A comment left by Plonkee on my last post coinciding with a trip to my local charity shop and used bookstore got me curious about how Christianity has historically affected commerce. I came across a book called Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney, an economist, historian, and lecturer at the London School of Economics in the early 1900s. He has been called the “patron saint of adult education.” The book is based on a series of lectures he delivered at King’s College in the twenties.

A quarter of the book is dedicated to a discussion of the development of Puritanism in England. As one of the results of the English Reformation and a sect considered by some to be dissenters from the Church of England, the Puritans, according to Tawney, were marked by “the mere energy of …expanding spirit” and determined to remake their “own character and habits and way of life… family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order.”

It’s easy to track this “energy” into New England, the Puritan’s Massachusetts Bay Colony, and finally the greater United States of America. The quote defines the idealistic American experience to some degree. The English Puritans were consumed with the exercise of the free will “organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining…but always will,” so much so that they began to embody a powerful “slave to none” conceit.

They were largely the new tradesmen, instrumental in overturning the feudal system via clothing and textile manufacture, and belonging to those classes in society “which combined [fairly newly established] economic independence, education, and a certain decent pride in their status…determination to live their own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who…through economic helplessness, were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful…,” wrote Tawney. There were often involved in sales and banking, specifically usury.

The new industrial and commercial classes were identified with the Puritans and religious radicalism as were the associations of independent economic prosperity. Tawney recorded scholars from the late 1660’s as having documented this recognition:

A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and — in that age the same thing – to practice its own religion.

One’s personal finance, in line with collective commercialism, was bound to the Puritan religious ethic. They were the new “middle class of men” and were made into financially independent people by their social habits and business discipline as well as “the whole bracing atmosphere of their moral life.” Religion and economics were inseparable. The “Puritan bourgeoisie” knew that “The Lord prospered their doings,” and their doings were composed of all of the things encouraged by the personal finance blogosphere today, like being “thrifty and thriving,” along with some others not so regularly encouraged, like being “constant in prayer.”

They detailed guidelines for money management as strict as their now commonly known reputation: “the habitual usurer ought to be ‘thrust out of the society of men’,” and discouraged those “who by lending…are wont to snare and oppress the poor and needier sort.” They gave strict measurements for caps on interest and formulated a scheme for economic ethics, “the theory that every department of life falls beneath the same all-encompassing arch of religion.”

They may have birthed (or co-birthed) the spirit of the tradition of the potential for individual financial freedom and success in the U.S, but I can’t write a completely pro-Puritan post. The rest of the ethics of Puritanism, as we’ve all heard, turned sour in the New World, encouraging such norms as the marginalization of women based on Eve’s corruption, the notion that the world was created for men and all should be subordinate to them. They implemented torture in crime sentencing. And, the Democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville posited to have bloomed from their groundwork, dropped some of the stricter aspects of their ethical economic framework.

However, on an individual level, the Puritan economic vigor and attitude toward individual wealth has most fascinatingly endured in American personal finance. Nina’s comment on my last post reinforces this notion:

… Most of us need to earn money in order to survive so finances become core to our existence. We can let finances consume us (or drive us or define us) which is the force behind modern day consumerism or we can view money with the same sacredness that can produce an inner calm…