There's a feeling you get at 11pm on a Tuesday as you crawl into bed after another long day. You've been moving nonstop since you got up and still theres a gnawing guilt you can't quite shake. That you haven't done enough, you should be doing more, working harder. That feeling has a 400 year history. It was born on a ship off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630, preached from a Puritan pulpit, secularized by Benjamin Franklin, bolted to a factory wall, and then carefully, deliberately, and expensively marketed to you by a public relations firm hired by General Motors.
This sinister message wanders through the mill towns where clergy were quietly put on the company payroll to preach that strikes were sins against God; through the Gilded Age sermons of Henry Ward Beecher telling starving railroad workers that bread and water was enough; through the jaw-dropping story of Spiritual Mobilization, a corporate-funded operation that distributed pre-written anti-union sermons to seventy thousand American ministers during the New Deal era. The Protestant pulpit, for a generation, was a subcontractor of the American boardroom.
But it's also a story of the people who fought back and the saga ends with a powerful question "What if rest itself is the most radical act left available to us?"
References: full list at patreon.com/montemader
Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A history of the American prosperity gospel. Oxford University Press.
Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. The North American Review, 148(391), 653–664.
Carter, H. W. (2015). Union made: Working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago. Oxford University Press.
Cotton, J. (1641). The way of life. Printed by M. F. for L. Fawne and S. Gellibrand.
Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
Franklin, B. (1904). Advice to a young tradesman. In A. H. Smyth (Ed.), The writings of Benjamin Franklin (Vol. 2).
Franklin, B. (1909). The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. P. F. Collier & Son.
Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117.
Gilman, C. P. (1898). Women and economics: A study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution. Small, Maynard & Company.
Grant, H. J. (1936, October). Conference report. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
Han, B. C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto.
Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books.
Machen, J. G. (1933). The Christian view of man. William B. Eerdmans.
Osborn, I. (2008). Can Christianity cure obsessive compulsive disorder? A psychiatrist explores the role of faith in treatment. Brazos Press.
Petersen, A. H. (2020). Can’t even: How millennials became the burnout generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Phillips-Fein, K. (2009). Invisible hands: The businessmen’s crusade against the New Deal. W. W. Norton.
Price, D. (2021). Laziness does not exist. Atria Books.
Rodgers, D. T. (1978). The work ethic in industrial America, 1850–1920. University of Chicago Press.
Rose, J. (2001). The poverty of virtue: The ethical foundations of American welfare reform. Journal of Religious Ethics, 29(2), 247–272.
Sutton, M. A. (2014). American apocalypse: A history of modern evangelicalism. Harvard University Press.
Suzman, J. (2020). Work: A deep history, from the Stone Age to the age of robots. Penguin Press.
Tawney, R. H. (1926). Religion and the rise of capitalism. John Murray.
Winthrop, J. (1838). A model of Christian charity. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (3rd series, Vol. 7, pp. 31–48). (Original work delivered 1630)
Ireland