Rare is the essay collection that advances a scholarly paradigm shift. The business turn in American religious history is one of those exceptions. Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem and John Corrigan's volume offers a definitive word on the history of faith and corporate capitalism in America. While each of its chapters vividly expounds on vital facets of this history, as a well constituted whole the book forces readers to think about it in completely fresh light.

Binding this volume together is its stellar introduction, which opens with a declaration of purpose: to lay ‘important groundwork for understanding the parity and symmetry between religious and business life in America, opening the way for further study’ (pp. 2–3). Before letting their authors glimpse that way forward the editors chart the history of religious and commercial activity in North America. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they observe, market revolutions freed American colonists from the moral constraints espoused by Puritan settlers – whose own baptism in the spirit of capitalism was foundational. ‘Communal bonds weakened over time as individualistic behavior became more acceptable’, the editors note, ‘but religion and commerce changed together in this historical process, with developments in religious belief and practice stimulating commercial development as well as justifying it’ (p. 3). That synchronicity intensified in the nineteenth century as lawmakers sanctified contract law and deemed institutions of commerce and faith ‘parallel forms of private enterprise’, warranting protection by the state (p. 5). Cultural forces followed legal ones as Christian and capitalist principles were together shored up in the mid-nineteenth century. The Businessmen's Revival of the late 1850s reaffirmed the vitality of market principles doused with spiritual ardour and reminded America's entrepreneurial class that personal salvation, trust in providence, and the logics of business were to be bundled in one formula for success.

Porterfield, Grem and Corrigan then track the ‘Gospel of wealth’ through its nascent state in the Gilded Age period (epitomised by Russell Conwell's Acres of diamonds) and into its full flourishing after World War II (pp. 7–8). Challenged by a social justice gospel (and enlarged state) in the 1930s, corporate-friendly Protestantism nevertheless emerged from the shadows of Depression and war ready to redouble its quest to make ‘Christian free enterprise’ the beating heart – and core identity – of the United States. During the Cold War and as New Deal liberalism faltered and declined, Christian free enterprise's key champions – Evangelicals – found their opportunity to reify what had been evolving over generations. From the glitters of televangelism to self-help preaching, prosperity-gospel Pentecostalism to bible-believing firms such as Walmart and Hobby Lobby: during the waning years of the twentieth century, Evangelicals creatively and concretely ‘affirmed the union of Christian business and Christian striving’ (p. 12).

The eight chapters that follow expand upon the story that the editors tell in their opening pages. Unsurprisingly – and understandably – Evangelicalism receives a lot of attention. Daniel Vaca and Timothy Gloege incisively show how these two entities did not merely mirror one another, or use each other to gain shares (and converts) in their respective sectors, but at their heart embodied the very same worldview. ‘Through business’, Vaca writes with respect to his subject (the rise of the Christian book industry), ‘evangelical ideas, behaviors, and sensibilities continually have taken shape, manifesting market logic. In turn, evangelicals have evangelized on business's behalf’ (p. 21). David King, meanwhile, illuminates the mechanisms of Evangelical nonprofit work in the post-World War II international realm. With sights set on a variety of nongovernmental agencies, he ably proves how Christian responses to global capitalism have been multifaceted and multidirectional; while some American Christians have embraced humanitarianism as responses to global ruptures, others have endorsed pro-capitalist developmental schemes, and although Americans have been at the heart of the action, non-western Christians have helped ‘dictate the interactions of power, people, and profits in the development of a global Christianity’ (p. 97).

Where this volume makes a more striking departure is in its inclusion of other religious encounters with mammon. It turns out that the capitalist ethic that Max Weber famously attributed to Protestantism was and is multivalent, not monolithic. Weber does indeed loom large in these chapters, principally as a foil to their overarching argument, which is this: that Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Native Americans and Hindus – cast aside by Weber as antithetical to modern capitalism – have helped to sacralise the marketplace too. While Matthew Bowman outlines the evolution of Mormon economic thought during the mid-twentieth century, which ultimately espoused a tenuously middle position between laissez-faire capitalism and communitarianism – between ‘liberty and order’ (p. 108), Deborah Skolnick Einhorn illuminates the role of Jewish women in Jewish charitable organisations during and after World War I. In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, she illustrates, Jewish activists affiliated with the Federation of Jewish Charities’ Women's Divisions subversively ‘expanded their sphere, responsibilities, and talents’, extended their reach into the ‘business of Jewish life in America’, and helped to give shape to the ‘elite model of Jewish philanthropy’ that would leave an indelible mark on American charity and commerce (pp. 135, 149). Equally revealing is Angela Tarango's ethnographic study, which unearths current dynamics of religion and commerce that have led Indian tribes in Oklahoma to view casinos as ‘the new buffalo – a new economic enterprise that contains the potential to lift tribes out of dire economic straits’ (p. 177).

In the volume's most provocative chapters, Michael Altman and Paula Kane put to rest the Weberian notion that Hinduism and Catholicism operated at cross-purposes with modern capitalism. Contrary to the first-generation social scientist who ‘blamed [the] lack of rational capitalism’ in India on the preponderance of its ‘mystical religion’, Altman singles out Indian Hindu swamis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to demonstrate how they sold their ‘lectures, yoga poses, and meditation in the marketplace as a solution to the stress of the market economy’, and in doing so turned themselves into businessmen as well as gurus (pp. 156, 161). Weber was equally dismissive of Catholics, whom he believed remained entrenched in a pre-modern, pre-capitalist order. Yet, as Kane proves in her look at the devotees of St Homobonus, ‘the patron saint of businesspeople’, America's richest Catholic CEOs have hardly operated on the outside of the modern, capitalist order (p. 199). To the contrary – they have ‘found an elective affinity with capitalism’ and, through their giving and politicking, have done their part in advancing the free market ideology upheld by their fiercely pro-capitalist Evangelical brethren, all to ensure that America serves God and the market with equal vigour (p. 200).

From beginning to end, then, The business turn in American religious history delivers one rich and surprising insight after another. As if that is not enough, its Afterword carefully lays out the volume's scholarly takeaways and glimpses the field's next steps – with a precision that only the esteemed historian James Hudnut-Beumler, author of the concluding section, could provide. In sum, this volume is a state of the art/state of the field address, one that scholars will find invaluable for their work in the archives and on the written page, as well as in the classroom.