In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-Era Philadelphia by Thomas F. Rzeznik
  • Christopher D. Cantwell
Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-Era Philadelphia. By Thomas F. Rzeznik. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013. 288pp. $69.95.

If the many insights of Thomas Rzeznik’s important new book could be distilled into a single phrase, it would be this: follow the money. A religious history of Philadelphia’s industrial elite, Church and Estate compellingly illustrates the beliefs, thoughts, and actions that unified the city’s ruling class. Yet Rzeznik’s book is more than just a local story. In exploring “the relationship between financial patronage and ecclesiastical development” (76), it also provides a framework for scholars to rethink capitalism’s role in shaping American religious history more generally.

At the center of Rzeznik’s history is what he calls “the religious consolidation of the upper class” (111) in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing upon denominational publications [End Page 78] and local church files as well as business histories and financial records, Church and Estate weaves together histories that traditionally have been discrete. Chapters on denominational patterns of philanthropic giving and the minor revival that Philadelphia’s Episcopal Church experienced as a surprising number of Quakers converted to a more opulent church all convey how class and religious identity informed and reinforced each other. Yet Rzeznik’s attentiveness to the “authenticity” (6) of elite religious expression does not blind him to the disproportionate influence figures like John Wanamaker, Katharine Drexel, and others exercised over the institutions they touched. The most fascinating chapters by far are those that unpack the impact wealthy patrons had upon everything from faculty at religious universities to the messages the stained-glass windows at the Episcopal-funded Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge conveyed.

What animates this relationship between faith and finance is the search for what Rzeznik calls “spiritual capital.” Braiding Robert Putnam with Pierre Bourdieu, Rzeznik offers up a theoretical tool that could help integrate the new history of capitalism into the study of religion. The concept speaks not only to the expanded social authority elites derived from their religiosity, but also includes those discriminating religious dispositions the wealthy had to embody in order to access this authority. In this way it provides a framework other scholars could adopt and adapt.

Church and Estate concludes with the impact suburbanization and Progressive reform had upon Philadelphia’s religious nobility; as if spiritual capital was an investment with declining returns. But of course, as our own age of inequality makes clear, this is by no means the case. America’s religious and economic elite have constantly been made and remade. By what means spiritual capital transfers to new and emerging markets, however, Rzeznik does not say. To do so would mean considering spiritual capital’s relationship to other structures of [End Page 79] power like gender, race, and public policy – subjects he does not fully engage. But this observation is by no means a dismissal of the import of Rzeznik’s work. Church and Estate is, in the end, more of a snapshot, an excavation of spiritual capital’s working in a particular time and place. What this history demands is that we now attend to capital’s impact upon our own religious histories.

Christopher D. Cantwell
University of Missouri-Kansas City
...

pdf

Share