In this ambitious and deeply researched book, Kate Carté Engel reframes familiar questions about the relationship of religion to commerce in early America. Those questions have most often been asked of New England in the long shadow of Perry Miller's declension narrative, whereby the faith of the early Puritans gradually eroded before the onslaught of material acquisitiveness. Subsequent historians have argued some version of two spinoff positions: that religion kept the profit motive in check for a time, or that religious values stimulated the pre-revolutionary market economy. Shifting her focus to the Moravians, members of the Renewed Unity of Brethren in eighteenth-century Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Engel finds such dichotomies less interesting than what she sees as a continual dialectic between religion and economic life. For the Moravians, the two were inseparable, a symbiosis that enables Engel to draw new conclusions about the group which prompts broader arguments about religion and economics in early America.
While the Moravians will not challenge the Puritans anytime soon for supremacy in early American historiography, their theological, social, and missionary practices and astonishing record-keeping have earned them increasing attention in recent years. Some of this attention has resulted in tightly focused studies of Moravian enclaves in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, which, as Engel is well aware, run the risk of being perceived as investigations of isolated German communitarians with limited applicability to broader issues. She is quick to identify the Moravians as instigators and central figures in the age of evangelical awakening, apostles of a heartfelt gospel of spiritual rebirth who were much better known in the eighteenth century than today. Their global missions, especially among native Americans and enslaved Africans, inaugurated a new age in Protestant missionary vigor. Immersed in transatlantic evangelical and Pietist networks of communication and commerce, they embraced the modern world rather than retreating from it like some German immigrants in America. As the Moravians' foremost settlement in North America, all of this activity flowed through Bethlehem, founded in 1741 fifty miles north of Philadelphia.
Their commercial prowess is at the heart of Engel's argument, for it furnishes the lens through which to view their carefully considered and tightly ordered relationship between religion and money. The Moravians needed money to support their missionary enterprises, and Bethlehem's unique communal, church-controlled economy, or Oeconomy, was structured to bring in lots of it. Moravian millers, smiths, tanners, and other craftsmen and women, whose wages were set by the church, produced finished products for sale in the frontier economy. The Moravian general store sold textiles, gloves, spices, and other goods imported from Europe to non-Moravians. In all of these dealings, church leaders regulated prices to generate reasonable profits within what it considered allowable Christian limits. Under this form of Christian communism—or was it Christian capitalism?—all property was owned by the church, individuals employed by the Oeconomy lived frugally in common dormitories while the income they generated went into godly projects. Thus did piety and profit go hand in hand toward a higher calling within a particular Moravian version of a moral economy.
Whereas some previous studies have depicted Bethlehem as far removed, and almost disconnected, from the frontier missions it supported, Engel demonstrates the very close cultural and economic links between them. Money and supplies flowed from the Moravians' international networks to the missions; missionaries sent constant reports back to town, which were then forwarded to Unity officials in Germany; and Delaware and Mahican converts regularly traveled to and lived in Bethlehem. These close ties began to unravel during the Seven Years War, which severely strained the Unity's economy, brought anti-Moravian violence and disruption to the mission communities, and prompted changes to Bethlehem's economic structure. Church leaders in Germany dismantled the Oeconomy in 1762, privatized businesses and property, and shifted the financial responsibility of supporting the missions to the broader Unity. With the demise of Bethlehem's brand of corporate economic control, the town's divine sense of purpose gradually atrophied, and the massacre of ninety-six peaceful Delaware Moravians at Gnadenhütten in 1782 by Pennsylvania frontiersmen hastened the demise of the missions. By the end of the century, Bethlehem was just another industrious town of Americanizing German immigrants, still devout, and still connected spiritually to the central church headquarters in Herrnhut, Germany, but eager to make profits on their own account.
The flourish and decline of the Oeconomy made Bethlehem one of the most distinctive experiments in Christian communalism in early America and an ideal site to study the relationship of religion and economics. In situating Bethlehem's story in a wider Atlantic world of commercial and religious exchange, Engel undercuts the tag of isolated provincialism with which the Moravians are still regarded in some historiographic traditions. She is careful not to extrapolate too broadly from the experiencers of this one group with its unique culture and sense of itself in evangelical destiny. But she does contend that the story of Bethlehem shows the pitfalls of generalizing too quickly, particularly from the Puritan example, about faith and finance in American history, which are “both historically contingent and part of a wider story” (253). Her overarching argument about the continual negotiation between these two powerful forces provides a compelling new way of analyzing this enduring theme, even if the particulars vary by place, time, and confession. Religion and Profit is an ideal example of a case study with far broader implications for American religious history.
