From the iconic pink Cadillac of Mary Kay Ash to the aisles of the Christian bookstore, this episode traces one of the most tangled relationships in American religious history: the bond between evangelical faith and the marketplace. Hosts John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra use the rise of Mary Kay Cosmetics as a launching point to explore how evangelicals have understood work, wealth, success, and consumption — and why prosperity has so often been read as a sign of divine blessing.

Along the way, the conversation reaches back to the early republic, where revivalism, democracy, and the market economy grew up together, and forward through the postwar boom, the Cold War, the Sun Belt, and the Jesus People movement. The result is a wide-ranging discussion of faith, money, identity, and whether evangelicalism and capitalism have become so intertwined that they can no longer be easily separated.

KEY THEMES & TOPICS

Mary Kay Ash and “golden rule leadership”: How a Southern Baptist saleswoman built a cosmetics empire infused with the motto “God first, family second, career third” — reworking Sunday school hymns into business jingles.
Faith and feminism in tension: Mary Kay as both a product of and a conservative critique of second-wave feminism, offering women economic flourishing without challenging family norms.
Prosperity, agency, and the prosperity gospel: From Weber’s Protestant work ethic to self-help figures like Zig Ziglar and Robert Schuller, and where Mary Kay sits near — but not squarely within — the prosperity gospel stream.
A deeper history: Revivalism, democracy, and the market economy emerging together in the early 19th century, all centered on the empowered, choosing individual.
The “business turn” in scholarship: How historians now study company records and business dynasties — the Cathy family (Chick-fil-A), the Green family (Hobby Lobby, Museum of the Bible), and earlier funders of Moody Bible Institute.
The rarity of systemic critique: Why sustained evangelical critiques of capitalism are hard to find — with the unusual dispensationalist exception of Philip Mauro.
Cold War capitalism and the Sun Belt: Consumer culture and business interests sold as ways to be a good American, a good Christian, and an anti-communist, fueling the postwar rise of Southern evangelicalism.
Consumerism as belonging: Christian bookstores, CCM, the Amish romance genre, the faith principle vs. business principles, and the scaling of ministries from Billy Graham to the megachurch.

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Mary Kay Ash, Morley Safer, Phyllis Schlafly, Marabel Morgan, Zig Ziglar, Robert Schuller, Dwight L. Moody, George Rapp, Josiah Bissell, Philip Mauro, Cyrus Scofield, Hal Lindsey, Carl McIntire, Bill Bright, Billy Graham, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Lewis Sperry Chafer.

BOOKS REFERENCED

The Mary Kay Way by Mary Kay Ash (Harper & Row, 1984)
The Total Woman by Marabel Morgan (Fleming H. Revell, 1973)
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (originally published 1905; widely read in the Talcott Parsons translation, Scribner, 1930)
Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store by Nicole C. Kirk (NYU Press, 2018)
Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism by Timothy E. W. Gloege (University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic by Joseph P. Slaughter (Columbia University Press, 2023)
The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith by Daniel Silliman (Eerdmans, 2021)
The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (Zondervan, 1970)
The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity by Darren E. Grem (Oxford University Press, 2016)
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse (Basic Books, 2015)
From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism by Darren Dochuk (W. W. Norton, 2011)

Send us Fan Mail

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.

Find out more about our work:

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

“A Whole Civilization Will DIE!” - Jiang WARNS Trump WILL Strike Iran After Deadline

Valuetainment

Outro

The AI-powered Podcast Player