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God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860
God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790-1860 edited by Mark Noll Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 368 pp.; $24.95, paper |
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.
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