Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Theology of Business Podcast. I'm your host, Darren Scheer, and this is the show for marketplace Christians seeking to explore and apply God's will for business. On this episode, we're joined by Dr. Stephen Mansfield. Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author and popular speaker who leads a speaker training firm based in Washington, D.C. He's also part-time senior fellow of public leadership and director of the Center for Biblical Leadership at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He first rose to global attention with his groundbreaking work, The Faith of George W. Bush, a New York Times bestseller that Time magazine credited with helping to shape the 2004 U.S. presidential election. And he's also written a number of other celebrated biographies of Booker T. Washington, George Whitfield, Winston Churchill, Pope Benedict, Pope Benedict XVI, Abraham Lincoln, and others. And his humorous but fiery Mansfield's book of manly men has inspired men's events around the world. The Miracle of the Kurds is other another one of his books has been selected as Book of the Year by Rudolph, the leading Kurdish news service. As a result of this book, Mansfield has become a respected voice and support of Kurds worldwide. And he's also the author of the book The Search for God and Guinness, a biography of the beard that changed the world, which we're going to be learning about today. Stephen, welcome to the Theology of Business podcast.
SPEAKER_02Hey, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me back.
SPEAKER_01Yes, indeed. So what do you say? I know people might be a little bit confused, right? Some people might be a little bit confused right now. What do you say to people who assume Arthur Guinness, the founder of the Guinness Brewing Company, couldn't have been a devout Christian man because he started a beer brewing company?
SPEAKER_02Well, the opposite is actually true. The fact of the matter is that there had, first of all, beer had been used in the church for years. In fact, one of my favorite little fun facts is that uh when times of plague happened, the Catholic Church actually baptized infants in beer because it was a safer alternative than the water. But uh anyway, that aside, what was what's a little another little fun fact is that in England uh there had been a thing called the gin craze. I don't know if you know that uh uh parliament had outlawed the importation of alcoholic beverages. So people began to distill gin on their own, and the whole country gave itself to drunkenness. And there was crime waves, and you know, families were destroyed. So people who brewed beer were seen as actually doing social good. And that's why you'll often see monks and nuns, for example, uh on beer posters, because many of the great breweries in the history of the world were started by uh people of that uh you know calling who were trying to do social good. So the fact is that Arthur Guinness uh was seen as a Christian do-gooder, as uh as a Christian uh man having an impact on society, not as somebody who had stepped into the secular world. So it's uh it's a little bit of reverse of the way we think today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I think Martin Luther started a brewery, if I'm not mistaken. That could be a myth, but I believe it to be true. I know your doctorate is in history, so you would know.
SPEAKER_02Well, only because I've spent a little time studying beer. His wife was actually a brew mistress. She was a specialist, she had been a nun, and her job was to brew beer because it was so essential to life. You have to realize that uh during that era of history, people distrusted water. They didn't know about microorganisms. So they'd be dumping their garbage upstream, drinking it downstream, people would get sick and die. They said, well, water's not good for us. They literally believed that. Uh so they used water to put out fires or feed the cattle, but human beings wouldn't drink it. And so as a result, brewing of beer was an essential thing because most people drank beer. I'm talking about just that with their breakfast from the moment they were born, they drank beer because it was seen as the healthy drink to drink. So uh anyway, it's it's it's uh that that was an important part of what she did. And then when Luther K came along and married her, he actually sometimes wanted to be paid for his preaching in beer. He wasn't a lush or an alcoholic. Um, he just it was just a measure of trade at that time. So, you know, there's a there's a book to be written. I doubt I'll write it, but there's a book to be written on the history of the Christian church and beer. It really is a central part of the narrative. And again, not because people were addicted or, you know, greasing the the skids to sin, uh, but because it's just uh was part of the culture at the time and the church used it and did good with it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, so much of the focus of of your book is is not so much on the beer itself, but on uh the man and the legacy of Arthur Guinness, the founder of the of the company. So what inspired him to start his brewing company? Um, and you know, you mentioned about the the Gen Craze, and but really he was acting on a on what he perceived as a word from the Lord, right?
