The Evangelical Business Mindset
Evangelicals are remarkably good at making money and remarkably bad at turning it into cultural power.
A quick note that the American Institute for Boys and Men is hosting a webinar on the “gamblification of everything” tomorrow, June 18 at 1pm ET. Panelists include Kyla Scanlon, Matt King, and Jonathan Cohen. Register here if interested.
Why are evangelicals so successful in business but so powerless in the culture despite the money they’ve earned?
In my essay on the lack of an evangelical elite, I noted that business was an exception that proved the rule. Despite being almost a quarter of the national population, there are few evangelical top academics or artists, university or foundation presidents, but there are many top flight evangelical entrepreneurs and business leaders.
This evangelical business success hasn’t translated into cultural influence, however. One reason is that evangelicals are concentrated in profitable but prosaic industries like restaurants, retail, or oil and gas. They rarely run key companies in culture shaping industries like high finance, technology, or major media.
One might argue that they’ve been gatekept out of culturally influential domains. I’m sure that’s true to some extent. But the way evangelicals are taught to think about business plays a key role too. Evangelicals have a business mindset problem.
Businessman and influencer Nick Huber has crystallized and articulated this mindset in a very clear way through a model he touts called the “sweaty startup.”
Huber grew up in Southern Indiana and went to Cornell, where he was All-American in track. He co-founded a valet storage company while there. He started by personally working up a sweat, writing ads with chalk on sidewalks and slinging boxes, eventually growing the company to the point where he could sell it for seven figures. He’s now in the self-storage business, and owns a cluster of related services firms. And he’s built a large online following as an influencer touting his approach to entrepreneurship. Huber is a high-agency man with a clear philosophy of business.
His philosophy explicitly rejects the swing-for-the-fences venture capital startup model of disruption, innovative products, the search for Thiel-style de facto monopolies, and 50X hockey stick returns. He also says to avoid going into fields like medicine where you are tied to a money-for-your-personal-time model.
Rather, he argues the secret to success is to go into a prosaic business where lots of companies are already making cash money right now, the funding required to enter it is low, and startups can become cash profitable almost immediately. This especially includes home services businesses like pressure washing, cleaning grills, HVAC, etc. Like Huber, you start out personally hustling, maybe as a side gig. Print up some flyers and write ads in chalk on the sidewalk for a pressure washing business, for example. Do the basic things that matter extremely well in terms of calling customers back promptly, delivering on your promises, etc. Start by renting the pressure washing machine to keep capital costs low. Then grow, grow, grow. Leverage technology better than others in these kinds of businesses. Hire great talent to let you scale without killing yourself. Use offshore labor when you can. (Huber also owns an offshore staffing agency).
This approach is sweaty up front, but ultimately allows you to make money to fund a good life without having to work extremely long hours. This lets you spend time on what matters: family (Huber is a big believer in getting married and having kids), friends, church, community, hobbies or other things you enjoy or are passionate about, etc.
I like and resonate with Huber because he’s from rural Southern Indiana like me. While he grew up in a very Catholic town and I don’t know his actual religious affiliation, he talks just like a low-church evangelical Protestant. He says things like, “80% of the experience of a church for me is about the pastor and the messages,” and talks about his wife’s “church groups.” The business mindset he espouses is very evangelical, but is culturally dominant in heartland American places like Southern Indiana regardless of one’s personal religion.
While Huber is a business guru not a cultural analyst, his sweaty startup formula is implicitly based on assumptions that are what you see in the typical evangelical approach to business. Its key elements:
The purpose of a business is making cash money. It’s not changing the world, finding a source of meaning, or doing what you love. It’s strictly utilitarian.
The purpose of making money is to live a good life. This is defined in terms of the middle-class American Dream (bourgeois success), including being an active member of church. It aspires to a country club membership or a bass boat, but not necessarily plutocrat money or an ostentatious lifestyle.
The ethics of a business come from how its profits are used. While evangelicals believe business must be conducted ethically, the type of business one is engaged in or how it directly interacts with and shapes the world are not major considerations. Any legitimate business - say self-storage - is ethically equivalent to any other. How you spend your money, such as on Christian missions, is what matters most.
The business orientation is implicitly localist. Even if one of these businesses becomes a very large national company, it would likely do so via some sort of franchise type approach (either literally or figuratively) that is local market centric. The manner of life this business is intended to support is also localist.
