Evangelical capitalists and their fawning clerisy induced the disease to which they offered a paltry, sanctimonious remedy. John Ruskin—who “unconverted” from his parents’ evangelical faith—would later excoriate this heartless sentimentality. “You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in ‘the position in which Providence has placed him,’ ” he sneered in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866). “That’s modern Christianity.”
