The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Therapeutic Consumerism

Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels through the United States from 1829 to 1831 yielded penetrating insights defining how Americans have understood Democracy in America (1835, 1840), the title of the political classic resulting from his journeys. Tocqueville wondered about the exuberance of religion in the young democratic republic. One of Tocqueville’s paradoxical nuggets involved the interplay between religion and the market. Americans, he observed, were at once spiritually devout and materially entrepreneurial, even avaricious. These two impulses, seemingly in contradiction, in fact have worked in tandem. Religion and materialism were like twin ventricles pumping blood through the American heart.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the German sociologist and intellectual Max Weber proffered perhaps the most famous thesis in the history of Western religion. He posited a direct connection between the Protestant Reformation and the economic revolution created by the rise of capitalist forms of economic organization. The link was theological and psychological: anxious about the state of their souls, Calvinist Christians accumulated wealth to reassure themselves of their place in the elect. This wealth ignited the explosion of commercial capitalism and, eventually, later developments such as the Industrial Revolution. Thus the anti-materialist Protestant ethic, born of biblically based critiques of Catholic priests who hocked “indulgences” and trinkets of salvation, fueled the greatest explosion of economic growth in human history.
Subsequent studies poked enough holes in Weber’s trial balloon that it eventually plummeted. Italian bankers in the Renaissance, the famous families such as the Medicis, bankrolled much of the early capitalist ventures of entrepreneurial Italian Catholics; and the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs, fueled by the zeal of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, pumped huge sums into exploring the New World. Catholic explorers eagerly sought the Seven Cities of Cibola and the fabled lands of gold that the Natives in the New World kept telling the Spanish explorers were just a little way farther down the road. Perhaps they were located some- where in the vicinity of the future Wichita, Kansas, some Indian pranksters told the humorless Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who found no yellow brick road of gold in Kansas, or anywhere else for that matter. Weber’s thesis, then, worked for places such as Calvin’s Geneva, and for England during the tumultuous years of the Puritan revolution, but it could not explain Catholic entrepreneurialism.
Although Weber’s argument collapsed, his impulse to seek connections between the theological and the material still animates much inquiry. Scholars have explored the paradox espied by Tocqueville and played out in myriad ways through American history: the tense yet inextricably intertwined relationship between spiritual purity and material gain. In the case of the early Puritans, the Weber thesis still appears to hold considerable explanatory value. Early New England Puritans came with visions of a city set upon a hill. But this was not to be a paradise modeled after some laissez-faire vision of economic freedom. It was quite the opposite—a communal utopian order in which individual economic behavior would be tightly controlled on behalf of the public good (a model also followed, brilliantly, by the early Mormon communities in Utah). What material wealth emerged from the experiment was to be devoted to God’s glory, not to acts of conspicuous consumption—which, at any rate, would have violated the sumptuary laws tightly regulating how individuals could dress, what they could eat, and what household items they could own.

Both because of and in spite of their theology, Puritans accumulated wealth, which increased capital holdings, which fueled economic expansion, which created more wealth—and so “Puritans” evolved into “Yankees,” and “Yankees” pioneered the market revolution of the nineteenth century that seemed to fit hand in glove with the evangelical explosion of that same era. Or did it? The evangelicals, of course, knew what the Bible had to say about Mammon, and evangelicals following the New Light stridently condemned wealth accumulation and conspicuous consumption. In their own minds, they were simply restoring the faith once known to their fathers, the faith constantly under assault by heretics and sinful commercial types alike. Early Methodists, for example, condemned the decline of piety in the older, more established denominations. They held class meetings to enforce communal norms of sin and repentance, and celebrated salvation in love feasts. They inculcated bonds of sharing between repentant sinners. Like most early evangelical and utopian groups, they valued communalism and distrusted capitalist innovation. Also like such groups, no matter what their intention, they contributed a remarkable range of innovations—theological, technological, and material—to the evolving commercial world. The Methodist emphasis on the free grace of God extended to all Americans in the expansive early republic; by later in the nineteenth century, Methodists were comfortably ensconced in the nation’s cities, with impressive urban cathedrals belying their humbler beginnings. One may return to Weber and speculate on how much the ethic of discipline, self- sacrifice, and careful thrift contributed to the often close connection between evangelical zeal and personal success.
By the later nineteenth century, numerous public lecturers and self-promoting publicists made a good living by preaching, if not practicing, precisely that connection. The Philadelphia minister Russell Conwell grew wealthy preaching his famous sermon “Acres of Diamonds” thousands of times, with many in the audience returning repeatedly to hear his prosperity gospel even though his song remained the same. Like most self-help authors, Conwell first and foremost helped himself. The Gilded Age was full of what would later come to be called “Prosperity Theology,” and more recently in its Pentecostal form, “Word of Faith Theology.” This was not new in American history; one only need look to Benjamin Franklin’s slyly sardonic witticisms to find the conflation of Protestant living and financial accumulation. The unapologetic crassness of the message in the Gilded Age, however, was the harbinger of the ubiquitous influence of the Nor- man Vincent Peale/Dale Carnegie school of thinking in the twentieth century. “Ask and ye shall receive” is a biblical maxim that Americans of all religious per- suasions (or no persuasion at all) took literally and dispensed liberally, from Rus- sell Conwell and Henry Ward Beecher to T. D. Jakes, John Hagee, Joel Osteen, and other contemporary prosperity gospelers.
