Historical Sociology

For sociologists, most conversations about faith and money begin, or at least touch base, with Max Weber's writings, especially The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1905. Weber seeks to explain the fact that the industrial and commercial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came first to those European lands most influenced by the Protestant Reformation, especially in its Calvinistic form. Calvin's doctrine of predestination, Weber argued, moved the core of spirituality out of the social and ecclesial realm and made it a matter of private self-examination and prayer. While his historical argument is much debated, Weber's analysis of the tension created by the Calvinist's "deep spiritual isolation" and the resultant "restless, systematic struggle with life"¹ still rings true. So does the connection Weber drew between spiritual anxiety and the striving for material betterment that is the most powerful engine of the capitalist economy. Weber lamented the diminishment of social life that seemed to be the price of capitalist prosperity: "The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws," he wrote, "the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness."²

Another classic of American sociology that addresses the relation of money to religion is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville, a French visitor to the United States in the 1830s, made many trenchant observations, among them that he found it difficult to tell whether American preachers thought that "the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this."³

Finally, while it has received more attention from literary critics and economists than from religious leaders, Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions contains valuable (and very funny) observations and analysis of how religion can function as a form of "conspicuous consumption" whose value lies not in the direct benefits to the consumer but in the envy and admiration it arouses in others.

The Social Sources of Denominationalism, by H. Richard Niebuhr, is so influential it forms an important basis for the thinking of thousands of people who have never read it. Building on Weber's distinction between state-sponsored churches and autonomous sects, Niebuhr argues that the division of American churches by denomination is a "moral failure" to achieve the unity demanded by the gospel in favor of "conformity to the order of social classes and castes."⁴ If mainline Protestants are embarrassed when they try to talk about money, Niebuhr has given them plenty to be embarrassed about!

1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1930), 107–108.


2. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 331.


3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by Phillips Bradley, translated by Henry Reeve (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), part 2, chapter 9, 135.


4. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 25.