Religion and the Economy: New Methods for an Old Problem

Although some of early American history's most influential early figures were concerned with the influence of religion on economic life, in recent decades scholarship in that area has flagged. Developments within the fields of religious studies, cultural history, and Atlantic history, however, suggest new approaches to the subject. A brief examination of the Moravian community in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania suggests that for early Americans, religion and economic life defined and enabled one another in myriad and changing ways that both encouraged economic innovation and defined for early Americans what true religion was.