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As is often evident in the pages of Books & Culture, many thoughtful American Christians are perplexed and sometimes troubled about the relationship between our vast affluence and our commitments to follow the teachings of Jesus. One index of that concern is that, even in the Reagan years and at the height of the Religious Right, one evangelical bestseller was Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which sold some 350,000 copies from 1977 to 1998. That figure pales compared to those for the more dramatic escapist scenarios of The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series, but also suggests that an evangelical social conscience is not an invention of the last few years. The most immediate questions sparking much of this concern have to do with the relationship of the immense wealth that most of us enjoy to the needs of the very poor, both at home and abroad. A related set of questions, probably less often discussed, have to do with the moral implications of modern capitalism, which has fostered both widespread economic growth and a world of competition in which the rich have huge advantages over the poor.
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Apologists for America and for its brand of capitalism have often treated widespread American prosperity as though it is, in fact, evidence of American virtue. Critics think otherwise. Much of the world sees American wealth as evidence of American greed, and leftist critics long have seen capitalism as organized greed. Militant Muslim observers add that, whatever the potential good of our affluence, it has hopelessly corrupted us, so that we preside over and export a civilization of unparalleled materialist decadence. The implication is that the Christian religion, especially Protestantism, has failed to provide significant checks on the debilitating effects of a civilization built around material acquisition. Radical disciples of the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount have said much the same.
Taking his title from one of Jesus' parables, Stewart Davenport sets Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon in the broad context of "one of the central paradoxes of American history: Americans are and always have been some of the most voluntarily religious people in the world as well as some of the most grossly materialistic." While that paradox hovers in the background of his inquiry, he focuses his study on the very precise and intriguing question: "what did Christians in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about?" He looks at the critical era from 1815 to 1860, when the structures of modern market capitalism together with the new infrastructures of the revolutions in transportation and communications were taking shape so that the northern United States was experiencing a dramatic economic and cultural transformation.
Davenport discovers that most Christian thinkers of this era, particularly Christian academics, did not think through the moral implications of the capitalist economic system with critical thoroughness. That becomes more understandable if we take into account that many of them formulated their views in an era before widespread questioning of the capitalist system was raised by Marx and Engels and a host of others. But the American writers did not much engage in earlier British debates either. Probably the most important intellectual context determining their outlook was that, as Mark Noll has emphasized in his works, American Protestants had fused their religious outlook with moderate versions of the ideals of the American Revolution associated with "self-evident truths" of "Enlightenment" reason. American Protestant thinkers accordingly tended to be uncritical of the current "sciences" of society. They had relatively little alertness to how much the human sciences work within frameworks both of self-interests and of social, moral, religious, and other assumptions. Rather, the dominant view of Christian intellectuals was that scientific questions regarding society were purely objective concerns, and that Christian viewpoints ought to be kept separate from them. Economics involved essentially technical questions regarding God-ordained ways that market mechanisms worked. Hence those questions could be treated with the same sort of objectivity one would use for understanding literal physical processes, such as geological change. Christian viewpoints had to do with practical questions of morality, understood largely in terms of how individuals ought to respond to the objective realities that they found in God's world, including the economic realities.
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