Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

A groundbreaking history of the corporate organization from which American institutions emerged
Puts new focus on religious ideals within business and the kinship between commercial organizations and churches

Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

Description

In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society.

Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business.

Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.

Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Corporate Organization in Roman Antiquity and Medieval Europe
Chapter One
Founding Visions:
The Ancient Roots of Corporate Organization
Chapter Two
"So poignant a memory of the past":
Corporate Accountability in Medieval Christendom
Chapter Three
"We need not see the church with the eyes":
Corporate Presence in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Part Two: Corporate Organization in America
Chapter Four
"The hearty hand of friendship":
New Men and Corporate Enterprise in British America
Chapter Five
Sanctifying Contracts and Persons:
Corporate Expansion in America's "infant republics"
Chapter Six
"The real nature and Spirit of our lives":
The Evolution of Corporate Personality, 1865-1920
Chapter Seven
"The very heart and soul and spirit of our national will":
Promoting the Corporate Dream, 1920-1980
Chapter Eight
Between Faith and Delusion:
Corporate Credit after 1980
Epilogue

Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

Author Information

Amanda Porterfield, Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion, Florida State University

Amanda Porterfield is Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion at the Florida State University. She is the author of Healing in the History of Christianity and the co-editor of The Business Turn in American Religious History (with Darren Grem and John Corrigan).

Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

Reviews and Awards

"Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation... deserves a wide reading." - Chris Steed, Theology

"Surveying vast historical and historiographical terrain, Porterfield's work contributes especially to recent scholarship that has used the study of religion as a method of identifying and illuminating the central concepts and convictions that animate seemingly secular areas of social life, including economy and law. In Porterfield's hands, economic history is religious history. This approach makes the book ideal for courses designed to unsettle traditional schemes of social categorization and historical periodization." - Church History

"Amanda Porterfield has produced a masterful, accessible, tightlywoven macrohistory of religious in?uences upon corporate cultures and structures from ancient Rome to the presidency of Donald Trump." - Jill K. Gill, Journal Of Ecclesiastical History

"Porterfield is pointing readers to new scholarly territory. As a religion scholar, she brings a fresh perspective to the historical study of economics and religion ... Porterfield points in important new directions to which scholars coming from other disciplines may be blind. This is a refreshing development." - Donald E. Frey, EH.Net

"Porterfield neither glorifies nor condemns corporations; instead, she deftly situates them in the mainstream of Western and American ideas and practices." - Susan Curtis, Journal of American History

"Porterfield has produced a landmark work on the messy entanglement of Western Christianity and the corporate form. It raises important new questions, reveals new patterns of change and continuity, and should alter the ways we talk about religion and capitalism... Corporate Spirit demonstrates that marking corporations 'secular' and religion 'private' distorts more than it reveals. The book's institutional focus imposes a healthy concreteness on a field of inquiry that too often leans on metaphors. If this book gets the attention it deserves, historians of religion will be spending less time chasing what adherents felt and thought and believed, and more time in the corporate documents." - Timothy E W Gloege, Reading Religion

"This learned and wide-ranging book on the varied and intimate connections between Christianity and American capitalism is absolutely fascinating. Amanda Porterfield chronicles their relationship from the Roman Empire to yesterday. In doing so, she has achieved an unusual combination of admirable traits: she is both original and judicious." - Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

"This fascinating new study explores the overlapping terrain of Christianity and contract law from Roman antiquity to the twenty-first century world of Enron and global corporations. In bringing together the Pauline idea of 'corporate membership' with the evolving world of corporate America it has no equal in breadth of scholarship, grace of style, or acuity of interpretation. Nothing less than a scholarly tour de force." - Harry S. Stout, author of American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism

"Amanda Porterfield's Corporate Spirit is not simply a description, or even a critique, of contemporary American capitalism; it is an exciting synthesis thinking about what makes for collective action and shared community, from the ancient world to the present. It is now essential reading for understanding Christian ethics, civil religion, and American exceptionalism." - G. Scott Davis, Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics, University of Richmond

Corporate Spirit

Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

Amanda Porterfield

From Our Blog

When corporations do the right thing

Delta Airlines was one of more than a dozen companies to cut ties with the NRA after the school shooting in February 2018 that left 17 dead in Parkland, Florida. In a similar spirit six months earlier, CEOs from major American corporations spoke out against racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Trump's inadequate response to the violence of white supremacists and their racist rhetoric prompted CEOs from Merck, General Electric, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Unilever, Armor, Dow, and Pepsi to separate themselves from him.

Posted on May 29, 2018

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