Heavenly Merchandizing

Mark Valeri attends to minutiae as he examines the interaction between religion and commercial activity in early New England ( Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America ). He attends to
“merchants accounts and ledgers, businesscorrespondence and personal letters, diaries and spiritual ruminations, autobiographicalclaims and the records of churches in which they participated” (6) in order to arrive at a description thicker than the usual accounts (he includes a few pages on Weber).

He does, however, discern an overall arc to the story: “the less[merchants] embraced the tenets of first-generation leaders such as Cotton andWinthrop, the more they entered into, and created, the world of the market.The more they adopted the idioms of civic loyalties, imperial identities,and enlightened rationalities, the more they embraced the mandates of theemergent economy. As Bostons ministers conformed their teaching to thelatest transatlantic intellectual fashions, they gave their merchant parishionersa language to bridge piety and commercial technique. From thisperspective, it was the transformation of puritanismwe might even overstatethe case by contending that it was the slow liberalization of puritanismand rise of rational Protestantismnot puritanism itself, that explains thecongruence between religion and the market in early New England. Religionhad everything to do with the development of a market culture inearly New England, but it was not necessarily old-time religion, if by thatwe mean the ideals of the founders” (9).