Mark Valeri's Heavenly Merchandize has appeared fifty-five years after the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955). In between the appearance of these two books, critical evaluations of Max's Weber famous thesis about the Protestant temperament and capitalism as well as discussions about the possible meanings we attach to the term “secularization” have expanded exponentially. The question that any reader will bring to Valeri's book is whether it can possibly offer a novel answer to the vexing question of how to explain the extraordinary prosperity of New England merchants in a society that in its origins valued Calvinist piety over a self-centered drive for profit.
One important contribution of Valeri's book is the enormous amount of information it presents about a select group of a half-dozen Boston merchants whose business practices illustrate the changes that by the early eighteenth century had propelled the inward looking, Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay into a willing trading partner in the British Empire. Boston's merchants at the end of Valeri's story would not have been comfortable with the restrictions that Puritanism placed on trade practices in 1630. However, reflecting the book's main challenge to existing scholarship, all of Valeri's subjects considered themselves God-fearing churchgoers who took notes about the sermons they heard. They did not make their way in the world by separating religion from their business and interpreted their contribution to New England's prosperity as part of God's millennial plan to make England victorious in its wars against Catholic foes.
The thrust of Bailyn's argument is different. Both he and Valeri make similar use of the early Boston merchant Robert Keynes to illustrate the initial restrictions enforced both by churches and the General Court on commercial practices. Beginning with charges lodged against him in 1639, Keynes, a devout Puritan, ran afoul of prohibitions against usury and the enforcement of the notion of a just price that prevented merchants from charging more in times of scarcity. Bailyn uses Keynes to start a thesis about the decline of religious, especially Puritan, influence. In the “confused reaction” of merchants to “ethical control” that interfered with their business enterprises “lay seeds of social change” (16). Fifty years after the founding of Massachusetts Bay, most merchants, many of whom were recent Anglican arrivals with no allegiance to Calvinist churches, were at odds with the original goals of the Puritan colony. They looked not to religion to set the rules of trade but to an Atlantic world of trade governed from Britain. Churches, religious and ethical concerns, and ministers disappear from Bailyn's account. Merchants had no plan to destroy Puritan society. Nonetheless “commercial success grew in inverse proportion to the social strength of Puritanism” (105).
In some important ways Valeri's account does not depart from Bailyn's script. He agrees that the tension between religious piety and business practice disappeared in Boston over the course of the seventeenth century. Church discipline weakened. Disputes about debt were increasingly settled in civil courts that saw nothing wrong with practices once called usurious. Economic prosperity, enjoyed by individual merchants in the pursuit of profit, became in an unabashed way a sign of God's favor. A wealthy man who went to church, even one who participated and drew profit from the Atlantic slave trade, could pass as a virtuous man.
Valeri, however, refuses to give this process of change the name of secularization because, as the book's subtitle insists, Puritan ministers adapted religion to guide the economic changes (76). Valeri's reading of sermons in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the leaders of Massachusetts Bay redefined their Godly mission. Few doubt the Puritan credentials of Cotton Mather. His sermons along with the sermons of other Boston ministers in the late seventeenth century stressed lives of piety free from vice and at the same time and in a new key celebrated market mechanisms as essential to a moral commonwealth. The writings of England's political economists passed through a religious filter and became part of the sermons that many of Boston's non-Anglican merchants heard, for example, in the newly formed Brattle Street Church. Hence an early version of liberal Protestantism created a religious conscience allied to the zealous pursuit of innovative business practices—an alliance that helped define the culture of the United States well into the twentieth century.
Valeri's well-written case studies bring many rewards to the reader. They forcefully demonstrate that no one can understand the changing culture of early America without paying attention to religion. Valeri's merchants were worried churchgoers who sought validation of what they did in their piety. Their religious language was much more than a thin veneer applied to mask their economic cupidity.
Still an important question remains as to whether we need follow Valeri and resist the term secularization. Most social scientists no longer think that secularization means the end of religion. In historical terms it meant the loosening of religious rules over the practices of other aspects of daily life. History betrays the intention of its actors. In blessing profit-making pursuits, Cotton Mather validated rules that gave economic reality priority over Calvinist thinking. Religion based on a serious, challenging theology remained essential to valuations of individual piety and continued as a strong influence over New England culture. Even so, something of fundamental importance was changing. Puritanism had acquiesced in an irreversible historical transition that made market operations the engine of and the measure of expanding social justice. This development surely represented a crucial, and secularized, “separation of economic exchange from spiritual dictates” (200).
