‘Silent Cal’, that is, Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States from 1923-29, used to be one of my heroes—simply for being ‘silent’. Growing up in a period of American history where presidents have spent their efforts with one eye to their historical significance, there was something nostalgically inviting about the idea of a president who did little.
Coolidge’s most famous words, however, indicate that his relaxed attitude to government was related to a satisfaction that everything was fine as it was. His words? ‘The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.’
His confidence in ‘business’ to get on by itself soon proved empty, as the Great Depression intruded on American, and world, business in the 1929 Stock Market crash.
Coolidge’s oft repeated words are a fair depiction of American self-consciousness through its history; certainly through the 19th Century. Both Mark Twain, in his little known The Gilded Age, and Charles Dickens, in an interval of Martin Chuzzlewit, paint a rough and unpretty picture of American business in the era of expansion. And little seems to have changed.
Therefore, it is not particularly surprising to observe that the American Church tends to see itself in terms of business; that is, ‘with buying, selling, investing and prospering’. One can look, for instance, at the financial portfolios of the major denominations to see the importance of business-expertise in running the church. More recently, and naturally in much more visible and demonstrative fashion, the Evangelicals have been displaying acute business acumen. See this report.
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