The Protestant Drive to Give a Better Life to All
Across the table at breakfast is a friendly billionaire. This particular man is acutely Dutch, the child of old reformed stock, and I could see him getting progressively more concerned as I cleaned my plate without touching the fried potatoes that had come along with the eggs and bacon. “Are you going to eat those?”, he asked, and then took on the task himself. You can’t unfrugal the Dutch.
There used to be many such men (when men were stronger and closer to God). “I never can remember my father lying down,” he said, “he was always working—he was the tide that floated all boats.”
The man is grizzled, direct, wise, well-read, and relentlessly productive. Speaking with him, you’re reminded of that 1925 photo of the last surviving Barbary lion walking through a canyon.
The man eating my potatoes is the last of a dying breed, or, perhaps, the first of a new one.
We’re catechized to believe that giants of industry, titans of finance, those who accrued great wealth, were gray-scale scrooges, men with dry raisins for hearts so consumed by selfishness that they spent the entirety of their bitter lives hoarding mammon at the expense of family, friends, and a healthy interest in the world around them.
In fact, this is a better descriptor of our bureaucratic upper middle class. Those with tunnel vision for status in a single tawdry field who live their lives at the expense of others in service of selfish comfort. Selfishness really only carries you through your own needs––security and a life in the top 1% of earth’s population. Those who go beyond need a reason to do so outside of themselves. Who are these men? When our children are grown, who will the great titans of industry be?
History reverts to the mean. In retrospect, I think it will have been obvious.
Walking through a Smithsonian exhibit on American Enterprise with my friend Santiago Pliego, we couldn’t help but notice adjectives injected in front of the names and descriptors of the American business tycoons. “Ruthless”, “greedy”, “dominating” etc. All this amidst sad attempts to write other characters into the story, “this 12-year-old girl was an entrepreneur too!”
One of the curators of the exhibit commented, “we have definitely done… a lot of reinterpretation of things we had, bringing in things that you not necessarily would have thought of as a part of a story on business.”
A few quotes that didn’t make it into the exhibit:
“There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship; nothing that can satisfy but Christ.”
“Every right implies a responsibility; Every opportunity, an obligation, Every possession, a duty.”
Both are from John D. Rockefeller. Last name synonymous with wealth in the American psyche. The greatest of the American industrial titans. His company, Standard Oil, was valued at over $1 trillion in today’s dollars before being broken up by new antitrust efforts.
Rockefeller was a faithful protestant and explicitly stated his goal was not to create wealth for its own sake. He was a quiet man by all accounts––analytical and skeptical––and a devout baptist. He was fond of saying to his executive team, “[let’s] give the poor man his cheap light, gentlemen.”
Rockefeller is the rule, not the exception. The largest enterprises of all time have been built by protestants, and will be again.
The most valuable company in history: the Dutch East India Company. The company was started by reformed and Calvinistic Dutch investors and adventurers who pooled money to send ships to the east indies, fought the Portuguese for trade hubs, and built a company large enough to rival nations with over 70,000 employees and a private army.
The second largest of all time: Standard Oil created by John D Rockefeller. (I’m excluding the South Sea and Mississippi companies, since they were almost entirely bubble phenomena, rather than long term economic engines). Rockefeller, as we noted above, was an ardent Christian. He led weekly bible studies at his church and donated extensively to the baptist churches throughout his life.
What about the third most profitable company of all time? Saudi Aramco. Believe it or not, also created by protestants.
What does the “am” stand for in Aramco?
It stands for American. “Aramco” was originally the Arabian American Oil Company.
When the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil with Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States in 1911 it was fractured into 39 entities (with an average market cap of $25 billion each in today’s dollars.) Some of those new entities included Standard Oil of California (aka Chevron), Standard Oil of New Jersey (aka Exxon), Standard Oil of Ohio (later acquired by BP).
In 1938, Standard Oil of California was exploring for oil in Saudi Arabia. After four years and seven drill sites––no oil had been discovered. It might have stayed that way for decades longer without this man. An American protestant named Max Steineke.
Despite the ordered closure of drill sites 1-6, Steineke convinced leadership to “drill deeper” at site seven a.k.a. Dammam No. 7. March 4, 1938, Steineke and his bedouin colleague, Khamis Bin Rimthan, struck oil in what became one of the most commercially productive regions in the world. It’s also interesting to note that Aramco is a direct descendant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil via Standard Oil of California.
Protestant dominance continues to the present.
Warren Buffet is another example. Commonly hailed as the greatest investor of all time, also a child of the protestant ethic. Buffet’s father was a devout protestant with distinct libertarian and free-market views. Buffet inherited all the cultural wealth of Protestantism in his upbringing. In many ways, Buffet is truly the last of that generation of productive, protestant American business––the men who truly created the American economy. Now at nearly 100 years old, he’s decayed into a sort of American Denethor–––the recipient of a beautiful inheritance intent on seeing it die with him, wealth scattered to the wind.
The protestant ethic rises when men internalize scripture and work it out in hard service to others. As George Gilder writes, “giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism”. Those who genuinely seek the Lord, to glorify him, have a duty to do their work well. The downstream results of helping people at scale is predictable.
Today, our lame tendency is to trust-fall into the protestant ethic via labels. Putting “reformed, postmil, covenantal, etc.” in your bio does not change your competence level. “You should use me because I’m a reformed post-millennial businessman” is just another iteration of the fish-sticker Christianity––subsidizing labels instead of competence.
If aggressive pursuit of faithful Christian life is the operating system, the hardware is still all “secular” skills. Falling back on theology labels is not going to make you a better steel salesman. Becoming a better steel salesman makes you a better steel salesman.
From the Dutch East India to Standard Oil, protestants have been the greatest players of capitalism. It’s fitting, given that we essentially invented it. As the West is re-christianized—as, Lord willing, it can and will be—we’ll see the fruits of that across Christian life including prospering enterprises. 50 years from now, I hope to see many more crusty old protestant billionaires saving leftover potatoes from the trash.
Who will be the future kings of capital? The same as they were in the past, the faithful men, our friends, building heroic enterprises in service to God.
Image Credit: Max Steineke and his team surveying an oil field.
