Goldwater Was Right: The Toxic Gospel of Capitalist Christianity

Before I get started, I hope you and yours had a great 4th of July celebration weekend! 

The History of the Fourth of July - On the fourth of July each year, also known as Independence Day, Americans celebrate this historic event.

Moving on...

Barry Goldwater saw it coming. He said so plainly. Nobody listened.

In November 1994, the man who had spent his life as the intellectual cornerstone of American conservatism picked up the phone and told John Dean exactly what he thought about the direction the Republican Party was headed. "Mark my word," he said, "if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

He had names in mind. Pat Robertson. The Christian Coalition. The Moral Majority orbit that had been methodically colonizing the Republican Party since Jerry Falwell decided God needed a lobbyist. Goldwater had been fighting these people inside his own party for years, and losing. He died in 1998. He didn't live to see how thoroughly he lost.

What Goldwater was describing wasn't Christianity. It wasn't even a coherent political philosophy. It was something more dangerous and more specific: the fusion of evangelical fervor with raw institutional ambition, wrapped in scriptural language to inoculate it against criticism. You can't argue with someone who believes they're doing God's work. That was his point. That was always his point.

Thirty years later, the movement he warned about has a name most Americans still haven't heard. They should learn it.

The Seven Mountain Mandate

The Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7MM, is a dominionist theological framework that holds that Christians are called not merely to evangelize but to seize control of the seven key institutions of society: family, religion, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. The goal isn't conversion through persuasion. The goal is dominion through occupation. Believers are instructed to place themselves in leadership positions across all seven spheres, reorient those institutions toward biblical principles as the movement defines them, and in doing so hasten the Second Coming of Christ.

The framework traces back to a 1975 meeting between evangelical leaders Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, who sketched out the "seven spheres" concept as a strategy for Christian societal impact. It was popularized more recently by figures like Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson in their 2013 book "Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate." The title is not subtle. Neither is the theology.

The movement is tightly linked with the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a charismatic network that has revived the concept of living apostles and prophets who receive direct divine direction for how the faithful should move through these seven mountains. It is organized, it is networked, and it has been quietly seeding itself into American political life for decades while most observers were looking elsewhere.

A 2024 poll found that 41 percent of American Christians have been influenced by or believe in 7MM concepts. That is not a fringe. That is a movement.

The Prosperity Gospel Connection

To understand why Goldwater's label of "capitalist Christianity" is more than rhetorical, you have to understand what prosperity theology actually teaches.

The prosperity gospel holds that God rewards the faithful with material wealth, and conversely that material wealth is evidence of divine favor. Poverty is a spiritual failing. Financial success is a sign of righteousness. The private jet is not hypocrisy. The private jet is testimony.

This is not a marginal position in the 7MM ecosystem. It is central to it. Business is literally one of the seven mountains. Market dominance becomes a spiritual mandate. The accumulation of wealth isn't just permitted -- it's commanded. Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Paula White-Cain: these are not outliers in this world. They are its architects and its celebrities.

Paula White-Cain, of course, served as Donald Trump's personal spiritual advisor and held a formal position in the White House Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives. When she stood in the East Room and declared that "all demonic networks" were broken over opposition to Trump's presidency, she was not performing for the cameras. She was doing exactly what the Seven Mountain Mandate instructs. She was exercising dominion from inside the mountain of government, on behalf of a man she had declared anointed.

That moment deserved far more scrutiny than it received. It got very little.

What This Isn't

It is worth being precise about what Goldwater was not saying, and what critics of 7MM are not saying. This is not an argument against Christianity, or against Christians in public life, or against religious conviction informing political values. People of faith have always participated in American democracy. The abolition movement was drenched in Christian theology. So was the civil rights movement. So is much of the Catholic social justice tradition.

The distinction matters enormously. Christianity as a moral foundation for civic engagement looks like: caring for the poor, opposing injustice, advocating for the vulnerable, accepting the dignity of people who differ from you. These are positions that require engagement with a pluralistic democracy. They require compromise, coalition, and persuasion.

