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"Faith in Markets demonstrates how religiously motivated choices shaped market activity, as well as the market itself, through the creation of Christian Business Enterprises (CBEs) in the early decades of nineteenth-century America. Slaughter focuses on the ways theologically conservative Protestants infused their businesses with faith and in turn, how these businesses shaped American capitalism and culture. Three CBEs of the American early national period form the core of Faith in Markets: George Rapp & Associates (the Harmony Society of Western Pennsylvania/Southern Indiana), the Pioneer Stage Coach Line (upstate New York), and Harper & Brothers (New York City). These businesses reflect the most influential Christian theologies of early America: Pietism, Calvinism, and Arminianism. Each of the manuscript's three parts is built around one of these cases. Part I focuses on how Lutheran Pietists attempted to purify the market, and in so doing provided an alternate vision of communal capitalism. Part II explores how evangelical Presbyterians strove to reform the market, not through legislation or volunteerism, but through business enterprise. Finally, part III examines how urban Methodists produced cultural objects (books!) that nudged American culture toward a middle-class, Victorian ideal, all while building a business that others regarded as the model of trustworthiness in a new era of anonymous market exchange"--

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States saw both a series of Protestant religious revivals and the dramatic expansion of the marketplace. Although today conservative Protestantism is associated with laissez-faire capitalism, many of the nineteenth-century believers who experienced these transformations offered different, competing visions of the link between commerce and Christianity. Joseph P. Slaughter offers a new account of the interplay between religion and capitalism in American history by telling the stories of the Protestant entrepreneurs who established businesses to serve as agents of cultural and economic reform.Faith in Markets examines three Christian business enterprises and the visions of a Christian marketplace they represented. Shaped by Pietist, Calvinist, and Arminian theologies, each offered different answers to the question of what a moral, Christian market should look like. George Rapp & Associates operated sophisticated textile factories as the business side of the model community the Harmony Society, which practiced communal living in pursuit of a harmonious workforce. The Pioneer Stage Coach Line provided transportation services only six days a week to keep Sunday sacred, attempting to reform society by outcompeting less pious businesses. The publisher Harper & Brothers sought to elevate American culture through commerce by producing virtuous products like lavishly illustrated Bibles. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Faith in Markets explores how the founders and owners of these enterprises infused their faith into their businesses and, in turn, how distinctly religious businesses shaped American capitalism and society

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp's Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker "Rapp & Associates." Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a "divine economy," the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists' communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp's authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.