The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption by Andrew Ball (review)

Reviewed by: The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption by Andrew Ball Maria O'Connell The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption. By Andrew Ball. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN 978-1350231672. Pp. vi+260. 108. 00. The cover image of Andrew Ball's book The Economy of Religion in American Literature is a photograph of various types of American currency pinned in the shape of a cross. The image illustrates Ball's theme that American Christianity is molded by the culture and politics of the country at large. Ball's thesis in the book is that "economic and technological change reshapes religion and gives rise to new forms of the sacred. These forms are expressed symbolically, in ideas, practices and artistic representations collectively designed by the members of a group" (2). He is particularly interested in apotheosis, which he defines as "the process whereby the differentiating traits of a social group" are made sacred through the symbolism of the divine (14–15). Ball maintains that "economics has a determining influence on religion that is necessarily mediated by the symbolic, most notably, by literature and print culture" (3). For him, the American experience of modernity was not disenchanted, but the "development of capitalism and the process of class formation intensely invigorated religious enthusiasm" (3). Because of this enthusiasm, Ball writes, Protestantism was substantially changed. The doctrine of salvation becomes not a moment of individual transformation, but a social construction. Ball spends a good deal of the introduction establishing his theory of the sacred and how the sacred is codified. He exhibits an impressive End Page 303 depth of reading and scholarship. One of his main sources for the theory is the work of Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1904. Weber believed that capitalism would ultimately make America secular, but Ball argues that his work "proved integral to the sacralization of capitalism in the American imagination" (3). Connecting the economic developments with the revival and development of American Protestantism, Ball develops a lens to see how popular literature functioned along with religion to transition from one type of economic organization to another. Ball makes his argument over seven long chapters, each identifying an economic movement and reading it through select contemporary writings to show how the economic movement contributed to and was also advanced through apotheosis or the sacralizing of a particular type of economic development. In order to make his point, he divides the rapid changes in the American social structure from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century into broad categories: The Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution; the early years of industrialization; sentimental labor fiction and class differences; the "sacralization of capitalism" (26) as exemplified in William Dean Howells' conversion; Sinclair Lewis and modern scientific management as religion; the Gastonia novels, the Depression, and class conflict; and finally the Black God of the Harlem Renaissance. Each of the chapters delves into history and economic theories, but they focus primarily on the ways that various literary works either support or undermine the predominant economic form and how they function as symbols of apotheosis with the ways that American capitalism has made gods of those economic forms. Because Weber and Emil Durkheim are the primary sources for this book, it has a profoundly sociological and secular approach to Christianity. Even the idea of apotheosis presumes that belief and conversion are more matters of sociological adjustments and pressures than an individual choice. It definitely forecloses the concept that one's relationship with Christ could, in and of itself, be a mandate for changing behaviors. In chapter 3 "The American Fetish: Religious Economics in the Novels of William Dean Howells, " Ball focuses on Howells' " belief that sin is a function of social conditions rather than the essential depravity of human nature" (89). In chapter 4, he examines the "Christ novel" to "observe the integral role of apotheosis in machine age class conflict" (112). He uses both novels by socialist writers that advocate for a view of Christ as the working carpenter and revolutionary, and the work of Bruce Barton, who wrote. . .