Eugene McCarraher's magisterial text recounts a story of the long interweaving of capitalism with theology, practical piety, mysticism, and notions of sacramentality. Arguing against the implications of Max Weber's thesis that capitalism, while perhaps emerging from a Protestant ethic, nevertheless leads to the disenchantment of the world, McCarraher contends rather that we have never been disenchanted and that the rise of market society is better described as a series of misenchantments. This latter term should clue readers in to McCarraher's normative stance: humans, together with all of creation, are permeated by the grandeur of God, and there is a right way of perceiving and manifesting this enchanted reality, but capitalism goes about it incorrectly.

These fundamental, guiding claims about sacred presence and sacramentality are more asserted than argued for, but they allow McCarraher to gather a great cloud of witnesses who attest to this sacramental vision and either praise its presence within or lament its distortion by the market. In this imposing text, McCarraher covers approximately five hundred years and straddles Europe and the United States but focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. He marshals Puritan divines, transcendentalist poets, early business pundits, theologians, pastors, and politicians to show the influence of “pecuniary reason,” McCarraher's delightful term for the ways money, accounting, and quantification increasingly come to structure human notions of value and visions for what is possible.

McCarraher turns to the Romantic movement to help tell another tale about modernity and market expansion, and to retrieve an alternative vision for economic life and relationality today. The Romantics gave the lie to disenchantment, continuing to limn the sacrament of nature and the sacrality of intimate relationships and communities, as well as of certain postures of production, consumption, and exchange. McCarraher notes that part of the problem with utopian world transformation schemes or even claims to find an alternative to capitalism is that they accept too much at face value the world as capitalism describes it. But McCarraher, following Henry Miller, claims that “we already inhabit paradise” (16); capitalism has simply twisted our vision and obscures this reality. The challenge is not to build a better or different world but to reclaim this one, a task that includes seeing differently through a Romantic vision of nature, life, labor, and relationships.

In the end, however, as McCarraher admits, the Romantics are ambivalent heroes for the project, for some flirted with and embraced authoritarianism and others were unabashed sycophants and celebrants to Mammon. Despite recounting the glories of the guilds and the Arts and Crafts movement, McCarraher wants to resist nostalgia and simplistic attempts to recapitulate the past. McCarraher ends with chastened optimism and hope that the Romantic ethos might help us to reclaim a sense of place, locality, communal intimacy and bond, compassion and justice, to recognize the divine presence that already inheres in purportedly secular market exchanges and to transform such interactions in ways that better reflect this life affirming and gracious presence.

This book adds to the recent and growing literature on religion and capitalism. Like Harvey Cox's The Market as God (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Benjamin M. Friedman's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Knopf, 2021), McCarraher's primary figures are white, European males, although he does include a brief section on slave religion. Yet any effort to trace the sacramental dynamics of capitalism should attend to the experiences and perspectives of those who functioned as the central sacrifice—the hosts that were broken—in the unholy Mass of market proliferation. No doubt alternative visions would also emerge from those who served as the actual outsides and centrally supportive margins of the economic system.

McCarraher's book is wonderfully written and thoughtfully crafted. It provides a treasure trove of illustrations and examples of the permeable boundaries between the realm of economy and sites of religion, spirituality, and transcendence. Yet, for readers such as myself who—perhaps strangely—love good theory as much as a good story and delight in abstraction, argument, and conceptual elaboration, McCarraher's book will not fully satisfy. To be sure, McCarraher tells a tale that shows clearly that capitalism is interwoven with theology, spirituality, and ideas of sacramentality. He persuades by presenting, through over seven-hundred pages of beautiful and eloquent prose, numerous examples of early market theorists and practitioners who regarded economics as divinely sanctioned or permeated with the transcendent, as well as clergy and theologians who saw the market as a site of divine providence, presence, and sanctification. But McCarraher does not elaborate upon or unpack their thought systems to a degree that allows us to grasp how, precisely, the link between economy and religion is made. To be sure, ideas are not all that count as historical agents, but McCarraher's is even less a social or material history. Given that he attends primarily to ideas, further exploration of the conceptual systems at work would be welcome, to help us see how these “migrations” from theology to economy or vice versa were actually carried out.

Nevertheless, McCarraher's work is a must read. Even if readers do not get through the entire tome, engagement with his prose and storytelling prowess will edify, and his central claim must be grappled with. While I was already in agreement with McCarraher and needed no convincing, I am well aware that many remain under the impression that religion and economy have nothing to do with one another. This book should go a long way toward disabusing readers of such illusions. The work also serves as an invaluable sourcebook and compendium of an overwhelming litany of examples and voices showing quite evidently the ongoing fusion of supposedly profane markets and the enchanted realm of gods, spirits, rituals, visions, and values. It will no doubt contribute richly to a wealth of new studies at this intersection for years to come.