SPEAKER_02Well, he he was it was a word from the Lord that came through John Wesley. What happened was that Arthur Guinness was raised on this uh the estate of an archbishop, and his father was the manager of that estate and was particularly known for brewing beer. People came from miles around to buy the beer from this estate. Young Arthur learned that craft, went to Dublin in 1759, and started his own Guinness Brewery. But he prospered, he did well, but he really didn't have a distinctly Christian vision for what he was doing in business. It was the old sacred secular division. You know, if you were called, you were a priest, and if you weren't called, you did quote unquote secular work like everything else in the world. John Wesley, though, went to Dublin and preached and said some simple words that changed Arthur Guinness's life. He said, make all you can, save all you can, give all you can to the glory of God. Well, that sounds simple to us, and we've we hear that preaching pretty much all the time now in our Protestant churches for sure. But it was new to Arthur Guinness. Again, he was living in a world dominated by sacred secular thinking that made everything not church work, secular and lesser. So this gave him a Christian vision for what he was doing. He immediately began using his wealth to do social good, and he began to change what was done in the brewery, uh, even in the lives of the uh of the workers. And that's the that's the legacy, that's the heritage that I track in the book, all the way to, and I know I'm randling on here, but all the way to 1928, where I actually start the book in 1928, the year before the Great Depression, because if you had worked for Guinness, you would have uh you would have gotten uh you know burial, your bury funerals paid for, you would have gotten uh days in the country paid for by the country, you would have the company, you would have had uh nurses showing up at your house to show your wife, it would have been all male workers at that time, show your wife how to have a healthy home and and serve food correctly. You would have gotten libraries and sports teams and massage services, and I could just go on and on. And of course, two pints of the good stuff every day. And this was all because Arthur Guinness had this vision to use his company, I mean the actual way he ran it with his employees to uplift people and to impact them for the gospel. And that's the that's the heritage that Guinness has been living out until very recently, and still in Ireland, the workers attempt to live out that part of the heritage.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So beyond that that encounter with Wesley and and really heeding the words that were spoken to him, what what is the evidence that he was really acting on uh really expressing his Christian faith? Because, you know, there's a lot of companies that do a lot of good work for their employees. You know, you you think about like the Googleplex and you know, sushi every day for lunch, you know, and all these different kind of perks that really tend to be concentrated in kind of high competitive job areas where they're trying to attract talent, you know, not so much for kind of the um kind of lower wage workers, which I assume were probably the type of folks that were being employed at at Guinness, but what what is the evidence there?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's a great question. First of all, there's the character of uh Arthur Guinness himself. Um he actually was the founder of the Sunday school movement in Ireland. In England, it was a man named Robert Rakes, that people who study Christian history would know. He started the Sunday school movement in England, and that's the Sunday school movement that more impacted the U.S. So he's sort of the granddaddy of the great granddaddy of the Sunday school movement that we still have in many of us in our churches now. Um but Arthur Guinness, believe it or not, was the founder of that movement in Ireland. Um, he also defended Roman Catholic rights and did so with the Bible in his hands. Um he funded churches, he actually funded the rebuilding of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is probably on the site of a place where uh St. Patrick, uh you know, the famous St. Patrick of Ireland baptized new believers and baptized the pagan uh tribes. And Arthur Guinness was dead by the time this was finished. But his family did this, and they did it citing scripture and citing the glory of Jesus, citing the cause of a Christian Ireland. So um I'm not trying to tell you that the Guinness Brewing Company, you know, was entirely Christian, you know, and spouting scripture all the time, but the family was strongly Christian and constantly gave what you might call scriptural footnotes for all the things they did for social good, both in the company and without. Um, one of my favorite stories is the way they uh is the tale of how they defended the poor. And one of the Guinness heirs, later on in the late 1800s, got married. His father, who was the head of the brewery at the time, uh, gave him five million pounds for his wedding gift. Now, this is in the $200 million range now. And the next day, this Guinness heir who received that money went and moved into a hovel, moved what we were into what we would call today the ghetto and lived there for some months to draw the nation's attention to uh the cause of the poor. Now, here's a guy who's got a couple hundred million dollars in his pocket, newly in his pocket. But what does he do? He moves into the ghetto with his new bride, so the whole nation's paying attention to the cause of the poor, and he's citing scripture as he does it. So this is the this is the lore of the Guinness family, and it's uh it's pretty pronounced.
SPEAKER_01And um there was uh was it a hundred-year lease? Is that right?
SPEAKER_02Like on the what what what was the arrangement with with the actual uh land and yeah, it's it's it's great that you asked this because it's one of the weirdest things I've ever heard of. I can't even explain why. But when Arthur Guinness started his brewery in 1759 on the banks of the Liffey River right there in Dublin, um, he signed a 9,000-year lease.
SPEAKER_019,000. I was a little off there.
SPEAKER_02I've never even heard of such. They'll they actually, if you go to the storehouse in Dublin now and you go to the gift shop, they'll actually sell you a reprinting uh of a parchment that is that lease. Uh they'll actually let you read the language and you can take one home if you want to, but it's I've never heard of a lease like it. And they're obviously Guinness owns its own land, but the small portion that they originally bought is still part of that lease, and they're happy to pay the heirs, you know, they're they're part of it. Uh, but nine thousand years. So that's some forward thinking right there. That's somebody planning for the future. I remember studying some Japanese business years ago, and they had 100-year plans and 200-year plans. Uh, we're fairly short term here in the West, but I've never before heard of a 9,000-year lease.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, what wasn't it like Cortez who burned the ships? I mean, you can build more ships, but you know, you can't get out of that lease.
