In 1925 Bruce Barton published The Man Nobody Knows, describing Jesus Christ as a businessman who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”Footnote ¹ The book by the late Sarah Hammond demonstrates that Barton’s metaphor spoke to a larger movement of Christian businessmen who were critical leaders of the prewar and wartime U.S. business community, even as they shaped the future of fundamentalist Protestantism by “bringing religion into business and bringing business into religion” (42). In so doing, she challenges George Marsden’s near-hegemonic narrative: fundamentalist Protestants in the United States crawled under a rock following the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), disappeared for sixty years, only to reemerge in 1980s as the evangelical Religious Right. Thanks to God’s Businessmen, I do not teach this story anymore. Fundamentalists such as Bob Jones, fearing the influence of evolution, secular humanism, and desegregation, did “withdraw” by starting their own schools and subcultures. But Hammond reminds us that for every Bob Jones, there was an R. G. LeTourneau—one of the most colorful businessmen of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. LeTourneau viewed his uniquely designed earth-moving equipment as tools that glorified God, since, as Hammond writes, “businessman were God’s instruments to Christianize the World” (8). He subscribed to a version of the prosperity gospel, believing that “God could be trusted to reward correct doctrine, earnest faith, and righteous living with happiness and financial success” (43). He built factories that held regular religious services, hired industrial chaplains, and proudly fought unionizing efforts as part of a fundamentalist war on socialism.

Darren Dochuk, one of the leading scholars of U.S. capitalism and religion, published Hammond’s doctoral dissertation posthumously. His recent work, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America,Footnote ² is in dialogue with God’s Businessmen, joining works by Barry Hankins, Daniel Williams, and Matthew Sutton that question the Marsden thesis.Footnote ³ Hammond’s other major contribution is chronicling the proliferation of Christian for-profit businesses and free enterprise ideology prior to and during World War II. Bethany Moreton was one of the first to call our attention to such firms and ideas in the postwar period, followed by Kevin Kruse and Timothy Gloege.Footnote ⁴ Like Kruse, Hammond argues that Christian businessmen played an essential role in fighting New Deal policies, even though they often benefited from them. However, she goes further in demonstrating the vital role fundamentalists such as LeTourneau played in selling evangelical welfare capitalism to the American public as a “godly” alternative to “godless” socialism and communism.

God’s Businessmen also illustrates the significance of the masculine, Christian “Everyman” archetype, in contrast with the caricature of effeminate, irreligious, and overly educated elites. Small-business owners who extended their authority beyond the workplace into their communities and congregations embodied the “Everyman.” They viewed themselves not just as treasurers, trustees, or administrators but also as “equal and complementary partners in world evangelism” alongside their clergy (75). These laymen formed groups such as Billy Sunday’s Business Men’s Evangelistic Club, including the chapter in Charlotte, North Carolina, which counted Billy Graham’s father, Franklin, as a member. Hammond argues this was part of a larger pushback against domestic, feminine Protestantism, as Sunday and other leaders emphasized the need for tough, male spiritual leaders. During World War II, Christian businessmen such as J. Howard Pew embraced the industrial-military complex, aligning fundamentalist businessman with the needs of national defense. Although Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne more clearly links militarist, fundamentalist masculinity to twenty-first-century evangelicalism,Footnote ⁵ Hammond deserves credit for locating this ideology in the prewar period, correcting those who define it as simply a backlash to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.

If LeTourneau illustrates fundamentalists’ fight to preserve U.S. capitalism, Hammond uses Club Aluminum president Herbert J. Taylor to demonstrate how Christian businessmen (“laymen”) shaped evangelicalism. While Rotarians may know that Taylor created the “Four-Way Test” in a bid to save Club Aluminum in the 1930s, few people understand the degree to which his philanthropy shaped modern evangelicalism, including organizations such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Young Life, and Fuller Theological Seminary. If Billy Graham was the face of modern evangelicalism, Hammond argues that Taylor, as a chief donor and the founding treasurer of the National Association of Evangelicals, steered its fiscal wisdom and salvation. Although I am not completely convinced Le Tourneau and Taylor were more important than twentieth-century ministers such as R. J. Rushdoony or Harold Ockenga, Hammond is right to direct our attention to the overlooked roles of businessmen in shaping modern evangelicalism, helping us understand the deep, intertwining roots of conservative politics, free market economics, and fundamentalism.