The Strangers' Store: Moral Capitalism in Moravian Bethlehem, 1753-1775

Eighteenth-century Moravians worried about the effect of economic success on the religious life of their community, and church leaders responded by founding the Commercial Council in 1766.¹ "It is certain that God has been with us in our commercial ventures, and has blessed us in that realm more than we ever expected," wrote the members of the new board in that year. Their church, an international Pietist missionary group with its headquarters in Germany, ably supported its work through a variety of businesses and loans. Financial success was not without its moral hazards, however. "On the other side," the Commercial Council continued, "it is also true that Commerce, if it is not pursued precisely after the sense of Jesus, and if the spirit of the world comes into it, it is a most dangerous thing, which can bring the fall of not only individual souls, but entire Gemeine."²

This sentiment was familiar to Moravians in Pennsylvania. Bethlehem, a town of about six hundred residents in 1766 and a thriving crossroads in the backcountry, was the spiritual and economic center of Moravian life in British America. Missionaries from Bethlehem fanned out across the countryside, sailed to the West Indies, and sought to bring the gospel to Surinam. To support these expensive projects, Bethlehem's residents took advantage of the economic opportunities around them, building a town that resounded with the sounds of mills, smithies, carpentries, and a tannery. At the center of this activity, the Strangers' Store, a retail outpost, drew customers by offering a wide variety of staples, textiles, tools, and a few luxuries. In the store's administration, Bethlehem's economic leaders balanced the disparate demands of religious devotion and economic life, carefully creating their own brand of "moral capitalism" while they tried to turn a profit.³

Historians have long noted the fortunate financial outcome of an industrious, moral life. Stephen Innes argued that the moral, social, and economic structures of Puritan life in Massachusetts laid the groundwork for future capitalist success. Closer to the Moravians geographically and chronologically, the economic values of Quaker merchants enriched the peaceable gentlemen's pocketbooks as well as their souls, according to Frederick Tolles. Since the publication of Max Weber's essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the idea of an essential link between Luther's concept of the calling, Calvin's worldly asceticism, and the birth of modern capitalism has been widely influential within early American historiography, if not universally accepted. The Moravians, like their Puritan and Quaker predecessors—not to mention their Pietist compatriots—shared the core set of economic values identified by Weber: hard work in this world for the sake of the soul rather than for worldly success. What makes the Moravian story notable, however, is the group's facile use of capitalism to serve religious ends in Pennsylvania in the latter half of the eighteenth century, long after the chroniclers of Puritans and Quakers perceive the decline in those respective Holy Experiments, and after economic historians begin to see the flowering of market capitalism.⁴

This incongruity is more historiographical than real. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber simultaneously demonstrated the centrality of religious belief to the development of modern capitalism and pounded the first nails into the coffin of the idea that religious belief and capitalism could comfortably coexist in a predominantly capitalist society. Weber used Benjamin Franklin to illustrate his capitalist ethic. Calling the icon of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania a "colourless deist" with one stroke, and citing his use of the Bible to justify making money with the next, Weber illustrated how a religious dynamic could stand at the heart of capitalism and simultaneously cease to matter at all. In other words, once the spirit of capitalism had gained momentum, religion became at best an annoyance, at worst a hindrance. Describing the world of the turn of the twentieth century, Weber wrote that the spirit of capitalism "no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to...