SPEAKER_02No, that's right. That's right. And they're kind of proud of it. You know, they this is the forward thinking of our founder, but uh that's why they sell copies of it in the store. But uh I still think it says something. It's it says something that a man would go and start a business and uh would sign a 9,000-year lease. He clearly intended to have descendants, he clearly intended the business to survive and do good for generations, and and it has.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and uh uh just some of the uh are there's some other items that you can maybe list off um that were kind of unique about what uh what they had done at Guinness in terms of taking care of the employees. Like, for example, um I I was I was reading that they were one of the first to provide pensions. And um, is that correct?
SPEAKER_02Yes, first to provide pensions. They paid 20% higher than average salaries. Uh they provided an early version of company life insurance. Uh it was it was pretty amazing. I mean, it was a it was the 1800s uh version, really advanced of what, as you said earlier, Google and Amazon and these companies that we we kind of see on profile in the news, they were doing an early version of it and they they invented whole new mechanisms. Um, intramaral sports teams built into a company, for example, was absolutely new. They invented that whole idea, nobody else had done it. Uh, the idea of giving the product of the of the factory to the people, whether it was a chocolate factory or what have you. Uh again, two pints every day. Uh that was not just, hey, go to the bar and have a drink. That was this is this is a health drink. I mean, your teenagers, your wife, they're drinking this because they don't trust the water. So it was, it was all many, many things like this. One of the things I really like, kind of a humorous thing, um, is that they would fund a trip to the country every year for all the families and all the workers. And they actually had a dating office so that if you were single working for the company, they would work all year to make sure that you had a nice young lady to take to the country on their dime. So uh they also were the first company in the world to have a dating office, can you believe it? And it was all about the fact they wanted to get their workers out to the country because they were, of course, uh all working in downtown Dublin and they wanted to get them away from the grime and the dirt. But innovations like that, pretty stunning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And a lot of this was kind of going on during the temperance movement, is that right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the temperance movement would have been more in the US. It never really gained that much ground in the UK. Um, but there's no question, people raised, you know, I think the main issue was um people marveled that you had this Christian family that owned a brewery, which a lot of Christians mainly in the US, I'll have to say, uh, the whole temperance movement really took root in the in the US and not so much the rest of the world. Um, but but that that but that God would use a family uh doing what some people consider to be a secular thing, a beer company, uh, to do such good. And that I I think uh I have to laugh and I think it's almost the Lord's humor. And look, if you want to see how I can bless a business that's that's gonna honor me, let me show you what I can do with a beer company that most of you think is secular kind of attitude, you know. And I'm not I'm not quoting Jesus there. I'm just saying that was sort of the mentality of the Guinness, the Guinness Brewery.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, and like you were saying earlier with the gin craze, so much of that temperance movement was aimed at hard liquor, not not so much on, I mean, what really was was understood as a nutritious, uh, I was reading that um for the employees whose wives had recently given birth, they would give uh small bottles of uh of Guinness with vitamin B rich yeast sediment for nutrition um to these to these mothers who were you know recovering from um from giving birth. Um but so so this was really uh a much safer alternative. Um and it's also interesting that so much of what kind of gave birth to the faith and work movement in the United States had to do with this issue of drunkenness in factories. Like it from what I was reading, I mean, they could hardly find workers that wouldn't show up the work just completely blitzed, and which was causing a lot of um you know accidents on the job and and so forth. I mean, I would assume that with the Christian values that they had, I mean, were they were they teaching kind of the the virtue of moderation when it when it came to alcohol?
