How often does a book make a scholarly contribution with its title? The Business Turn in American Religious History does not mark the beginning of a historiographical shift, but it very successfully names it. That alone is of great value. This edited volume will be essential to scholars seeking to situate themselves in American religious history. It will be frequently footnoted, but merits even more than that. The Business Turn deserves real, sustained engagement.

Editors Amanda Porterfield, John Corrigan, and Darren E. Grem call for “a fresh methodological framework” (16) focusing on the “complimentarity,” “parity,” and “symmetry between religious and business life in America” (2). They argue this is needed because of a change in contemporary American culture, where giant corporations, such as Apple and Walmart, have themselves taken a religious turn. At the same time, they argue scholarly attention is needed because nothing has changed, and “the interdependence between Christian religions and commercial activity in North America dates to the earliest days of European exploration and colonization” (3). They do not quite reconcile these conflicting claims, but the suggestion is that the new era—did it begin with Apple or IBM or Hobby Lobby?—reveals a deeper truth and longer history. The present moment shows narratives American religion need to be revisited and revised, with an eye to the religious parts of business and the business parts of religion. The Business Turn, if it cannot revisit and revise everything, at least offers a framework and a name for the endeavor.

The first two essays in the volume are the strongest and go the furthest toward articulating a new methodological approach. Daniel Vaca shows how American evangelicalism has “taken shape” “through business” (21), while Timothy E.W. Gloege demonstrates fundamentalist identity was “maintained through the practices of consumer capitalism” (48). Vaca focuses on the history of Zondervan publishing. Gloege looks at the publication of The Fundamentals. With their respective studies, they advance strikingly similar arguments: practices of consumer capitalism have served as the basis for religious identities.

Both claim these religious identities are less coherent than many have thought. Evangelicalism is “less a religious tradition with distinct essentials,” Vaca writes, and more “a mode of transdenominational identity and activity that takes place continually,” mediated through business (25). Fundamentalism, for Gloege, was likewise not a coherent theological system but a brand, and it was a particularly effective one in a world where church denominations were slowly losing organizational power.

These new religious identities, emerging at particular moments in American history, can be explained by studying the “complementarity” of religion and business. The “business turn,” for Vaca and Gloege, is thus the “examination of the overlap between a particular economic system and a religious tradition” (47). They demonstrate that, at the very least, this framework can be quite powerful in the study of fundamentalists and evangelicals.

In other chapters, examining other religious traditions, other scholars develop different methodological approaches. Michael J. Altman, for example, argues with the business turn, scholars “must collapse the distinction between business and religion” (172). Examining the history of Hinduism in America, he argues it is not enough to say that Hinduism is a commodity, circulated in the flows of capital and labor, nor that “Hindu” identity is mediated through business. Such approaches apparently essentialize Hinduism and misconstrue “religion” as a stable, timeless category.

It is not clear what the payoff is for this “collapse.” According to Altman, the reduction of religion to business focuses scholars’ attention on flows of “money, trade, and labor through global markets, between nation-states, and through multinational corporations” (158). But then it is precisely the “from-here-to-there” model for studying Asian religions in America, exemplified by Tom Tweed and Stephen Prothero's Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1999), that Altman objects to. When Tweed focuses on “flows,” Altman says that “signals a model where a thing in the world called ‘Hinduism’ somehow made its way to the geographical space we call the United States” (157). A brief look at Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2006) shows Tweed's theory of religion is not quite as naïve as Altman imagines, and neither is Altman's de-essentialization quite so novel. Altman's piece is provocative, though, and lays out an alternative version of “the business turn” that rejects the editors’ emphasis on parity, complementarity, and symmetry. “Religion is business” (171), he insists, and only business, and it does not exist.

Other chapters are less focused on advancing a new methodological framework. They offer case studies of the business-side of religious activity. They are under-theorized but address the question of the religion-business relationship in interesting ways.

Matthew Bowman, for example, argues there is a “peculiar relationship” between Mormons and American capitalism. Mormon theology, on the one hand, produces “rapacious” free market capitalists such as Rick Koerber, a real estate investor accused of running a Ponzi scheme. The same theology produces “less capable capitalists” who fall victim to these schemes (109). Bowman ably explicates the different ways Mormon leaders have responded to American capitalism. The piece practically begs to be put in conversation with Max Weber and would be great to use in the classroom.

Deborah Skolnick Einhorn, similarly, writes on Jewish philanthropy. She writes that “the business of taking care of their own . . . has been at the core of American Jewish life and history” (132). This is not exactly the same idea of business that Vaca and Gloege are using, but it is intriguing. How was American Jewish identity mediated through philanthropy? What economic developments shaped these religious fundraising practices? Unfortunately, Einhorn does not pursue this as far as she might, focusing more on women's underappreciated role in this fundraising. For now, at least, the framework of “complementarity” is sometimes just suggestive.

The historiographic shift in American religious history is ongoing. There is more revisiting and revising to be done. There are theoretical claims that still need to be hashed out. The Business Turn makes an important contribution.