What Will Make American Business Great Again?

Many people apparently think making money and Christianity run counter to one another. We have a problem putting the words “commerce” and “Christianity” into the same sentence. Sometimes we forget that the love of money is the root of all evil, not money per se. 

As mentioned last week, the Puritans turned the Massachusetts Bay Company into a thriving business by 1640, just 20 years after the first Pilgrims landed in 1620. By 1640, there were 20,000 Puritans in the New World building the Company enterprise.  

Not only did these commerce-minded Saints get great business practices going in New England, but the way they did business provided a pattern for American companies over the next 300 years. Until 1970.

That's when The Puritan Gift began to unravel. 

This is the contention of Kenneth Hopper, an expert in industrial affairs, and his brother William, a former investment banker. The Hopper brothers deftly laid out their case in The Puritan Gift.  

The Puritan Gift was hailed by the Financial Times as one of the Top Ten Business Books for 2007. The Hopper brothers demonstrated that the Puritans gave America a great gift in their approach to business. The authors maintain it's a business pattern we must restore.

What was The Gift? 

Mindy Belz, of WORLD Magazine, called it "faith-based entrepreneurship." Not just any faith, of course, but biblically-informed faith. The Puritan Gift was characterized by "careful planning, a disregard for social class in selecting management, an ethic of work combined with a habit of thrift, placing the good of the community above the individual, and a desire to create a kingdom of heaven on earth." That last point is huge.

The Hopper brothers warned that as America distances herself from The Puritan Gift, the foundation upon which American business rests is defective.

What will make American business great again? 

Kenneth and William Hopper gave a surprising answer to this question in 2007. To the degree that the Puritan way was biblical, I believe that apart from a return this way of doing business, we're only fooling ourselves with a false sense of security, low unemployment notwithstanding. 

It wasn’t just Puritans who provided a pattern for what it means to succeed in business. For the Moravian missionaries of the 1700s, commerce was an integral part of their worldwide missionary strategy.    

We'll re-visit the Moravian vision and mission next.

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman