to dock in the East River, while slaves were sold in an open-air market on the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets. And New York became a port city for the trade of Southern agricultural goods derived from slave labor that were thereafter handsomely packaged and shipped throughout the world. In fact, slave capital financed the creation of the New York Stock Exchange, currently the world’s largest stock exchange in terms of market capitalization, which amounts to tens of trillions of dollars, all told.
Other northern states benefitted from the slave trade as well, particularly as concerns the slave-labor products that flowed north. Of this, Beckert and Rockman write:
“Advocates of national economic development presumed the reciprocal relationship of the slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, as well as the mutual interests of the slaveholder, manufacturer, and merchant. ‘On the White mountains of New Hampshire we find the sugar of Louisiana, and in the plains beyond the Mississippi the cotton cloths of Rhode Island are domesticated,’ explained the famed editor Hezekiah Niles in 1827. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison recognized the North as a ‘partner in iniquity’ and credited the Panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South. In turn, southern nationalists lambasted northern sanctimoniousness. ‘Many of the abolitionists of the present day affect to have such tender consciences, and to feel such abhorrence of slavery, that they declare they will not wear the cotton of the South, because it has been cultivated by slaves,’ observed the Baltimore minister Alexander McCaine, ‘yet, these extremely sensitive, and preeminently holy characters, feel no qualms of conscience, to sell Southern planters their boots and shoes, their negro cloth, and all the et cetera that make up a cargo of Yankee notions, and put the money, arising from the labour of slaves, in their pockets.’”
While the Virginia colony was among the first to exploit Israelites for slave labor, it was not the first American colony to legally sanction the cruel servitude. The Massachusetts Bay Colony holds that distinction, when in 1641 it published the document the Body of Liberties, wherein “lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves are sold to us.” As seen in episode 24 of this podcast series, war had been the going pretext for enslavement since the infamous papal bull that gave the Portuguese the go-ahead to round up the descendants of Jacob from Africa’s west coast.
Protestant Boston, led by its clergy, would place profits above duty to the church by becoming a leading port in the slave trade, proving that the North aided in creating the thriving institution. In fact, all of New England saw great profits from slavery up until the American War for Independence. The year prior to the American Revolution, it has been learned that 5,000 souls had been enslaved in Connecticut—a paltry number compared to South Carolina or Virginia to be sure, but we’re talking about the North here. In the Preface of the book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, the authors wrote:
“[T]he number shocked us. How could we not know this? How could we not know, for example, that in 1790 most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave, as did 50 percent of the ministers? The federal census clearly showed this.”
The authors of Complicity also expressed that slaves in Connecticut lived on large farms that equaled the size of those in the South, and could also be considered plantations. In effect, their book clearly shows how the North helped create, strengthen, and prolong slavery in America, contrary to popular belief. The institution of slavery was fundamental to the growth of capitalism. And capitalism, it should be known, first flowered in Europe, under the Roman Catholic Church. Historian Randall Collins has confirmed this in his book Weberian Sociological Theory, which asserts that capitalism began during the High Middle Ages between 1050 and 1300 CE (which is a period we covered in episode 21), and “at its heart was the organization of the Catholic Church itself.”
The ecclesiastical portion of the church, with its administrative functions and papal bureaucracy, was the forerunner of the capitalism we see today, which includes the monastic orders. Even the church’s canon law, Collins argues, acted as a model for capitalism. Collins writes:
“The rationalized capitalism that emerged was, above all, that of the dynamic monastic movements, and the appropriately regulatory bureaucratic state that went along with it was not the secular states but the papacy in the period when it made a bid for theocratic power over all of Christendom…. [T]he institutional preconditions for capitalism were developed in medieval Europe, not so much in the wider society as in one specialized part of it, the church.”
We can look at it another way. Power in those days was held in land, and the Catholic Church alone owned roughly a third of all the land on the European continent. In order to administer so vast a territory, canon law was rolled out across multiple jurisdictions within the empire, including European nations, individual baronies, bishoprics, various religious orders, chartered cities, and it even extended to guilds, confraternities, merchants, entrepreneurs, traders, and so on. The church oversaw local and regional affairs as well, having influence over jurists, arbitrators, negotiators, and judges. And binding all of this together was one language: canon law Latin.
When considering the ecclesiastical offices, clerical celibacy itself informed capitalism, given its clear distinction between the office and person of an individual. Family and property were no longer tied to one another either, unlike the feudal days of old, which relied on strategic marriages as well.
Monastic orders like the Cistercians—a strict branch of the Benedictines—broke away from feudalism as a collective and were early entrepreneurs. They followed a form of rational cost accounting, which they mastered, and invested profits back into other ventures. They moved capital around from venue to venue and cut losses where they could, while pursuing possible new opportunities. They had a virtual monopoly over iron production in central France and wool production in England. And as Catholics, “They had,” as Randall Collins writes, “the Protestant ethic without Protestantism.”
This was foundational to modern capitalism. But speaking of Protestantism, when we arrive at the new world, and the institution of slavery, it was Protestants who effectively took capitalism to new heights after breaking away from the mother church. Remember that these very Protestants were former Christians who hailed from various European nations, being essentially part of the beast with ten horns upon whom the prostitute church sat (see Revelation 17:3). Reaching down to verse 16, we see that the same beast, along with its ten horns, have a change of heart concerning their rider.
[16] “And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire.”
—Revelation 17:16
This reeks of the Protestant Reformation. Following that prophetic event, and the subsequent colonial enterprises that accommodated Protestant migration, Protestant America (made up primarily of former Europeans) declared independence and completely broke with Europe, which led to the American Revolutionary War. The result was a new nation that was patterned after those in ancient Europe, particularly Greece and Rome, and whose religion was akin to Roman Catholicism, being its direct offshoot. In a way, it was like a second beast power had emerged.
Capitalism grew out of slavery, and like the ancient Israelites, who “built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses”—according to Exodus 1:11—their descendants also built many historic structures and the American economy itself. Taking a page from the Egyptian playbook, American plantation owners were just as cruel to the Israelites of their day, in that “they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens” (also verse 11). In detailing the harsh plight of the ancient Israelites, verses 13 and 14 of Exodus 1 give us a glimpse into the fate of those who would survive the Middle Passage.
[13] “So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves [14] and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”
Twice a phrase is mentioned: “they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves,” as though it would have a repeat history. And so it did, both in the physical Egypt as well as the spiritual Egypt that is America. Telling too is the growth of the ancient Israelites, whose numbers increased despite their great burden and oppression. One would think that such intolerable conditions would diminish their numbers.
“But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.”
—Exodus 1:12
This is true of those who were forcefully taken from the African continent as well. We currently fill the entire world, spread abroad like scattered seeds of Jacob. The ancient Egyptians bore witness to that miraculous increase of souls, for which “the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.” Just as modern Gentile oppressors are in dread of their descendants, who seem to increase on a yearly basis despite their modern burdens.
While the people of the world are currently wrapped in the worship of capitalism, Yah is right now readying his final judgment against this beast system, which will ultimately end the rule of Babylon and free his beloved people. As written in Exodus 7:16, Yah is still pleading to the nations of this world:
“Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.”
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: Evangelical Revival, John Wesley, denomination, bights of benin and biafra, list of prohibited books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Revelation 18, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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