The King's Business

Abstract

The King's Business William Schultz (bio) Peter W. Williams. Religion, Art, and Money: Episcopalians and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiv + 277 pp. Notes and index. $42.00. Sarah Ruth Hammond. Darren Dochuk, editor. God's Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xii + 228 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" The young Jesus was not talking about business of the General Motors variety, but that did not stop advertising executive Bruce Barton from appending this quote to the start of his bestselling 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows. Barton's effort to glean business lessons from the Gospels is not a bizarre curio from a money-mad decade; rather, The Man Nobody Knows was an earnest attempt to interpret religion's place within a capitalist society. The complex interplay of religion and capitalism has long been the topic of historical scrutiny, from Max Weber's writings on the "Protestant ethic" to contemporary studies of the prosperity gospel. The recent interest in the history of capitalism has produced, however, an efflorescence of new work on "religion and capitalism" that combine rigorous research with theoretical insight. The two books under review here—one by a scholar with a long and distinguished career, the other by a scholar whose promising career was cut tragically short—thus arrive at the perfect time, at least in commercial terms. It would be a mistake to pigeonhole Religion, Art, and Money and God's Businessmen as simply "religion and capitalism" books because both offer much more. Read together, they illuminate the shifting boundary between the sacred and secular in the modern United States. Peter W. Williams, an emeritus professor of religion and American Studies at Miami University in Ohio, has written a book with a sophistication that belies its simple title. Religion, Art, and Money offers a wide-ranging history of Episcopalianism in the United States between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Williams, as he makes clear in the preface, does not try to give a comprehensive survey of Episcopalianism. His concern is with "the ways [End Page 85] in which Episcopalians … participated in social and cultural movements, on which they put their own stamp" (p. xii). If this book has an overarching argument, it is that Episcopalians reclaimed art as a valid form of religious experience, rescuing it from the derision cast upon it by some varieties of Protestants. To prove this point, Williams provides a thorough excavation of the history of American Episcopalianism. "Excavation" is the proper metaphor for the book's first section, "Churches," which examines the Episcopalian art of church-building. The decades around the turn of the twentieth century witnessed the construction of many spectacular Episcopalian churches, Boston's Trinity Church, a masterpiece of the Romanesque style, foremost among them. Williams interweaves the history of Trinity with the biography of its most famous pastor, Phillips Brooks, who in his lifetime was one of America's most influential and admired men. Brooks was a "Broad Church" Episcopalian, part of a faction within the church that declared itself open to modern ideas. For "High Church" Episcopalians, who felt a close affinity with Catholicism, the church architecture of choice was not Romanesque but the ornate splendor of the Gothic Revival. Many Episcopalians admired the Gothic style for its supposed moral qualities—only Gothic architecture, they argued, could properly capture the symbolic dimension of religious life. Ralph Adams Cram, one of the era's leading architects, made a career out of translating this idea into concrete reality. Every element of Cram's churches, such as All Saints Church in Ashmont and St. Thomas in Manhattan, was meant to convey a deeper meaning. Williams deftly unravels these meanings, explaining, for instance, the significance of Cram's decision to use a painted statue of Jesus's crucifixion rather than an unadorned cross in All Saints. Williams provides an equally astute analysis of the Episcopal cathedrals built in this era. Churches such as New York's St. John the Divine and San Francisco's...