The Power of Mammon: The Market, Secularization, and New York Baptists, 1790–1922 by Curtis D. Johnson

Abstract

When this reviewer first came across Johnson’s Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, 1989) in graduate school, it prompted a rethinking of certain standard narratives and methodologies. Johnson’s third book, The Power of Mammon, is a similar work, seeking to overturn Finke and Stark’s argument that the marketplace of religion has been the foundation of American Protestantism’s lasting vitality and relevance.1 Instead, Johnson believes that the marketplace’s influence on American Protestantism has been pernicious, because of how it “secularized New York State Baptist congregations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” leaving them “distracted” from the transcendent (xv).Johnson effectively deploys a standard strain of secularization theory, but the strength of The Power of Mammon is its research methodology—a deep dive into the archives of New York Baptists—that mines congregational minutes, membership rosters, church judicial cases, baptisms, conversions, membership demographics, and periodicals to gauge the changing religious activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century congregants. For example, Johnson comprehensively analyzes church discipline records to demonstrate how “collaborative” congregations (those in which women wielded significant power) meted out discipline more frequently. This situation led to concern about the “disorderly” nature of women, and their gradual disempowerment, before the balance of power tilted back toward women in the late nineteenth century as congregations transformed from covenant communities to voluntary associations, relying on women’s proven ability to fundraise.Readers may disagree with Johnson’s reduction of the market to a “distraction” from religious participation. Certainly, the subjects of Hammond’s God’s Businessmen would object, failing to see any distinction between their religious and business lives.2 Valeri’s Puritans would similarly be confused, affirming a theology of vocation that blurred the boundary between secular and sacred in business practices.3 Likewise, Kirk’s portrait of John Wanamaker reveals a retailer extraordinaire who viewed his store and religion as inseparable.4 Johnson’s contention that the COVID-19 crisis supports his thesis—virus lockdowns removed market distractions, thus leading to increased religiosity—is debatable. Apart from the question of how much the “distractions” actually dissipated as workers faced unemployment, businesses struggled to stay open, and consumers moved online, American ministers facing cratering attendance, vanishing tithes, and politically polarized congregations would puzzle over polling that suggests Americans “felt closer to God” during the crisis (xxi). Such polling might simply indicate that people reconsidered God as they experienced a lack of control over their circumstances and were forced to confront their mortality.Johnson’s assertion that “the seeds of American religion’s current fading influence were sown two hundred years ago” is interesting, to say the least (xv). Arguably, in an era of Trump-fixated Evangelicals, the influence of American religion has never been greater. Johnson is more persuasive when he suggests this sort of religious influence is an empty shell, and that the marketplace hastened this transformation.Johnson’s jeremiad is worth reading and pondering. Others have written similar laments about American Christianity, often aimed at post–World War II consumerism.5The Power of Mammon rightly suggests that we should look back even further to discover how the marketplace fundamentally transformed Protestantism in the United States.