Abstract
It is difficult to read Faith and Money without thinking about Max Weber, especially his three-month sojourn in the United States in 1904 after which he published the two essays that make up The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002 [1905]). As we know, the Protestant Ethic thesis was part of a much larger project, namely the economic ethics of the world religions. In the opening sections of his famous study, Weber noted that the relationship between Protestantism and industrial capitalism was well known and recognized by Martin Offenbacher's Konfession und soziale Schichtung (1900) who had reported on a statistical comparison of Protestants and Catholics in Baden demonstrating the social advancement of Protestants. At one level, Weber merely offered a suggestive connection between Protestant teaching, especially in Lutheranism and Calvinism, and secular success. Weber's views on religion and capitalism owed a lot to his three-month sojourn in America in 1904, which offered him an extraordinary opportunity for observation of capitalism in the raw.
How does the Protestant Ethic thesis stand up in the light of contemporary evidence on wealth and American Christianity? There has been much speculation about religion and economic attainment – for example, Gerhard Lenski's The Religious Factor (1961) – but little hard data. Lisa A. Keister's study is welcome, providing as it does substantial evidence about religion and prosperity with respect to contemporary American denominationalism. It represents a substantial challenge to the Weber legacy. Her discussion is based on evidence from four major sources – the General Social Survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Health and Retirement Survey and the Economic Values Survey. She reports the data in terms of ethnicity and religious membership (White Conservative Protestant; Black Conservative Protestant; Mainline/Liberal Protestant; White and Hispanic Catholic; Jews; Other and No Religion). Her major findings are that ‘there is little evidence from these data that religiosity, measured as frequency of attendance at religious services and frequency of participation in religious activities, is associated with wealth outcomes’ (p. 107). In other words, strength of religious commitment does not appear to have any connection with wealth, but membership does. These data also show important patterns of social mobility in which, for example, white Catholics have now moved steadily into the more wealthy middle class. They now have high levels of education, relatively high occupational positions, and beneficial familial histories (such as low divorce rates and fertility rates). Hispanic Catholics currently have the opposite characteristics, but Keister anticipates that they too will rise up the social ladder. White conservative and black Protestants are the least successful in terms of incomes and assets. Mormons, despite their relatively high fertility rates, have considerable educational achievement, and are relatively wealthy. Jews have high educational achievement, low fertility, and low divorce rates, and are the most prosperous. For example, ‘net worth’ (assets minus debts) for Jews was $443, 000 and for black Conservative Protestants it was $25, 500. Whereas approximately 50 per cent of Jews are found in managerial and professional occupations, 63.6 per cent of black Conservative Protestants and 49.0 per cent of white Conservative Protestants are in labour or service sector occupations. Marriage and family patterns are also significantly different. Whereas 15.7 per cent of black Conservative Protestants are divorced, the figure for Jews was 2.2 per cent. Religion is important in rates of premarital sex, the choice of partners, reproduction and child rearing. Marriage has an obvious effect on wealth insofar as the partners share assets. Thus the data show that religion and wealth are closely and consistently connected.
What are the factors associated with income and wealth? The principal determinants are inheritance, educational attainment, marriage and fertility. Keister argues that religion mediates between these conditions and wealth outcomes, because religious values play a major role in shaping these conditions. People from large families have less wealth. In particular, religious values shape attitudes and behaviours relating to work and wealth creation. In summary, ‘family processes (including family background and adult family processes), race/ethnicity, education, work, and income mediate the relationship between religion and adult wealth ownership’ (p. 131).
Faith and Money is a painstaking and scholarly work, and a valuable contribution to the study of religion in American society. One wants, however, to push the work into questions regarding the sociology of religion more generally. For example, Keister recognizes the relevance of her work to the Weber thesis, but it is not a central concern. However, it is difficult not to speculate about her findings in relation to Weber, especially since the Jews are consistently wealthier than other groups. In 1911 Werner Sombart offered an alternative to the Weber thesis in The Jews and Modern Capitalism, arguing that it was the historical marginalization of Jews in Europe that created opportunities for them to take a dynamic role in economic growth. Another problem for the Weber thesis is that we might expect conservative Protestants to be more successful, while the poverty of black Protestants suggests that what W.E.B. DuBois called ‘the problem of the colour-line’ still functions to limit their social mobility.
Finally, one critical issue in the enjoyment of wealth is obviously when a person is born. Our understanding of the so-called ‘cohort or generational effect’ owes a great deal to the research of Glen Elder and Mathilda White Riley. Children who came to adulthood in the Great Depression faced lifelong disadvantage, whereas Jews coming to New York at the end of the 19th century arrived in an economic boom, and have continued to accumulate wealth in the subsequent decades. We can only speculate about the consequences of the current economic crisis for future cohorts of white and black conservative Christians.