Thanks to a recent publishing trend, there is no shortage of books that parse the ties between corporate logics and Christian theology, business, and the church. Readers would be remiss to set aside Amanda Porterfield's Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation as simply more of the same. Porterfield's is not only a stellar work of scholarship, but a surprising one too, demanding of special attention.

Corporate Spirit shines because of its analytical range. “How did the corporate organizations that play such an important role in American society come to be?” Porterfield asks (p. 1). In tackling that query her purview encompasses commercial and religious corporations, stressing their synchronicity under U.S. law: both “have legal standing as persons,” and through “credos, mission statements, and social practices,” both “act purposefully to achieve collective goals, and construct group identity” (p. 1). While commercial organizations boost their reputations by claiming “ethical principles,” religious ones do so by “generating and distributing income and managing investments and debt” (p. 1). This “kinship” animates Porterfield's book. “If the history of corporate development in the United States is primarily a history of commercial growth,” she argues, “it is also a history with deep ties to a religious past, parallel formations in the growth of organized religion, and cycles of corruption and reform similar to those in religion” (p. 2).

Two subsidiary claims highlight the innovation of Porterfield's work. First, she locates the roots of America's corporate forms in Roman antiquity, “where images of society as a supersized body, or corpus, shaped conceptions of the world, and Roman law recognized voluntary organizations known as collegia as legal persons” (pp. 2–3). As their empire expanded, Rome's “imperial agents” leaned on local corporate entities and professional guilds to promote citizenship and maintain the peace (p. 7). Early Christians benefited from that arrangement. This was in large part due to the Christian apostle Paul, whose First Letter to the Corinthians outlined a theological contract that offered “practical instructions for corporate unification” (p. 2). As a “hub of commercial activity,” Corinth was the ideal litmus case for the Pauline ethic, its church of merchants ideal for applying its essentials of discipline, stewardship, fellowship, charity, and accountability to the group (p. 8). The Corinth model worked; over subsequent generations, Porterfield asserts, it “provided guidelines for an expanding network of churches and charitable operations that, by the fourth century, had grown as a stabilizing force within the Roman economy and a transforming agent within Roman imperialism” (p. 9).

Paul's framework of Christian corporate association grew in importance over the next millennia, even as prelates and kings—and eventually “modern businessmen and labor leaders”—reoriented it to their times (p. 2). Of notable import during the early modern period, Porterfield writes, was the emergence of craft guilds. Legitimated by canon law, these voluntary societies not only organized work, but also “sponsored masses, prayers for the dead, charitable endeavors, church building, religious art,” and generally assumed control “of urban order, labor regulation, craft specialization, and regional marketing” and “pathways to citizenship and elected office” (p. 45). Through guilds, laypeople strengthened the bonds of the Christian corporate order passed down to them by prophets of yesteryear.

That transition paved the way for the Puritan errand to North America, and this nation's baptism in the Pauline gospel, which Porterfield recounts in her book's second half. In the early seventeenth century, “merchant families with puritan leanings and dozens of men of similar disposition” crossed the Atlantic to chase fortune (p. 70). “These were ‘new men,’” Porterfield explains, both “in the Pauline sense of understanding themselves as empowered through membership in Christ and in the commercial sense of being men of a new middle class eager to make their mark in the expanding world of British trade” (p. 70). As underscored in John Winthrop's sermon to charter members of the Massachusetts Bay Company—a homily Porterfield brilliantly revisits—their aims were to act as “one body in Christ,” bind communal and commercial values as Paul ascribed, and, as one efficient company, achieve profits for the common good and gain (pp. 72–73).

The remainder of Porterfield's narrative charts the entrenchment of Christian corporate citizenship in America, through which she fleshes out her second subsidiary claim. In the early national period, American jurisprudence redoubled the legal rights of corporations, while government sanctioned them as “primary vehicles of national organization” and expansion (p. 95). “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or unsparingly applied . . .  than in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville would tellingly remark at this time (quoted on p. 95). After the Civil War, America's corporate sector grew exponentially. Over time, that expansion was accompanied by secularization of corporate law, which dulled the theological explicitness of Pauline theory. “Modern secular law works to separate religion as a realm of activity apart from for-profit commerce and public policy,” Porterfield explains, and this “legal ‘cornering’ of religion creates a division within modern social life that few if any people in Roman antiquity or medieval Christianity could have imagined” (p. 3).

Yet, as she shows through a fresh reworking of twentieth-century U.S. religion and capitalism—well-trodden analytical terrain as of late—while formal divisions increasingly separated faith from market principles, Paul's spirit of capitalism lived on. As proof, Porterfield guides readers through the multivalent ways that commercial and religious corporatism bonded anew in the post–World War II years. “Christianity permeated America's hot economy,” she emphasizes: many CEOs “looked eagerly toward the future . . .  with religious and economic enthusiasm intertwined,” while church and political leaders sanctified free-market capitalism as the nation's spiritual lifeblood (p. 145). By century's end, “free-market enthusiasts” in America's Catholic cathedrals—but especially evangelical Protestant megachurches—had fully sanctioned “the ascendance of consumer choice, shareholder value, and bold financial schemes” (pp. 172–73). Paul's contract, in other words, was alive and well. In twentieth-century Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles—not unlike in first-century Corinth—“membership in the corporate body of Christ became commodified through savvy corporate management” (p. 172).

With stunning command of two millennia of religious, economic, and political history—and a rare ability to trace it in engaging and judicious prose—Porterfield has signaled a new stage in our understanding of commerce and religion. While historians have done much lately to construe fiscal and political connections between religious and commercial enterprises in modern America, with this exceptional book Porterfield proves that America's “corporate spirit” is metaphysical as much as material, “ubiquitous” in its reach in and between boardrooms and the pew, and the product of a history Christian apostles set in motion eons ago (p. 120).