The Seven Mountain Mandate looks like: seizing the institutions so you don't have to persuade anyone. It looks like: placing believers in positions of authority specifically to reorient those institutions away from pluralism. It looks like: describing secular culture as "demonic" and your opponents as agents of Satan. Speaker Mike Johnson is the most visible current example of a politician whose stated worldview is saturated with 7MM and NAR theology. He is second in line to the presidency.

Jesus of Nazareth had quite a lot to say about wealth and power in the Gospels. Very little of it resembled what Kenneth Copeland preaches from his $6.3 million parsonage. The people Goldwater was warning about have constructed a theology that would be unrecognizable to the tradition they claim to represent.

The Party Goldwater Built

There is a bitter irony running through all of this. Barry Goldwater spent his career building an American conservatism based on individual liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the absolute separation of religious authority from state power. He was not a gentle or easy man politically. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds he would later reconsider. He held views that were genuinely hard-edged.

But he also supported gay rights. He supported abortion rights. He believed with ferocity that what happened in your bedroom, in your church, and in your conscience was none of the government's business, and certainly none of Pat Robertson's business. He told the Senate in 1981 that he was "frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are?"

The movement he spent his last years fighting didn't just take over the party he built. It gutted it, hollowed it out, and replaced its principles with a dominionist theology that treats democratic pluralism as an obstacle rather than a value. The MaGA movement is its current political expression, and the overlap between MaGA, NAR, and 7MM is not incidental. It is structural.

Goldwater was a conservative's conservative who understood that the republic runs on compromise and that anyone who won't compromise because God told them not to is not a political actor. They are something else entirely.

He tried to deal with them. He said so himself.

The rest of us are still figuring out how.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

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Dead men walking

I've been conflicted about this for a while. But I think I found a way that works for me.

Should we have the death penalty or not? Sure, why not. Why? Because some people should be destroyed off the face of the earth. But, I bet within the United States, there may only be one or two of those, if that, every year. 

I've confused people most of my life. I don't believe in killing people for much of any reason. I do think you have the right to kill someone trying to kill you, however. I mean, it's one for one, right? And they are trying to kill you, you have the right to stop them. You should try not to kill them but stop them, but hey, sometimes passion just gets the better of you. But then if they started it they asked for it. 

"War is bad", says Subliminal Man. But so is the death penalty — and at least in war we pretend there's a military necessity. The death penalty doesn't even have that fig leaf.

If several people are trying to kill you, really you shouldn't be trying to kill a bunch of people to save yourself. Yet then again, if they are choosing to try to kill you and you are better at it than they are, who's to say that you shouldn't, as some would say, use your God given talents at their utmost to save your skin? 

Right?

So fine. What about State sponsored killing, like Capital Punishment, the Death Penalty? When I was first in college in my first Philosophy class, our Prof. brought this up one day as a learning experience. I said I thought it was okay for the State to have the death penalty. But he pointed out (many things I won't go into here) that it is basically State sponsored murdered and a Government should never kill it's people to whom it serves. It's just ethically wrong.

Okay then, maybe he had a point. And so I passed that class, I graduated, years passed and here we are.

Now we have Florida who has been letting go like one in three prisoners on death row because they have found that in all the time since their trial and verdict, they were actually innocent as proven by various things like DNA and confessions. Or Texas who are about to celebrate their 500th execution as of mid June 2013, next week. 

The Colorado Governor just interceded to keep the death penalty live in their state, while signing an order so as not to be responsible for any executions during the rest of his term as Governor. He upholds the death penalty but doesn't want anything to do with it, himself.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I know where it leaves me, because I have an idea. 

Go ahead, keep the death penalty. But let's do this, make it possible only if and when the Governor him (or her) self actually goes to the room execution chamber, and personally executes the prisoner. 

Why? Because what we seem to have here is too many people not caring or thinking deeply enough about the situation and so they just let it continue on. Much like with Right Wing Conservatives who are staunchly against the LGBT community or Gay marriage, they are all against it until it turns out to be their son, or daughter, or someone close to them. Then it is fully and finally brought home to them, it becomes personal and so they tend to turn away from their beliefs and change their mind, altering their original position to one of agreeing with say, Gay marriage. 

