The Hidden Agenda in Ben Hur

Abstract

“It may be that Wallace wrote exactly the kind of apologetic that some Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century needed, an apologetic which allowed them to have God and Mammon too. Wallace wrote a tale as an opiate for the rich and for all those other Americans who thought that they had a divine calling to make it, even to make it big, in the ‘Great Barbecue.’ They could participate in the struggle not only for existence but also a place in the emerging industrial state of the late nineteenth century—and be Christian too.”