(RNS) — “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873, gave the period from the late 19th to early 20th century its most lasting metaphor — a thin veneer of gold that hid layers of poverty, corruption and suffering beneath. On Monday (Jan. 20), Donald Trump launched his inaugural speech with a promise that “The golden age of America begins right now,” but it was hard not to hear “gilded” rather than “golden” and to take Trump’s promise as a threat.
Trump’s MAGA nostalgia for an earlier age of American power and prosperity was solidified by the president’s praise for William McKinley, ostensibly for the 25th president’s support for tariffs, but Trump’s summoning of the late 19th century answers the question so many have been asking: When does he believe America was great? It’s the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age, like the Trump Age, was populated by very rich men who used their wealth to control political decisions, particularly the laws that would govern business: Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and the notorious antisemite Henry Ford, who built ostentatious homes that glorified their riches while 90% of the population lived in poverty.
This inequality was supported by an ideology, not to say a theology, summed up by Andrew Carnegie in an 1889 essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which the steel baron wrote, “We accept and welcome … great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.”
In 1886, three years before Carnegie wrote his defense of unbridled capitalism, my great-grandfather, the Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch, accepted a call to a small immigrant Baptist congregation located in what was known as Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. He was shocked by what he encountered. His congregation worked in factories that created the wealth Carnegie was so proud of. Rauschenbusch’s parishioners and their families were an expendable part of production, to be used for as little cost as possible and then disposed of when no longer useful.
Reflecting on that time later, Rauschenbusch remembered most of all the funerals of children who had died preventable deaths because of their poverty. He lamented, “Oh the children’s funerals! They gripped my heart — the small boxes. I always left thinking — why did these children have to die?” The experience sent him to the Bible, where he found the clear call from God through the prophets and Jesus to establish the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, in which every person had the same dignity and right to thrive as any other.
In the same years that some Americans, including many Christians, were preaching the Gospel of Wealth, Walter and many others were developing what would become known as the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel had its own approach to wealth, which Walter captured in this homely metaphor: “Wealth is to a nation what manure is to a farm. If the farmer spreads it evenly over the soil, it will enrich the whole. If he should leave it in heaps, the land would be impoverished and under the rich heaps the vegetation would be killed.”
It’s worth noting that the Gilded Age was also notable for a strong nativist sentiment, with hatred toward immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act and violence directed at immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, coupled with the terror campaign of post-Reconstruction violence against Black Americans in the form of lynchings.
With that in mind, we come back to Trump’s inauguration, in which a man famous for his gilded bathrooms surrounded himself with the current gilded age titans Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. These men are the ones now who control vast sums of money and power, choking off competitors and influencing elections. In the U.S. today, the top 10% of households hold 62% of the country’s wealth, while 5.7% of wealth is held by the bottom 50%.
On Monday, his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders attacking immigrants and rolling back advances for Black Americans. He pardoned members of white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who four years ago attacked the U.S. Capitol and our democratic system. Musk answered with what could only be called a fascist salute. In proper Gilded Age form, religious leaders such as Franklin Graham, eager to bless this administration, explicitly claimed that God had been the key player who put Trump back in office, giving sanctimonious sanction to his billionaire buddies and the accompanying malfeasance of their industries and personal lives.
One result of the Gilded Age was that its excess made the case for the advent of the Progressive Era, in which Americans realized the value of protecting workers, increasing wages, decreasing inequity and caring for the elderly and the young and passed laws that made that possible. Today, those laws are being targeted; Social Security, Medicare and other protections are on the chopping block and even laws prohibiting child labor are being rolled back.
As we enter into this new, gilded golden age, people of faith will have to search our souls. Will we worship at the altar of the golden calf of the Gospel of Wealth or, perhaps, remember the concerns of the Social Gospel and the mandate that runs through all faiths that compels us to show up with the poor, the immigrant, the stranger and outcast?
On this first day of this new age, I am reminded of a centering thought that Walter Rauschenbusch offered in his book “Christianity and the Social Crisis”: “In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose ministry and vision expanded upon the Social Gospel, reminded us that “The time is always right to do what is right.” That time is now.
(The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is the president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)