We tend to take for granted that most Protestant evangelicals vigorously support capitalism and free markets. This is one of the reasons, of course, so many Americans assume that Protestant evangelical is synonymous with the Religious Right. But why are Protestant evangelicals so committed to markets? Where did this commitment come from, and how does it square with the repeated scriptural admonitions against wealth and greed?

Focusing on the first 70 years of America's existence, the essays collected in God and Mammon address these and many other questions about American Protestants' perspectives on finance. In a pair of fine essays at the beginning and end of the collection, Mark Noll links Protestants' support for a market-based economy to the absence of a state-sponsored church. "A move away from top-down monarchical, hierarchical, and colonial control in religion," he argues, "predisposed many evangelicals in the same direction economically, that is, toward localism and free trade." Noll also points out that the Protestant view of salvation—each believer must make a personal commitment to Christ—fits comfortably with an economic system that emphasizes individual decisions by individual actors rather than governmental intervention.

This is not to say that Protestants in the early Republic simply lined up behind market-based economics and never looked back. To the contrary, Protestant views on money and markets were every bit as complex then as they are today. Many ministers praised wealth obtained through diligence as a gift from God, for instance, but, as Richard Pointer notes, they also warned that "speculation threatened to turn men into 'practical atheists' by persuading them that their business fortunes were more dependent on their skill at exploiting current economic circumstances than on God's providence." These distinctions were not always easy to maintain, and the sometimes contradictory positions taken by Protestants make for some of the most fascinating and instructive reading in this very important book.

One of the most refreshing qualities of God and Mammon is the contributors' insistence on taking religious motivation seriously as they explore these tensions and apparent contradictions. Rather than simply assuming that American Protestants assimilated their theology to the economic conditions of the early Republic, the essays repeatedly consider the ways in which Protestants' views of money also were shaped by their beliefs, in an ongoing negotiation with the rapidly changing marketplace.

The essays are organized around three general themes. The first set explores the general stance of American Protestants toward the market, with a particular emphasis on the Methodist church, whose explosive growth was one of the great stories of 19th-century American religion. The lightening rod for much of this discussion is the influential work of historian Charles Sellers, who argued that the "market revolution" in 19th-century America displaced a frontier culture that had been anchored in communitarian values rather than the impersonal exchange of the marketplace. Both Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine question aspects of Sellers's terminology and his thesis. Carwardine casts doubt on Sellers's claim that the Methodists shifted sharply from localism and community values to a market-oriented perspective during the 19th century. Rather than reflecting a sudden reversal, Carwardine contends that the Methodists' enthusiasm for self improvement and entrepreneurial values was there from the beginning.

A second focus of God and Mammon is the role of money within the church and in Protestant ministries. Particularly disputed during the early decades of the Republic was the question of how pastors should be supported. Pew rentals were one prominent method of support, and some churches gave their ministers land to farm. An essay by David Hempton explores the striking transformation in the Methodist church on these issues. As the 19th century wore on, reliance on itinerant preachers who depended on the hospitality and financial assistance of the laity whose paths they crossed gradually (and controversially) gave way to a more formal and centralized system of support.

Money issues figured equally prominently in evangelical book publishing. The early publishing societies insisted on always giving their Bibles and other publications away, relying on charitable giving rather than sales to support the enterprise. By 1810, however, the publishing societies had begun charging the wholesale price to those who could afford to pay. A decade later, retail sales had become a primary source of income for sustaining the publishing enterprise. Rather than simply concluding that evangelical publishers succumbed to the market, David Paul Nord tells a more complex and compelling story. The publishing societies seem to have been shaped by emerging new business techniques (they were among the first to use "stereotyped" printing plates, which could be stored for later printings), but they also never lost their commitment to getting Bibles and tracts into as many hands as possible.

The third set of essays shows how money issues worked their way into the two biggest social issues of 19th-century Protestant life: slavery and the great revivals. Both Kenneth Startup, who chronicles the Southern clergy's stance toward North-South tensions, and Richard Carwardine, who explores how money disputes exacerbated the schism within the Methodist church, point out the role that market rhetoric played in the debate over slavery. Many Southern clergymen concluded that abolitionism was corrupted by economic self interest. Abolition was championed, they believed, by industrialists who stood to gain if the agricultural Southern economy were crippled. On this view, which Startup describes as naïve but not wholly unfounded, the campaign against slavery was steeped in greed, and reflected the dangers of capitalism gone amok.

Although we do not often associate revivalism with markets or money, financial issues and perspectives figured quite prominently in the revivals of the 1850s. An essay by Kathryn Long points out that Charles Finney and other revivalists used modern marketing techniques to promote the revivals, advertising their efforts and playing to the breathless newspaper coverage in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Long also explores how the 1857-58 revival targeted the business community. Revivalists held their events during the lunch hour of Wall Street businessmen and even mimicked the structure of business meetings. Long suggests that many Protestants' lingering apprehensions about the market melted away as they watched so many businessmen commit their lives to Christ.