SPEAKER_02Or yes, they absolutely were. And and you know, it's interesting, there was a great deal of distinction made between what happened when you drank beer and what happened when you drank gin. Uh there's a famous uh paint drawer and painter named Hogarth, William Hogarth. And Hogarth actually has something you can look up online, and your listeners can look up online. Uh, one drawing is of Gin Alley, and the other drawing is of Beer Lane. And on Gin Alley, people are drunk and they're neglecting their children and their there's crime and the buildings are falling down. And the only the only institution doing well in that drawing is the pawn shop. But on Beer Lane, uh you now have uh people are happy, they're full-bodied, they're meaning they're just symbolic symbolism of them being healthy. Uh the arts are being done, people are flirting with uh people on the streets. In other words, there's vitality and there's health, and there's just intention to have families and procreate and all that kind of thing. And only the pawn shop is doing badly in that drawing. So uh this is this is very much the Guinness mentality. Uh, drunkenness is a sin. The consumption of alcohol is not. And if you have a choice, you should consume beer. Uh, one you just put your finger on one of the important things was they not only said that uh beer has far, far, far less alcohol, but uh it's interesting that during their time that beer was perceived almost the way we might think of a smoothie today. If I'm feeling really drained and I'm traveling, maybe I'm in an airport, I'd love to find a smoothie king, you know, and get a nice smoothie and get new get kind of hydrated. Uh but beer, even though they didn't quite understand the science of it, beer had those vitamin, you know, the B vitamins that you've just talked about, and it transformed health. So the Guinness has made this point a great deal. In fact, that's why in the 1920s, some of their most famous advertisements were uh Guinness Good for You and Guinness for Strength and things like that. Many of you, many people who are listening, probably have seen um those advertisements famous in the pubs of England. Um, and and this is why, and by the way, you put your finger on another important point, and that is that pregnant women were prescribed Guinness beer until the 1930s in England, until the 1930s, because again, of those B vitamins that had provided some other vitamins that pregnant women needed. So again, we tend to think, wow, uh, you know, it's almost like we're thinking these doctors are telling these women to, you know, just shoot scotch or something. You know, it's it's it's it's just shocking. But when you think about how little alcohol there is in beer, and and a little alcohol we're told is just a very little is good for pregnant women, and these B vitamins, uh, this is the kind of thing that Guinness pushed. They they they realize, by the way, their beer, Porter Stout, even more stout, even more filled with nutrition than the average of what we would call blonde beer today. I'm not a beer drinker, but um, all of this is what Guinness put in its educational programs, put it in its advertising, and tried to encourage people against um the extreme of hard liquor. And I just make one more point while I'm ranting on here, and that is, you know, we had prohibition in the United States. Um, and what happened was it was this was part, this was certainly about some people's concern about drinking. It was also anti-German. We just fought World War I. We were opposed to the Germans brewing in America was largely a German concern. So we were opposed to that. Well, we now know that that prohibition increased the illegal consumption of hard liquor in America. Hard liquor consumption skyrocketed. The drinking of beer fell off to almost nothing because those breweries got closed. And so it wasn't until beer kind of came back around that the alcoholism and hard liquor consumption dropped a bit to healthy levels. So my point is there's a that you're making a great point, which is there is a correlation between the healthy consumption of beer and people not going to the hard stuff and destroying their lives. And the Guinness has made sure that their society knew about this.
SPEAKER_01Well, Stephen, thank you for highlighting this story of this great man of God, Arthur Guinness, and and the legacy that he's left behind. And we need more of these stories because typically, if I ask, you know, who are the heroes of the Christian faith? People immediately think, you know, Billy Graham and you know, and and others who stood behind pulpits. They don't often think of the R. G. Laternos and John Wanamakers and and um and Arthur Guinness's of history. And so um, thank you for bringing this story to the forefront. Um, as we wrap it up here, what action do you want people to take as a result of what they've heard today, Stephen?
SPEAKER_02You know, I'd like for people to understand that there are are there's a relatively small group of people called to be clergy. The majority of us are called to be in the marketplace. We're called to bring our Christian principles to the marketplace. We're called to prosper, we're called to be successful if we can be, and then to do exactly as Wesley said: make all you can, save all you can, give all you can to the glory of God. And there's never been a more important time. We need to fund the gospel, we need to fund the kingdom. Uh, and we also need to be people in the marketplace who are righteous. I'm very proud of the Green family, for example, of Hobby Lobby fame, who are, you know, right their will with the uh the Gateses and the Jobs family and others, being strong Christians, uh in the marketplace, being successful, using their money to the glory of God. So that's what I urge those who are listening to us, watching us now, um you realize that people are called to business. They're called to the marketplace, they're called to so on so-called the private sector. And um, and that's probably the vast majority of us. So let's use our gifts to the glory of God, uh, ask God to help us prosper, and then use our wealth for the glory of God, and we can we can impact this generation with that that kind of thinking.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. So good. Again, the book is The Search for God and Guinness, a biography of the beer that changed the world. You can get that um pretty much wherever books are sold. And also at stephenmansfield.tv. Um, that's Stephen with a ph not a V, um, mansfield.tv. And you can check out all of his other he's an extremely prolific author. I'm sure he's got a couple other dozen books he's uh in the in the works. Um, but anything else you want to say about how people can get connected?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, check check me out at uh stepamansfield.tv. I also do a lot of work with men, and I think this is an important part of what you're talking about here. I certainly value women as leaders and in the marketplace and what have you. Uh, but check out uh greatman TV. Greatman.tv is the website, greatman TV, and all of my social media is Mansfield Rights, MansfieldRights, just my last name with W-R-I-T-E-S. And we'd love to have you jump in with us.
SPEAKER_01All right. Stephen, thanks for helping us grow today and again for this incredible story of Arthur Guinness and the Guinness Brewing Company. We're better for it.
SPEAKER_02Great to be with you, man. God bless.
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