Making Personal Finance "Christian": How Neoliberalism and Evangelicalism Built Christian Personal Finance Advice

• In Event: 50461 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Culture, Belief, and Politics

Abstract

Christian personal finance advice represents a large force in combining economic and religious ideas. Ramsey Solutions, the company run by Dave Ramsey which sells his Financial Peace University curriculum, claims that over 50,000 churches have run a Financial Peace University class. This represents almost 15 percent of all religious congregations in the United States. Despite its ubiquity today, this juggernaut of US Christian subculture is startlingly young: before the second half of the 20th century, scarcely anything was written specifically on the management of household finances for a Christian audience—and little of it resembled Ramsey's brand of self-help-infused, boostrap-capitalism. This paper traces the social changes that undergirded the transformation of the economy and US Protestantism that created a world of Christian personal finance advice personalities and compares the rhetoric popular Christian and non-Christian personal finance advice books. I found that economic individualism and arguments for the justness of inequality reign across the whole corpus, regardless of whether they are categorized as Christian or non-Christian. The prevalence of this literature in institutions US Christianity indicates that economic ideology is strongly in social milieux beyond the marketplace, and that religious association may in fact be used as a conduit for spreading that ideology with the imprimatur and authority of religious language.

Author

• Dawson Paul Richard Vosburg, The Ohio State University