Throughout American religious history, communalist groups, often born of profoundly conservative and anti-capitalist social visions, have fostered remarkable economic systems. Almost in spite of themselves, they have generated wealth and the social frictions that come with it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints (the Mormons) have simultaneously fostered and controlled wealth creation and distribution probably better than any single communalist group in American history. Born of Joseph Smith’s encounter with the Angel Moroni (detailed in D. Michael Quinn’s “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [‘Mormons’]”), the tiny, beleaguered, and relentlessly persecuted sect encouraged the most successful communalist experiment in American history—indeed, one of the relatively few that survived more than two generations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compelled believers to live and act within strict communal guidelines. It was their communalism, ultimately, that brought commercial life to the desert in Utah and made Salt Lake City the headquarters for a new religious empire. The Mormon Church emerged as one of the wealthiest non- profit entities in American history, with vast holdings in hotel chains, newspaper and electronic media, and other business enterprises. In the process church leaders, beginning especially with Brigham Young, adjusted to American economic norms, helping the Latter-day Saints become an economic powerhouse in the twentieth century. The model of tight control of church organization and doc- trine combined with decentralized methods of spreading the gospel and a democratic message of salvation for all served the Mormons as well as, perhaps even better than, it did the Methodists. The Mormons present a striking picture of the intriguing paradox of communalist visions and capitalist triumphs.
The nineteenth century witnessed a veritable explosion of utopian and communalist movements, some of which are detailed by Stephen J. Stein in “Alternative Religious Movements in American History.” The religious energies sparked by the Second Great Awakening exploded in the mid-nineteenth century, as Mormons, Shakers, Millerites, Spiritualists, Fullerites, Owenites, Transcendantalists at Brook Farm, and hundreds of other idealistic bands created societies generally featuring some mixture of experimental living. They became famous for unorthodox sexual arrangements, ranging from celibacy to what was termed “free love,” meaning not so much sexual promiscuity as the drive to find one’s “spiritual match” outside the conventional bounds of legally defined marriage. They also consistently proposed utopian theologies envisioning the creation of a perfect society on earth. Nearly all of these eventually died out; the very hyper individualism of American society that spurred their creation also usually doomed them to dissolution. But if communalist utopias rarely survived beyond a generation or two, they frequently left long- lived products or economic arrangements. Thus such familiar consumer icons as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Oneida flatware and silverware, and Tappan kitchen appliances can be traced back to the attempts of religious visionaries to promote health (as in the case of the corn flakes, considered a digestive cleanser) or to provide an economic means to support a utopian dream. Another example is the famous furniture produced by the Shakers. Putting their “hands to work” and their “hearts to God,” Shaker craftsmanship today brings raised eyebrows of delight from the all-knowing appraisers on Antiques Road Show. Once again, the drive for communalist purity turned inward long enough to produce explosive economic energies that could not be contained and that helped to drive American economic expansion and consumerism. Religious communalism, in short, was part of the nuclear fusion that supercharged American commercial capitalism.
In his later work, Weber pondered the quandary of the “iron cage” of rationalist bureaucracy. In economic terms, historians such as Daniel Rogers have traced the gradual evolution of the “Protestant ethic” (which, as we have seen, was never all that Protestant to begin with) to the “work ethic.” If, under the Protestant ethic, anxious souls worked to ensure their eternal fate, in the work ethic people labored long and hard mostly because it was by definition moral (hence the idle hands in the devil’s workshop) or because (later in the twentieth century) upwardly mobile consumers desired ever-higher standards of living. Contemporary Americans work longer than Europeans, and even longer than the Japanese. That national work obsession has roots outside religion, but nonetheless Weber was on to something. The question that troubled Weber was whether there would be any human meaning within the wondrously efficient creation of the modern bureaucratic society. Everything would work, but not to serve any higher purpose; instead, rationality would become its own purpose, a gilded but soulless “iron cage.” The machine would go of itself.
In short, the American religious ethic and the spirit of capitalism have worked in tandem, variously contradicting and undergirding each other. The city set upon a hill has grown into an economic empire producing and distributing a cascade of goods that moralists consistently fear will undermine the very virtue that was essential to its creation. Religious culture spurred market culture; religious culture consistently has responded and adapted to market culture; but market culture’s imperatives of utilitarian profit- and pleasure-maximizing behavior always threaten to overwhelm religion’s calls for self-restraint and obedience to a higher purpose.