In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (review)

James Hudnut-Beumler has pointed the study of American religious history in an important direction, one that has seen very little travel by scholars in this field. This book takes one familiar defining moment in American history—the disestablishment of Christianity in the era of the early republic and the ensuing voluntarist religious culture that replaced it—and follows its effects in an unfamiliar but fruitful way. The book is structured along thematic chapters that are also basically sequenced chronologically. His research offers some of the first longterm analyses of salary data for American Protestant ministers, and combines it with research from books, diaries, architecture, and, in the last section, the World Wide Web. The opening chapter reframes the disestablishment of Protestant churches in terms of financial and labor issues, reinforcing for us the depth to which Protestant Christianity was reformed in this period by reminding us that clergy were, for the first time, forced to become sales-people for their labor—and, thus also for their religion. Succeeding chapters cover fund-raising and investment in building; the rise of theories on tithing and a wide formulation of the concept of “stewardship;” the characterization of the minister as a professional; and, the emergence of a consumerist church mentality that mirrored the broader culture of consumption.

Several of his arguments and insights merit cursory mention here. Regarding capital investment in buildings, Hudnut-Beumler highlights the competitive nature of American Protestantism, and also one of the many dueling impulses in the culture that emerged: that is, that Protestants found persuasive power in presenting themselves as both part of a mainstream and outside that mainstream. In the chapter on the rise of tithing and “stewardship,” we see one of the many effects of modernizing on Protestant churches. Protestants, who were enamored of what seemed like the inevitable modernization of their world, began to systematize all aspects of their institutions, including the means of raising money. The stabilization of income for the churches was intended to not only raise more money, but to provide for more predictable budgets that could then accommodate more elaborate and grand schemes of church expansion. The substantial spread of American Protestantism around the world in this time period was made possible by this new mode of financial planning. In chapters that are not as dependent on new research, Hudnut-Beumler narrates for us the ways in which Protestants and the broader consumer culture paralleled each other through the twentieth century. The successful Protestant churches, following wealth to the suburbs, building larger churches for ever larger congregations, and rapidly consuming more goods and services, survived by reshaping the nature and purposes of American churches.

Perhaps the best chapter, in terms of its originality and importance, is the chapter on clergy spouses. While this unexplored area of religious history could be viewed from many angles, the choice of money, and particularly class as a point of departure, is particularly helpful. Most spouses of ministers have been and continue to be wives, of course, and thus most of the chapter is about women. We see the wives of nineteenth-century preachers forced to make sense of the new religious world they have been suddenly thrust into. We see them as part of a sales team, clearly expected by the buyers in the local congregations to be a part of the minister’s labor they are paying for, but also not explicitly “employed” by them either. At the center of much of this history, the author argues, is a pervasive anxiety about finances and social respectability. The minister’s wives, like their husbands, were often college-educated, and in another marriage might have expected to live a little more comfortably. Certainly many Protestant ministers were not paid as much as many in their congregation, but yet they were often expected to dress as...