As with any edited collection, the essays of God and Mammon do not always fit together seamlessly. The critiques of Sellers's market revolution thesis, for instance, feel at times like part of a larger conversation that we haven't heard. Yet this book tells a remarkably coherent and compelling story about American Protestants' adjustments to the increasingly commercial 19th century American economy.

Of all the multifarious connections between Protestants and money, the only significant issue that God and Mammon seems to me to leave out is the regulatory dimension. Although American Protestants often treated financial issues as questions of private morality, markets obviously cannot exist without governmental support, and several high-profile 19th-century issues forced Protestants to consider the proper role of the state when it comes to markets and money.

The first is bankruptcy. Throughout the 19th century, lawmakers debated whether to enact a federal law that would enable debtors to discharge their debts and start over. Leading proponents of a market-based economy, including Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, insisted that uniform bankruptcy laws were essential to deal with the failures that are inevitable in a capitalist economy. In response, many bankruptcy opponents insisted, among other things, that debtors have a moral obligation to repay their debts. Yet this moral argument receded into the background after the mid-19th century—another sign of Protestants' acclimation to the market?—even though Congress did not pass a permanent federal bankruptcy law until 1898.

The second issue is gambling and speculation. Protestant ministers routinely condemned gambling, but it was not always clear what counted as gambling. Then, as now, casual and genteel gambling were sometimes excused on the view that gambling is most pernicious if it stems from a greedy desire for sudden wealth. Lotteries were another troublesome issue. Although some ministers warned that lotteries substituted belief in luck for true faith, and supported their prohibition, many church building projects were financed by money the state raised through lotteries. Lotteries were defended as a voluntary tax that went to a good cause, until scandals led state after state to ban them in the mid-19th century.

Closely related to gambling was the question whether to take action against market speculation. God and Mammon touches on this issue (most prominently in Richard Pointer's essay), but the essays do not fully pursue the tension between Protestants' hostility to gambling and speculation, on the one hand, and, on the other, their growing sympathy for a market-based economy whose liquidity and efficiency depends in important part on the same kind of behavior—speculation in stocks or commodities—that American Protestants have always denounced. By the end of the 19th century, this tension would manifest itself in fierce battles, replete with dueling scriptural rhetoric, over the regulation of futures—that is, contracts for the future sale of corn, pork bellies, or other commodities.1

The moral, then, is this: if your interest is piqued by the subject of Protestants, money, and the market, leave space on your shelf for a future book that takes up some of the regulatory debates I have just described. For just about every other aspect of American Protestants' views on money and finance, however, God and Mammon is and will be an irreplaceable resource.

We tend to take for granted that most Protestant evangelicals vigorously support capitalism and free markets. This is one of the reasons, of course, so many Americans assume that Protestant evangelical is synonymous with the Religious Right. But why are Protestant evangelicals so committed to markets? Where did this commitment come from, and how does it square with the repeated scriptural admonitions against wealth and greed?

Focusing on the first 70 years of America's existence, the essays collected in God and Mammon address these and many other questions about American Protestants' perspectives on finance. In a pair of fine essays at the beginning and end of the collection, Mark Noll links Protestants' support for a market-based economy to the absence of a state-sponsored church. "A move away from top-down monarchical, hierarchical, and colonial control in religion," he argues, "predisposed many evangelicals in the same direction economically, that is, toward localism and free trade." Noll also points out that the Protestant view of salvation—each believer must make a personal commitment to Christ—fits comfortably with an economic system that emphasizes individual decisions by individual actors rather than governmental intervention.

This is not to say that Protestants in the early Republic simply lined up behind market-based economics and never looked back. To the contrary, Protestant views on money and markets were every bit as complex then as they are today. Many ministers praised wealth obtained through diligence as a gift from God, for instance, but, as Richard Pointer notes, they also warned that "speculation threatened to turn men into 'practical atheists' by persuading them that their business fortunes were more dependent on their skill at exploiting current economic circumstances than on God's providence." These distinctions were not always easy to maintain, and the sometimes contradictory positions taken by Protestants make for some of the most fascinating and instructive reading in this very important book.

One of the most refreshing qualities of God and Mammon is the contributors' insistence on taking religious motivation seriously as they explore these tensions and apparent contradictions. Rather than simply assuming that American Protestants assimilated their theology to the economic conditions of the early Republic, the essays repeatedly consider the ways in which Protestants' views of money also were shaped by their beliefs, in an ongoing negotiation with the rapidly changing marketplace.

The essays are organized around three general themes. The first set explores the general stance of American Protestants toward the market, with a particular emphasis on the Methodist church, whose explosive growth was one of the great stories of 19th-century American religion. The lightening rod for much of this discussion is the influential work of historian Charles Sellers, who argued that the "market revolution" in 19th-century America displaced a frontier culture that had been anchored in communitarian values rather than the impersonal exchange of the marketplace. Both Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine question aspects of Sellers's terminology and his thesis. Carwardine casts doubt on Sellers's claim that the Methodists shifted sharply from localism and community values to a market-oriented perspective during the 19th century. Rather than reflecting a sudden reversal, Carwardine contends that the Methodists' enthusiasm for self improvement and entrepreneurial values was there from the beginning.

