THE MONEY CULT
Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream
Chris Lehmann
Melville House
403 pages; $28.95
How can the most hedonistic consumer culture on the planet also be host to some of the most religious people in the world? Why hasn't the bureaucratic rationality of corporate capitalism erased the last vestiges of faith in God, especially in the United States, still the farthest outpost of modern-industrial society? Chris Lehmann, a co-editor of Bookforum, has the answers in The Money Cult.
Mr Lehmann is up against Max Weber, who also had North America in mind when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber argued that pious Puritans somehow became secular Yankees, who learned to lock themselves into an iron cage of a disenchanted world: "In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport."
Mr Lehmann demonstrates, contra Weber, that Protestantism at its extreme, out there on the European frontier called America, was a way of re-enchanting the world, not draining it of transcendent meanings - and it still is, in the evangelical or Pentecostal forms of contemporary megachurches, where Joel Osteen, the "prophet of the new millennial prosperity gospel," presides over an empire of God-blessed striving and self-help.
Mr Lehmann's point is not that the ruthless rationality of the market never quite overruled magical thinking. It's that the mysteries of the market itself have always solicited such thinking, and always will.
This is not exactly a new finding. Donald Meyer, Christopher Lasch, Jackson Lears and Thomas Frank have all reached similar conclusions. But the key insight of Mr Lehmann's book is that the Puritans and their theological heirs (including the Mormons) completed the logic of the New Testament by treating God as a man - by honoring the worldly economic activities of men on earth, in this life, not hoping for the exemptions from work that would come later, in the next life.
Mr Lehmann shows that a specifically Protestant, vaguely gnostic materialism has always animated American life, saturating the lowly world of objects with the sanctity of higher, heavenly purpose, even unto our time. His book is a tour de force that illustrates the continuities of American cultural and economic history.
Still, I think he makes two mistakes that drive us back toward Weber. On the one hand, Mr Lehmann claims that the Puritans sanctified the market as such. They didn't. Instead, they feared it, and went to great lengths to contain it. In their view, money, property and wealth were the means to the end of a self-determining personality who could choose God's path of his own free will - they weren't ends in themselves. The inversion of these means and ends, what we now call the market revolution, terrified the Puritans. They were the first articulate anticapitalists.
On the other hand, Mr Lehmann suggests, as Weber did, that the Puritans were the prophets of the self-made man, the tricky Yankee trader unbound by custom, family, tradition or community. They weren't. John Winthrop, among others, preached a "yoak of government, both sacred and civil" to contain the "wild beast" that would be loosed by the embrace of every individual's "natural liberty". Like Shakespeare and Hobbes, he didn't see how this animal could be tamed outside the iron cage of religious and political hierarchy.
Sometimes The Money Cult reads like something straight out of the 1920s, when the Young Intellectuals who invented an American literary canon (Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, et al.) made Puritanism a metaphor for everything distasteful about American culture. More often, it sounds refreshingly new. For Chris Lehmann has shown us why religious history is the mainstream of American history - and how Protestant theologians became the court poets of capitalism.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
