This episode is brought to you by ground news. Get 40% off their Vantage plan by using groundnews.com/montemaderThat 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 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. Born on a ship off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630, preached from a Puritan pulpit, secularized by Benjamin...
This episode is brought to you by ground news. Get 40% off their Vantage plan by using groundnews.com/montemader
That 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 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. 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 deliberately and expensively marketed to you by a public relations firm hired by General Motors.
The 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
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