Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy.
I.
By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere in evidence. Affluence had proven illusory. Fervid efforts to obtain or to manufacture wealth had…