In Merchants and Ministers, Kevin Schmiesing has bitten off a large and complex topic: the relationship of Christianity and commerce from America's colonial roots to the present. The emphasis of this wide-sweeping survey is on clergy and theologians’ interaction with business leaders. A research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Schmiesing has touched on this subject in earlier works on the history of Catholic social and economic thought. To shed light on the variety of the American religious and business experience, this book encompasses not only Catholic but also Protestant clergy and a diverse group of Catholic and Protestant business leaders, ranging from powerful financiers and large manufacturers to small-town retailers operating in communities across the nation. As the focus on religious and business leaders suggests, this is mostly a top-down study. To make his topic more manageable, aside from a few primary sources on Catholics drawn from his earlier research, Schmiesing relies on secondary sources and printed primary sources. To tell an “impossibly complicated and unbounded story,” he adopts an “anecdotal rather than a systematic approach” (p. 203). Thus, as he readily concedes in the introduction, Merchants and Ministers is primarily a succession of stories about individual relationships, not an analysis of two distinct classes or groups. Possibly because of this anecdotal approach, he found it difficult to construct any pattern or draw any definitive conclusions about the interaction between business and clergy beyond noting that relations were both positive and negative and that both groups often exhibited a “bewildering array of viewpoints . . . that crossed economic and religious lines of demarcation” (p. 43).

Merchants and Ministers moves chronologically through American history beginning with chapters on the colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National periods; then moving on to the antebellum era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era; and ending with two chapters discussing the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first. To provide context for nonspecialist readers, each chapter includes helpful discussions of the business and religious history of the era, noting, for instance, such economic changes as the shifts from colonial-era mercantilism to the nineteenth-century market revolution and the emergence of industrial and then managerial capitalism in the twentieth century, and such changes in religion as the rise of evangelicalism and the social gospel. Aware of the significance of geographical and racial variations, Schmiesing periodically highlights sectional differences by turning his attention to the South and the West and to the experiences of African Americans. He notes that in the late nineteenth century, segregation created unique relationships between black clergy and the business community. African Methodist Episcopal churches, for example, helped capitalize small businesses, which were unable to obtain loans from white banks. Schmiesing also charts variations in the public status of clergy and business leaders, and each group's changing attitudes toward the other.

Each chapter includes short vignettes that serve to illustrate the various kinds of relationships that ran the “gamut, from hostility and distrust to friendship and collaboration” (p. 2). The Progressive Era chapter, for example, includes vignettes about department store magnate John Wanamaker, who incorporated social gospel ideals into the operation of his business; Catholic Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, who sought to serve as a mediator between unions and capital; and Methodist minister and socialist Henry F. Ward, who openly criticized business. The chapter also demonstrates the rapprochement between business and Christianity by highlighting the careers of Edward Scribner Ames—long-time pastor of the Hyde Park Christian Church and a professor at the University of Chicago, who praised the idealism and morality of businesspeople—and evangelist Billy Sunday, who in his massive business-backed revivals promoted temperance and hard work, while advocating for capitalism and against unions.

One of the book's important themes is the question of inherent tension between capitalism and Christianity. As early as 1639, Puritan cleric John Cotton condemned merchant Robert Keayne for charging high prices and making excessive profits, thus violating Christian moral constraints. Schmiesing finds that almost four centuries later many of the clergy continued to be uncomfortable with the moral deficiencies that seemed integral to capitalism. Yet at the same time there were strands of Christianity that meshed well with business. In 1896, theologians like W. Hay Aitken could make sophisticated arguments for the morality of business, and other ministers in the 1920s preached the prosperity gospel, an element of American Christianity that linked faith with material success. This strand of Christianity reemerged with regularity: in the 1950s through the writing and preaching of Norman Vincent Peale; in the 1970s through institutions like A. A. Allen's bible school, Oral Roberts University, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Christian amusement park, Heritage USA; and in the 1990s through the televangelical ministries of Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes, who continue to preach today. Moreover, elements of the business community, especially evangelicals like earth-moving-machine manufacturer Robert G. LeTourneau and Chick-fil-A's founder S. Truett Cathy, eagerly embraced Christianity and incorporated it into their workplaces.

Schmiesing is to be praised for taking on such an ambitious topic, and his book does provide a good introduction for those unfamiliar with either religious or business history, even if it overstates the lack of scholarship and interest in clergy-business relations. A particular strength of the book is the author's determination to avoid simple correlations and explanations. However, the short vignettes—often only a page or two—are frustrating, often just touching on important individuals and themes. Moreover, while specialists will find little that is new or surprising here, it is a useful survey for those wishing to engage the topic.