This model creates what the writer James Patterson called the “car dealer” mindset, and what Patrick Wyman called the “local gentry,” identifying them as a core constituency of the Republican Party. Businesses Wyman highlights include farms, cold storage facilities, construction companies, McDonald’s franchises, and yes, car dealerships. These differ somewhat from Huber’s list in that many of them are based on owning scarce assets that limit competition, as with car dealers themselves. But presumably Huber would also suggest establishing a moat like that at some point if you are able. The business outlook they inculcate is similar for most of them, with some exceptions (like farming, which often is a source of identity). Their political aims are typically pecuniary, such as favorable tax and regulatory treatment, especially at the state level (e.g., state franchise laws).
Few evangelicals explicitly think in sweaty startup terms. Few would embrace it as an ideology. Many might take exception with some of Huber’s approaches, such as heavy use of offshore labor. But they very much share this business mindset. It is how their churches and communities form them to think and act.
We see this from the fact that evangelicals churches themselves are often implicitly operated as just such a sweaty business. We know there’s already a large constellation of successful churches, which is a sign that this is an attractive market to enter. Think about how evangelical church plants then start. New church plants print up flyers and do low-cost outreach marketing. They start in a rented facility like a school or strip mall where the pastor and volunteers do literally sweaty work like setting up chairs and the sound system each week. They typically do receive a sort of venture funding from a sending church, denomination, or church planting network, but must attract attendees and start generating donations quickly to become self-sustaining. The pastor is functionally a business operator hustling to keep small-to-medium-sized enterprise alive and grow it. The church planting model in general is about expansion through new localist “franchises.” The landscape is dominated by these types of entities rather than the longstanding “institutionalist” model of the mainline churches that traditionally supplied America’s Protestant elites.
Whether this religious culture shapes the evangelical business mindset or whether a pre-existing heartland culture shaped the church isn’t clear. But at a minimum they reinforce each other. Because this culture is so rarely talked about explicitly in the way Huber does, it’s invisible.
The evangelical business mindset isn’t bad. In fact, it’s actually the most rational model for the average aspiring entrepreneur. The sweaty startup approach is a far better way to achieve most people’s ambitions than swinging the bat on some low-probability Silicon Valley startup. Being willing to swing that bat usually requires motivations beyond money and lifestyle anyway. Elon Musk is the world’s first official trillionaire, but he organized his businesses around colonizing Mars, not just accumulating money.
The real question is why evangelicals produce so few people with those kinds of ambitions. The lack of this in part comes from their subculture over-converging on the sweaty startup type approach as a business mindset. What works well for individual evangelical entrepreneurs and business leaders here ends up collectively undermining evangelical cultural influence in the world at large.
But this dovetails with the larger evangelical cultural ecosystem. The overwhelming evangelical theological and missional focus is on saving souls. This lends itself to thinking of business as primarily about making money to fund missions, reinforcing the sweaty startup mindset. Business is not seen as culture-shaping in its own right. Then add to this the way that evangelicals approach church as an entrepreneurial endeavor. The very way evangelicals do church can form them into a sweaty startup business mindset.
The net result is a lot of evangelical money and success, but not much cultural power. People who run major media companies or technology firms or activist hedge funds view them as forms of leverage for influencing other institutions and the culture at large. For evangelicals, business is merely a way to generate cash, which is then deployed into localist endeavors or explicitly Christian mission. It doesn’t have to be this way. But until evangelicals are able to name and define their business mindset, as Huber does, they won’t have the awareness of what they are missing.
Another problem is that the evangelical mindset sees business as just a way to make money, and that money isn't very important, or even is bad. Thus, the vocation of business, a very hard one, is seen as a bad life route-- tho those who have already succeeded and give a lot of money to the church are valued.
We need to go back to our protestant roots and see business as as valuable a vocation as ministry.
My experience in evangelical churches ran from lower class to upper middle class. I'm painting that with a broad brush; I was certainly upper middle class in one lower class church. But the lower class the church was overall, the few independent businesspeople of means were in it. It trended to zero fast below congregations with a core of upper middle class members.
You're right, the independent businesspeople in these churches did sturdy but unremarkable things. Plumbing companies. Real estate investing. Niche but lucrative consulting. One guy turned his farm into an event place with pumpkins in the autumn, orchards in the summer, Christmas trees in the winter, etc. All of them started small and grew it through considerable effort.
These people had _money._ Get-things-done amounts of money, and they all quietly got things done with their money, at least locally and especially within the church. One local megachurch in that faith tradition sits on prime land donated by a member who had built a real estate empire. And while we congregants all knew who had the money, from appearances you couldn't tell.
Outside these congregations, these wealthy members are hardly known.
I don't know the private lives of any of the members I mention but the thing I wonder if they know they can do is use their capital to influence outside the congregation. Invest in culture-shaping companies. Endow chairs. Fund programs.