Near the beginning of Corporate Spirit, Amanda Porterfield describes the safety video that Delta Airlines showed to the passengers on its planes in 2016. Porterfield focuses especially on the video's ending, which displayed an aerial view of hundreds of Delta employees standing in a pattern that formed a giant version of the company's logo (3). This video and its logo serve as commonplace examples of modern corporate organization, which not only includes human habits of forming shared social bodies but also features the authority that commercial corporations use to organize the world and its peoples. Through an ambitious and insightful historical synthesis that traverses millennia of commonplace and canonical examples of corporate development, Porterfield invites readers to recognize that corporate organization continually has taken shape in dialogue with religious understandings of community, corruption, and mystical communion. By accepting Porterfield's invitation, readers see Delta's video, its logo, and the totality of its business as potential artifacts of church history.
Although the majority of Porterfield's narrative focuses on explaining “how corporations became building blocks of American society” (1), the book's first three chapters explore corporate organization in Roman antiquity and medieval Europe. Tracing the roots of modern corporate organization to the ancient Roman empire, Porterfield highlights a theory of incorporation found especially in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament. Articulated most clearly in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Pauline incorporation used the metaphor of a body (or corpus, in Latin) to describe the relationship between diverse members of a Christian community. Paul taught that every member of a social body deserves equal respect despite their high or low rank outside the organization, just as seemingly indispensable and insignificant parts of a human body nevertheless belong fully to the whole.
Acknowledging that Paul's model of individual membership and behavior had Roman, Jewish, and Stoic sources, Porterfield argues that the spirit of Pauline incorporation became the foundation for Christianity's expansion and development, subsequently shaping centuries of corporate organization. Communities encouraged members to practice equality in Christ by giving to the community and caring for the poor, sick, and suffering. Donations generated corporate wealth that elevated Christianity's social prominence, and Christian communities appointed bishops as representatives of the corporate body and its growing resources, which funded the construction of new basilicas and monasteries. Porterfield presents new monastic rules of order, penitential systems, craft guilds, and other fixtures of medieval European society as expressions of Pauline organizational theory and its emphasis on the collective good. By detailing how concepts of incorporation shaped understandings of church and business, Porterfield argues that many of the early modern era's theological and political developments can be seen as attempts to conjure higher standards of corporate life. Examples include Martin Luther's egalitarian call for churches to acknowledge the “priesthood of all believers” (56).
In the book's second section, Porterfield explores corporate organization in the United States. Organized chronologically, the section's five chapters situate their analysis within broader overviews of social and economic history. Particularly in chapters devoted to the colonial and antebellum eras, these overviews allow Porterfield to chronicle how American society took shape through initiatives and ideas that commercial and religious institutions nurtured collaboratively. At times, the breadth of Porterfield's synthesis muffles the book's avowed analysis of corporate organization, which occasionally seems difficult to distinguish from general commercial activity. Yet Porterfield continually reveals how shifting understandings of social organization shaped ostensibly secular areas of political and economic life. The chapter on the antebellum era, for instance, explains how religious theories of natural law affirmed the authority of legal contracts. This allowed commercial and especially religious corporations to deepen their relationships with state governments and to build institutions that redefined conceptions of national identity and the “common good” in expanding territories (98). While contract law previously had recognized corporations as legal persons, corporate personhood became more robust after the Civil War, with legal scholars cultivating the notion that commercial corporations possess a “personality” in the same way that churches and political parties do (132).
Throughout the second section of the book, Porterfield regularly presents debates over questions of justice and equality as conflicts that manifested divergent understandings of Pauline corporatism. Exemplary debates took shape around issues such as the proslavery claim that the body of Christ united slaves and slaveholders, industrial workers’ fight for better pay and working conditions, and business leaders’ insistence before and after the twentieth century's Great Depression that businesses prioritized the individual freedom and welfare of American workers. Although champions of free enterprise presented individual freedom and ownership as priorities that benefited everyone, Porterfield argues that economic policies and theological notions focused on individuals have tended to cultivate economic disparities. In the book's analysis of the decades since 1980, examples include the rising corporate preoccupation with shareholder value, popular religious psychology focused on individual willpower, and the prosperity gospel's fusion of “Christian fundamentalism and New Age mysticism” (172).
Surveying vast historical and historiographical terrain, Porterfield's work contributes especially to recent scholarship that has used the study of religion as a method of identifying and illuminating the central concepts and convictions that animate seemingly secular areas of social life, including economy and law. In Porterfield's hands, economic history is religious history. This approach makes the book ideal for courses designed to unsettle traditional schemes of social categorization and historical periodization. Undergraduate and general readers especially will find the book's synthetic history an informative and provocative resource for illuminating concepts that link together varied religious and cultural developments. But readers also should see the book as an invitation for further analysis of the examples, connections, and “corporate spirits” that Porterfield often examines briefly, and sometimes indirectly.
Considering this book's long historical arc, what does Corporate Spirit teach readers about corporations today? Although the book focuses primarily on historicizing claims regarding corporate power and personhood, Porterfield also presents the book as a resource for understanding and cultivating corporate responsibility. Seemingly responding to critics who have condemned recent legal decisions that have affirmed corporations’ ability to practice religion and claim religious freedom, Porterfield insists that corporations have practiced religion for centuries. Rather than denying that corporations have a spirit, Porterfield suggests, we should focus on examining the spirits that animate the corporations in our lives. Only by doing so can we conjure better spirits.
