Show Notes
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 Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A history of prosperity gospel. Oxford University Press. Carnegie, A. (1889). Wealth. The North American Review, 148(391), 653–664. Carter, H. W. (2015). Union made: Working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago. Oxford University Press. Cotton, J. (1641). The way of life. Printed by M. F. for L. Fawne and S. Gellibrand. Dochuk, D. (2011). From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain folk religion, grassroots politics, rise of evangelical conservatism. W. W. Norton. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia. Franklin, B. (1904). Advice to a young tradesman. In A. H. Smyth (Ed.), The writings of Benjamin Franklin (Vol. 2). Franklin, B. (1909). The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. P. F. Collier & Son. Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99–117. Gilman, C. P. (1898). Women and economics: A study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution. Small, Maynard & Company. Grant, H. J. (1936, October). Conference report. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. Han, B. C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Machen, J. G. (1933). The Christian view of man. William B. Eerdmans. Osborn, I. (2008). Can Christianity cure obsessive OCD? A psychiatrist explores the role of faith in treatment. Brazos Press. Petersen, A. H. (2020). Can’t even: How millennials became the burnout generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Phillips-Fein, K. (2009). Invisible hands: The businessmen’s crusade against the New Deal. W. W. Norton. Price, D. (2021). Laziness does not exist. Atria Books. Rodgers, D. T. (1978). The work ethic in industrial America, 1850–1920. University of Chicago Press. Rose, J. (2001). The poverty of virtue: The ethical foundations of American welfare reform. Journal of Religious Ethics, 29(2), 247–272. Sutton, M. A. (2014). American apocalypse: A history of modern evangelicalism. Harvard University Press. Suzman, J. (2020). Work: A deep history, Stone Age to the age of robots. Penguin Press. Tawney, R. H. (1926). Religion/rise of capitalism. John Murray. Winthrop, J. (1838). Model of Christian charity. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (3rd series, Vol. 7, pp. 31–48). (Original work delivered 1630)
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Reminder: I will be in Scotland for my birthday next week! Libras UNITE! Yesterday's news will still be coming out leading into midterms, but the time of day may change slightly, I will have a few days that I take off completely from being online, but I will announce those. SOURCES On This Day: JFK Library — October 16, 1962 | Office of the Historian — Cuban Missile Crisis
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The word “gossip” started out as something sacred. In Old English it was godsibb, literally “God-sibling,” the name for a godparent or anyone who stood with you at a baptism and became spiritual kin. By the Middle Ages the meaning had loosened to cover any close friend or companion, and in particular the circle of women who gathered in the birthing room to help a mother through labor. Those long hours of waiting were filled with talk, and the “gossips” became known as much for their conversation as for their support. Men, fearful and suspicious of women in community without men supervising began to demonize women gathering publicly or speaking to each other. Male writers of the 1500s and 1600s sneered at “gossips” as idle, chattering women, and by the 1800s the verb “to gossip” meant exactly what it does today. It was uniquely WOMAN sin and was built to isolate a woman from network. Then... they added it to the Bible.