A second focus of God and Mammon is the role of money within the church and in Protestant ministries. Particularly disputed during the early decades of the Republic was the question of how pastors should be supported. Pew rentals were one prominent method of support, and some churches gave their ministers land to farm. An essay by David Hempton explores the striking transformation in the Methodist church on these issues. As the 19th century wore on, reliance on itinerant preachers who depended on the hospitality and financial assistance of the laity whose paths they crossed gradually (and controversially) gave way to a more formal and centralized system of support.

Money issues figured equally prominently in evangelical book publishing. The early publishing societies insisted on always giving their Bibles and other publications away, relying on charitable giving rather than sales to support the enterprise. By 1810, however, the publishing societies had begun charging the wholesale price to those who could afford to pay. A decade later, retail sales had become a primary source of income for sustaining the publishing enterprise. Rather than simply concluding that evangelical publishers succumbed to the market, David Paul Nord tells a more complex and compelling story. The publishing societies seem to have been shaped by emerging new business techniques (they were among the first to use "stereotyped" printing plates, which could be stored for later printings), but they also never lost their commitment to getting Bibles and tracts into as many hands as possible.

The third set of essays shows how money issues worked their way into the two biggest social issues of 19th-century Protestant life: slavery and the great revivals. Both Kenneth Startup, who chronicles the Southern clergy's stance toward North-South tensions, and Richard Carwardine, who explores how money disputes exacerbated the schism within the Methodist church, point out the role that market rhetoric played in the debate over slavery. Many Southern clergymen concluded that abolitionism was corrupted by economic self interest. Abolition was championed, they believed, by industrialists who stood to gain if the agricultural Southern economy were crippled. On this view, which Startup describes as naïve but not wholly unfounded, the campaign against slavery was steeped in greed, and reflected the dangers of capitalism gone amok.

Although we do not often associate revivalism with markets or money, financial issues and perspectives figured quite prominently in the revivals of the 1850s. An essay by Kathryn Long points out that Charles Finney and other revivalists used modern marketing techniques to promote the revivals, advertising their efforts and playing to the breathless newspaper coverage in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Long also explores how the 1857-58 revival targeted the business community. Revivalists held their events during the lunch hour of Wall Street businessmen and even mimicked the structure of business meetings. Long suggests that many Protestants' lingering apprehensions about the market melted away as they watched so many businessmen commit their lives to Christ.

As with any edited collection, the essays of God and Mammon do not always fit together seamlessly. The critiques of Sellers's market revolution thesis, for instance, feel at times like part of a larger conversation that we haven't heard. Yet this book tells a remarkably coherent and compelling story about American Protestants' adjustments to the increasingly commercial 19th century American economy.

Of all the multifarious connections between Protestants and money, the only significant issue that God and Mammon seems to me to leave out is the regulatory dimension. Although American Protestants often treated financial issues as questions of private morality, markets obviously cannot exist without governmental support, and several high-profile 19th-century issues forced Protestants to consider the proper role of the state when it comes to markets and money.

The first is bankruptcy. Throughout the 19th century, lawmakers debated whether to enact a federal law that would enable debtors to discharge their debts and start over. Leading proponents of a market-based economy, including Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, insisted that uniform bankruptcy laws were essential to deal with the failures that are inevitable in a capitalist economy. In response, many bankruptcy opponents insisted, among other things, that debtors have a moral obligation to repay their debts. Yet this moral argument receded into the background after the mid-19th century—another sign of Protestants' acclimation to the market?—even though Congress did not pass a permanent federal bankruptcy law until 1898.

The second issue is gambling and speculation. Protestant ministers routinely condemned gambling, but it was not always clear what counted as gambling. Then, as now, casual and genteel gambling were sometimes excused on the view that gambling is most pernicious if it stems from a greedy desire for sudden wealth. Lotteries were another troublesome issue. Although some ministers warned that lotteries substituted belief in luck for true faith, and supported their prohibition, many church building projects were financed by money the state raised through lotteries. Lotteries were defended as a voluntary tax that went to a good cause, until scandals led state after state to ban them in the mid-19th century.

Closely related to gambling was the question whether to take action against market speculation. God and Mammon touches on this issue (most prominently in Richard Pointer's essay), but the essays do not fully pursue the tension between Protestants' hostility to gambling and speculation, on the one hand, and, on the other, their growing sympathy for a market-based economy whose liquidity and efficiency depends in important part on the same kind of behavior—speculation in stocks or commodities—that American Protestants have always denounced. By the end of the 19th century, this tension would manifest itself in fierce battles, replete with dueling scriptural rhetoric, over the regulation of futures—that is, contracts for the future sale of corn, pork bellies, or other commodities.1

The moral, then, is this: if your interest is piqued by the subject of Protestants, money, and the market, leave space on your shelf for a future book that takes up some of the regulatory debates I have just described. For just about every other aspect of American Protestants' views on money and finance, however, God and Mammon is and will be an irreplaceable resource.

David A. Skeel, Jr., is professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the author of Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), reviewed in this issue.

1. For a fascinating account by a secular historian, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, 1999), pp. 153-202.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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