For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content analysis of the most popular religious books of Restoration England showed just the opposite—that the most self-consciously “Anglican” authors were those who placed the most emphasis upon work and worldly enterprise as a religious duty. They were also able to integrate this duty with the rest of their theology in a more straightforward, logical manner than the Puritans, for whom the connection is thought to have been psychological, mediated by religious anxiety. Work was, for the most popular Anglican authors, part of a moralistic religion of works. We can even say that such an emphasis was adopted at just the time when Anglicans were facing up to a change in the status of their church and adopting attitudes more characteristic of members of a movement or denomination, which helps to explain why work and effort were coming to seem more important to them.

There have been numerous lines of criticism of Max Weber's thesis connecting the doctrine of evangelical conversion and the spirit of economic enterprise. But since the following approach and alternative suggestions do not build on them, we must go back again to Weber's own classic formulation.