The relationship between Christianity and capitalism in American history cannot be understood without knowing how Christians have participated in market economies. This assumption undergirds Joseph P. Slaughter’s Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic. Slaughter’s subjects are not theologians or churches, but “Christian business enterprises”: commercial firms “infused” with explicitly Christian – specifically, Protestant – identities and missions (3). His book follows excellent scholarship on Christian businesses by Bethany Moreton, Nicole Kirk, and others, but is set apart in two ways. First, Slaughter applies this approach to an earlier era, the 19th-century industrial and market revolutions. And second, he finds not one template for Christian businesses, but three.

Faith in Markets is structured around case studies illustrating three ways entrepreneurs applied their faith in the marketplace: separation, reform, and redemption. Each part contains a short introduction and three chapters. These studies strike an accessible balance: sections offer space for rich narratives paired with sufficient religious and economic context for non-specialists, but each requires less commitment than a full monograph. The parts stand independently, but Slaughter uses the general introduction and conclusion to give an overview of his framework and situate it historiographically.

The opening section on the “communal capitalism” of George Rapp & Associates exemplifies the strengths of Slaughter’s approach. Rapp was a German Pietist who emigrated to the United States with hundreds of followers beginning in 1803. They renounced private property and sought to establish economically viable communitarian systems in Pennsylvania and Indiana. But far from withdrawing into simple anti-capitalism, Slaughter details how their industrial towns thrived by selling everything from whiskey to textiles in the larger market economy. Paradoxes abounded in these capitalist communes: they were sectarians keeping up with fashions; separatists staying close to commercial routes; and millenarians making long-term investments. Such tensions supplied real competitive advantages, including low production costs, high standards of living, and insulation from economic shocks. And even though the enterprise ultimately proved unstable, Slaughter deftly uses the Rappists to challenge narrow assumptions about what constitutes “Christian capitalism.”

The following two case studies treat less extraordinary subjects but therefore offer analyses that are applicable to a wider range of businesses. “Christian Reform Capitalism” describes firms organized to correct “specific evils” in the market (92). Slaughter chooses the Pioneer Line, a stagecoach company founded by wealthy, Reformed businessmen from upstate New York who opposed conducting business on the Sabbath. They sympathized with legislative efforts and consumer boycotts targeting Sunday commerce, but aimed to “create a new, reformed marketplace” with a novel consumer service: a six-day-a-week stagecoach line (118). Ironically, their commitment to markets undermined their effort to reform those markets. They wanted to be a for-profit company that competed without lobbying or discounted prices, but this left them without a strategy to compete against rivals that offered more. Yet despite the company’s short life, Slaughter finds opportunities to examine Christian businesses’ relationships with their investors, consumer base, and notions of national destiny.

The final category, “Christian virtue capitalism,” describes businesses that lacked sharp critiques of the market but believed that Christians of good character, working in principled companies and selling virtuous products could “redeem” the surrounding culture. Slaughter focuses on Harper & Brothers, the successful book publisher run by four devout Methodist brothers. The Harpers’ vision was the formation of a “moral, middle-class” populace through edifying books and magazines (152). Slaughter devotes analysis to particular consumer goods, party politics, and nineteenth-century literary culture. He also pays close attention to the Harpers’ New York City church, describing concrete class dynamics in an upwardly mobile denomination and the shift in personal piety from the local congregation to the home parlor. Throughout, this case demonstrates the way religious principles and economic interests shaped one another, a reciprocal dynamic evident in the publisher’s effort to tailor Bibles to everyone from middle-class families to recent Catholic immigrants. The result was “a market-oriented, broadly Christian” ethos that proved influential, profitable, and enduring (198).

The overlap between “reforming” and “redeeming” sometimes leaves the boundary separating these categories elusive. Both Pioneer and Harper & Brothers espoused postmillennial optimism about progress, offered “virtuous” alternatives to existing products, and paused operations on Sundays. Neither prioritized political activism aimed at altering the economy by force of law, say by banning vicious books or Sunday travel. Thus, comparing the two businesses produces a subtle distinction between ways Christians used markets to change culture, categorizing each based on the extent to which efforts to “redeem the culture” would also “reform the market,” (214).

While commonalities across the three cases may muddy Slaughter’s typology, they also point to his important overarching argument: Christians used businesses to pursue Christian aims. Separatists, reformers, and influencers all viewed the market as an effective medium for their respective projects. As Slaughter puts it, Christianity was not “simply playing defense against an expanding capitalist system.” Instead, “it was at the center of this process as people’s religious identities shaped what they imagined the marketplace could and should be,” (4). This thesis builds on compelling scholarship from recent decades, such as Stewart Davenport’s Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon, that aims to correct older histories, represented by Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, that sorted religious movements based on whether they “embraced” or “resisted” economic change. Because Christian business enterprises shaped capitalism from within, they make an outstanding vehicle for escaping dichotomous frameworks.

As is often the case when introducing new categories, the largest question left unanswered by Faith in Markets concerns representativeness. How many firms practiced “virtue capitalism”? What was the cumulative impact of “reform capitalism”? Did “communal capitalism” surface outside of a few extraordinary experiments? Slaughter occasionally gestures towards a larger picture, suggesting other firms that might fit into each category and connecting his findings to the present. But the strength of his work lies in an illuminating classification system combined with persuasive, accessible analyses of three cases. Hopefully, other scholars will take up Slaughter’s categories and sensibilities, uncovering more of the convergences, contradictions, and paradoxes that have marked the history of religion and capitalism.