‘Investments in the Kingdom of Christ’: home missionary fundraising and investor capitalism in the late-nineteenth-century USA

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the issuance of ‘certificates of stock’ in return for financial donations towards missionary chapels and schoolhouses in the late nineteenth-century American Presbyterian home missionary enterprise. No dividend or interest payment was made by the missionary agency. Instead, fundraisers explained that the ‘dividends’ on these ‘investments’ were spiritual, promising donors an improvement in their spiritual lives now, and potentially even greater ‘returns’ in the hereafter. The emergence of this method of raising funds is an example of how American religious organisations have used the methods of the commercial world in their fundraising strategies. However, as this article shows, it also sheds light on the mutual entanglement of religion and economy, values, and finance in the spheres of both the market and the church. At a time when many American Protestants were morally ambiguous about investor capitalism, the emergence and development of this mode of fundraising represented one of the ways investor capitalism was legitimised as a necessary, and respectable, economic activity for Protestant believers in a modern capitalist economy. At the same time, it also reflected a broader reframing of financial donations as worship within the Presbyterian Church.