Joseph P. Slaughter’s Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic is a fine addition to current scholarship on religion, culture, and capitalism in the US. His study focuses on the under-studied (at least recently) but important interim sphere of the American North from the 1790s to the 1850s. Three models of “Christian capitalism” emerged then and there. One could “fight for reform,” “separate to maintain purity,” or “engage and attempt to redeem culture and the market” (p. 2). Rejecting Charles Sellers’s simplistic, for-or-against binary regarding religion and the market revolution, Slaughter deploys the “theological frameworks” of Pietism, Calvinism, and Armenianism to represent the emerging nation’s “contested forms of capitalism” (p. 4). Each also shaped “attitudes toward economic exchange and ideas about how the marketplace should function within both the local community and the nation” (p. 6).
Slaughter devotes the first third of Faith in Markets to separatist Pietists living in Pennsylvania. George Rapp’s Harmony settlement, underway after 1798, benefitted from the nation’s westward push after the Louisiana Purchase and blended communalism with utopian idealism. Unlike its contemporaries, Harmony’s “emphasis on technological innovation kept it viable until the end of the nineteenth century … rare for utopian societies” (p. 18). As controversial as their like-minded separatist contemporaries (the Shakers and Latter-Day Saints, for instance), the Rapps “were ruthless in their communalism, showing no flexibility in demanding … new members hand over all possessions” (p. 26). Harmonists also endorsed and preferred full celibacy and couched their “divine economy” in metaphors and practices that “meant efficient and balanced agriculture, industry, and trade.” For Slaughter, Harmony exuded “capitalist behaviors while internalizing communal attitudes toward property and wealth accumulation,” using intermittent relocation to maintain “physical distance from the ‘corrupting’ influences of American society” (pp. 40-41).
By contrast, the Pioneers—a Sabbath-honoring Calvinist set of reformists led by Joseph Bissell, Jr.—worked “to reform the market … [by] curing it of the ills of alcohol, seven-day workweeks, and slave labor” (p. 93). Established and operating as a carrier along the Erie Canal, the Pioneer Line used Sunday closing to counter what one of their 1828 handbills called “a most alarming evil in our State,” meaning capitalism’s encroachment on the Christian holy day (p. 120). The Pioneers found allies and investors in abolitionist Lewis Tappan and Aristarchus Champion, a land speculator. Like the Harmonists, the Pioneers also ruffled feathers for reasons obvious and not-so-obvious. Weekly work stoppages on Sundays undercut the smooth transport of goods and people via the canal, which did not make the Pioneers any easy friends. A Calvinist stubbornness regarding the Sabbath’s keeping led to run-ins with attendant laborers doing upkeep work (like shodding horses on Sundays) and overworked horse-drivers and deliverers (often inexperienced and pushed to meet distance quotas before Sunday time off). Even mail delivery became a sticking point for the Pioneers’ Sabbatarianism and vice-versa, preventing Bissell himself from securing a federal mail contract. Bissell’s sudden death in 1831 sank the Pioneer Line, but Slaughter suggests its spirit lived on. Blue laws restricting Sunday sales signaled the longevity of the Pioneers’ reformist Christian capitalism, which held “the increasingly impersonal ‘rules’ of the market did not dictate how new transportation technology should be employed” (p. 148).
Slaughter’s third case study concerns the publishing firm set up by James and John Harper in 1817 and then renamed as Harper & Brothers in 1833. It was a business “transforming American culture into a broadly moral, middle-class milieu” (p. 152). Arminianism, which privileged human effort as contributive to salvation, drove the Harpers. As Methodists, they valued a measure of organizational independence, the mass proliferation of literacy as a religious act, and the redemption of “American culture by producing morally edifying cultural products” (p. 170). Open to publishing “secular” novels by writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Richard Dana, Harper & Brothers put out dictionaries, illustrated Bibles, and its famed eponymous periodical, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Crisscrossing religious and secular markets, all while pulling from a virtues culture grounded in republicanism to sell its brand of middle-class Methodism, Harper’s pursued the most viable means of market survivability of Slaughter’s three case studies. Still, he concludes, all three strains live on today, “even if some of their visions of capitalism (communal and reform) are not as commonly practiced today” (p. 218).
Slaughter’s book is very well-researched and cogently argued. It works best as a self-contained setup and comparison point for work already done on colonial and post-Civil War arrangements of business and religion. The book also ends with a thought-provoking invitation to see its three models from two centuries ago as still operating today given that “[t]he question of business and morality has never been more controversial” (p. 220). Slaughter certainly sees present-day connections when using presentist terms like “conservative” to describe his subjects’ theological stances and, by suggestion more so than documentation, their political import. But the real takeaway from the book seems less about historical continuity than contrast. Striking are the differences between the theological specificity, seriousness, and subtleties of Slaughter’s subjects and the banal bromides or simplistic platitudes of today’s business-speak, corporate religionists, or self-appointed capitalistic gurus. Moreover, the cultural and political aims of contemporary Christian capitalists, especially white evangelical partisans, seem somewhat different from Slaughter’s subjects, given that the harder hand of the regulatory state does today what the softer hand of business culture, commercial activity, or “Christian” consumer goods did then. Such minor counterpoints aside, Faith in Markets indisputably achieves its goal of revisiting and revising the market revolution as a more complex set of religious endeavors than previously portrayed.
Professor Grem is the author of The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (2016) and co-editor of The Business Turn in American Religious History (2017) and Southern Religion, Southern Culture (2019). He is presently working on his next book, Hard Times, U.S.A.: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory.
