What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while working furiously to make a place for themselves in a changing economic landscape. In Friends of the Unrighteous Mammom, Stewart Davenport explores this paradoxical partnership of transcendent religious values and earthly, pragmatic objectives, ultimately concluding that religious and ethical commitments, rather than political or social forces, shaped responses to market capitalism in the northern states in the antebellum period.

Drawing on diverse primary sources, Davenport identifies three distinct Christian responses to market capitalism: assurance from clerical economists who believed in the righteousness of economic development; opposition from contrarians who resisted the changes around them; and adaptation by the pastoral moralists who modified their faith to meet the ethical challenges of the changing economy. Delving into the minds of antebellum Christians as they considered themselves, their God, and their developing American economy, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon is an ambitious intellectual history of an important development in American religious and economic life.

Stewart Davenport is associate professor of history at Pepperdine University.

“An important contribution to a much-neglected but very important subject. No other author has set out to do what Davenport accomplishes, which is a systematic study of how key representatives of America’s rising tide of religion attempted a theoretical understanding of, and practical response to, America’s rising tide of commerce.”

“Stewart Davenport conscientiously and insightfully re-creates the world of the nineteenth-century political economists, who taught that the principles of international trade manifested, like the laws of biology and physics, the intelligent design of a Divine Creator.”

“Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon is an illuminating and original examination of religious thought about political economy in nineteenth-century America, and thereby of deep and enduring conflicts within market societies.”

“Scholars have endlessly written about antebellum Protestant thinking about slavery. Now, finally, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon turns a spotlight on a new, crucial question:  how did antebellum Protestants parse capitalism?  For anyone who seeks to understand the political economy of the antebellum era—or, indeed, the complex entanglement of Christianity and capitalism today—this book is critical. I, for one, am very grateful to Stewart Davenport for having written it.”

"This book accomplishes well what it sets out to achieve. The research is carefully executed, the prose clear and engaging, and the structure . . . easy to follow. . . . [It] should be of wide interest to scholars of antebellum history, religion, and moral phiosophy."

"Davenport's superb Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon . . . is primarily an explanation of the attempt by Northern ministers to offer guidance for their students, congregants, and neighbors—and the still-young nation—all caught in the vortex of modern capitalism."

"An outstanding contribution to the history of American intellectual life in the nineteenth century. On the critical question of the relationship between economic ideas and religion, he casts his lot with historians of the period who see theological commitments as independently interesting and of complicated genesis."

"Davenport provides a sensible introduction to important themes in ante-bellum Protestant thought; his book may prove useful to a new generation of scholars..."

"Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon, by Stewart Davenport, is a well-written, persuasively argued classification of the economic views of select religious elites....[It] accomplishes well what it sets out to achieve. The research is carefully executed, the prose clear and engaging, and the structure and micro-organization easy to follow."