“Christianity Incorporated”: Sinclair Lewis and the Taylorization of American Protestantism

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Sinclair Lewis’s finest works from the 1920s are devoted to examining the conflation of economy and religion in modern America. In Main Street (1920), Lewis contends that the effort to standardize American culture is the result of the apotheosis of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management. The popularization of Taylor’s industrial reforms gave rise to an efficiency craze that, as Samuel Haber writes, was nothing short of “a secular Great Awakening.” Lewis shows that Taylorism was recast as divine truth, allowing it to transcend the factory and to become the dominant system of norms operative in American culture as a whole, entirely redefining American modernity. He maintains that when Taylorist capitalism is abstracted and made metaphysical, the church assumes the priorities and procedures of industry. Moreover, this leads business to be regarded as a religion. I prove that Lewis further elaborates this critique in Elmer Gantry (1927)—his analysis of Protestantism’s thoroughgoing adoption of capitalist structures, values, and ends—and Babbitt (1922), where he satirizes the sanctification of business culture and the emerging managerial middle-class.