The Rich Man and the Kingdom

the long version

Between 1917 and 1960 John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave away roughly a billion dollars. Schenkel investigates this century's foremost religious philanthropist, who hoped to use his staggering wealth to fund "a Christian America," to establish the kingdom of God in America, and to bolster the religious establishment that alone, he felt, could stave civil unrest. Schenkel's lively study casts light particularly on the waning of Protestant religious hegemony, the network of persons and institutions that guided the "establishment," and the ambiguities and ironies of the religion/capital relationship. He opens a window on the self-understanding of liberal American Protestantism as it embraced and then succumbed to the "modernist" impulse, only to find itself dethroned by the secularism and pluralism it had, in part, spawned.