At least since de Tocqueville, observers have tried to make sense of Americans’ intense and durable religiosity. And, at least since Weber, that religiosity has been linked to the ways that Americans have structured their economy. More recently, in the years since Thomas Frank tried to discern What’s the Matter with Kansas, the tendency of some Americans to vote against their own economic interests has frequently been explained in terms of religious commitment that overrides rational economic calculus. Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism intervenes in all of these debates with monumental ambition and succeeds impressively in tracing the influence of Protestant Christian beliefs on American economic and political thought in an intricate intellectual history that begins decades before Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

The book devotes most attention to two major theological problems related to human beings’ capacity to improve themselves and their society—first, the conflict between European and British Protestants over Calvinist predestination versus Arminian agency and second, the divergence between American Protestants over the capacity of human beings to bring about a peaceful, just, and equitable society prior to God’s intervention. Friedman argues that these questions were never merely theological:

The first half of the book is devoted to a careful history of the development of Protestant religious thought in Europe, with particular attention to the differences between Calvinists and Arminian heretics over the doctrine of election. Orthodox Calvinism held that human beings marked for salvation had been chosen before the Fall of Adam and Eve, and that human action could neither earn nor remove election. Jacobus Arminius and his followers argued that individual agency could influence the eternal fate of human souls. By the time John Locke and Adam Smith began working out their ideas about political economy, the belief that human beings had no control over the fate of their souls was fading, and Arminian optimism about the effects of human agency was in ascendance.

Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity posited a God who had created humans to be sociable and value the good opinions of others, and a universe that operated not according to inscrutable divine purposes, but in keeping with discernible laws. Thus, Smith’s ideas about how markets and competition can improve human lives “reflected the increasingly widespread belief that the benevolent God who created the world intended the human creatures he put in it to be happy, and therefore that God also endowed their world with the human institutions needed to channel their behavior accordingly” (168). Contra Weber, Friedman locates the engine of capitalism in this optimism, rather than in fears about predestination.

In the nascent American Republic, questions about human institutions were newly urgent. The problem of human agency became linked to theological disputes about the Millennium—a thousand-year period described by the Biblical book of Revelation as part of the end times, when Satan would be bound, and the righteous would live in peace and harmony. Protestants differed over whether the end of the world would come before or after the Millennium—premillennialists held that Jesus would return to the earth, destroy wicked people, and usher in the Millennium. Postmillennialists, building on a more optimistic view of human potential, believed that human beings would achieve millennial peace that would be followed by Jesus’s return and the end of time.

Friedman’s major contribution is to link these theological questions about whether and how human beings can improve themselves and their society to modes of economic as well as political thought. Friedman argues that “the non-predestinarian and voluntarist orientation of American Protestantism in general, and the premillennialism of evangelical Protestants in particular, today mark its most powerful substantive features” (412). These religious ideas are humming in the background of Americans’ conviction that people’s economic condition is a function of individual effort, that wealth should not be taxed, and that private charity rather than government largesse is the best way to address poverty. Crucially, Friedman notes that these beliefs about economic policy are even more strongly correlated with denominational preference and church attendance than attitudes about “culture war” issues such as abortion and marriage equality. Friedman argues that where evangelical voters appear to be voting against their own economic interests, it is not because they are led by politicians to over index cultural issues, but because they are voting in congruence with religiously inflected thinking about economics.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism may seem to be much more about religion than about capitalism and might be faulted for occasionally venturing too far into thickets of theological minutiae. However, Friedman’s eye for illuminating detail makes even intricate theology delightful reading, and the volume is an excellent primer for the burgeoning literature on the history of capitalism and recent work on the rise of the Religious Right. Friedman’s argument about the way that religion shapes economic thought makes a particularly important contribution to the literature on Christian nationalism. Historians of business will find it a useful adjunct to recent work such as Joseph Slaughter’s Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early Republic; Porterfield, Corrigan, and Grem’s The Business Turn in American Religious History; Emma Hart’s Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism; and the growing literature on religion and capitalism in American empire. Despite its thoroughly researched and elegantly argued intervention in these scholarly spaces, Friedman’s writing is accessible throughout and will reward the general reader as well.