The death penalty is a very similar and strange animal. The problem is that people seem to be too divorced from it to make a fully qualified decision. So let's make it personal. If someone is really so bad that they have to be executed by the state, then let the highest authority in that state carry out the execution, personally. I think it might only take one execution for one to come to realize that this is a bad thing. It is cruel and unusual punishment to hold someone for years, and then on a day set very much previously, to take that individual knowingly and murder them.

But what about their victims, you say? So we should become like them, and kill them? Besides, isn't life in jail far worse than death? 

Here's the thing. If you have someone that is a seriously deranged serial murderer, someone truly and wholly evil, then I do think that they should be destroyed. But even they could possibly be saved, make a turn around at some point. Still, I'll grant you it's very possible or even likely, that there are people like that who do need to be not only removed from society and imprisoned, but removed from life itself. I'm also willing to recognize that these types of people are very few and far between. 

Even so, we really need to stop killing people as a nation, both internally and more so yet, externally. War is bad, necessary on occasion, but far too many times we have been illegitimately pulled into it. And too many times we have killed too many innocents in the strife and fog of war. But so too have we killed innocent people through the death penalty. If Florida is accurate in releasing people who are innocent at so high a rate as reported, a third, then how many other states have killed how many innocent people over the years? 

I would argue that if we kill even one innocent person it is one too many and we need to stop. One innocent life is more important than all of the guilty lives we could execute. After all, one thing that Time does really well is release information, it loosen lips, allows knowledge to rise to the surface of the social conscience. 

For those who are truly dangerous and evil, I really wouldn't have trouble executing them. And I don't think many who hold a position of power would. But if it were someone who had a moment of anger, who had grown up with a chip on their shoulder and just need to be locked up, then they might just have a problem. If for no other reason than that, we have to consider that old adage, "There but for the grace of God, go I."

Yes some of those on death row are real bastards I'm sure, and have caused a lot of people a lot of grief. But when you also take into consideration those who have to handle these people on a daily basis, those who have to deal with them leading up to their death and those who have to actually execute them on their day of atonement, we have to consider, why would we want to do THAT to our own citizens, either?

I once heard that considering how expensive it is through trials and appeals and so on it is really cheaper to keep a prisoner for life in prison, than execute him. Which surprised me because I would think, you flip a switch, inject to fluid, bingo, money saved. But not really and certainly not assured. And so too there are non-monetary costs we should take into account. 

I'll say it clearly, if someone is trying to kill me (especially if I don't deserve it, which is another matter entirely), I will have no problem killing them instead. Once I know there is nothing left for me to do but kill them, I'm 100% behind the idea. Of course, getting to that realization is what typically gets good people killed and gives the bad guys the edge in being able to more easily kill some unsuspecting victim. They don't have to consider, they just act. They kill. They have the element of surprise. They are murderers and cowards.

However, once you start talking about my Government killing American citizens, I have a serious issue with  it. I have a problem with them killing non-Americans too, but on a list, Americans are definitely on top for who NOT to kill. Consider for a moment that ultimate rule of empathy, "what if one day I'M in that situation, and worse, what if I'm INNOCENT?"

This country needs to start advancing again. We need to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps (we've done it before) and get our act together. We need to get smarter, deeper, funnier, happier, more benevolent and stronger. And Strong, does not mean you kill people. It is after all, harder not to.

I've always said that I always try never to lie, because it makes you smarter as you have to think your way around things. Any idiot can lie, just say the opposite of truth. But try finding a way, any way but lying and it's not so easy. Is it. Probably why so many people lie so much. Telling the truth also sets up a kind of Karma for you as people start to realize you are an honest and loyal type, dependable at least in your word.

America needs to find the high ground again and live it. Inflate our mind, body and spirits and not just inflate our egos and pride as we have done for far too long and far too much in recent decades. We are a great nation and a great people. And we can be more so. If we just have a mind to.

We just need to start looking more closely at the things we do, to be more honest with ourselves, more open, more rational. 

Killing our own citizens, just isn't one of those things that will put us on that road upward and into the future with grand prospects. Because if we don't make some changes like these, we can only have more to look forward to of the same. More and more right wing nutzo propaganda, more ridiculous religious fervor, more partisan patronizing, more stopping intellectual progress, more, more, more...but not of the things we need more of. 

For one, we don't need more dead men walking....