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The King's Business

“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” The young Jesus was not talking about business of the General Motors variety, but that did not stop advertising executive Bruce Barton from appending this quote to the start of his bestselling 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows. Barton’s effort to glean business lessons from the Gospels is not a bizarre curio from a money-mad decade; rather, The Man Nobody Knows was an earnest attempt to interpret religion’s place within a capitalist society. The complex interplay of religion and capitalism has long been the topic of historical scrutiny, from Max Weber’s writings on the “Protestant ethic” to contemporary studies of the prosperity gospel. The recent interest in the history of capitalism has produced, however, an efflorescence of new work on “religion and capitalism” that combine rigorous research with theoretical insight. The two books under review here—one by a scholar with a long and distinguished career, the other by a scholar whose promising career was cut tragically short—thus arrive at the perfect time, at least in commercial terms. It would be a mistake to pigeonhole Religion, Art, and Money and God’s Businessmen as simply “religion and capitalism” books because both offer much more. Read together, they illuminate the shifting boundary between the sacred and secular in the modern United States. Peter W. Williams, an emeritus professor of religion and American Studies at Miami University in Ohio, has written a book with a sophistication that belies its simple title. Religion, Art, and Money offers a wide-ranging history of Episcopalianism in the United States between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Williams, as he makes clear in the preface, does not try to give a comprehensive survey of Episcopalianism. His concern is with “the ways