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Republicanism, both of these authors teach us, by the mid-nineteenth century became indistinguishable from the aims of religion in the United States. A broad array of protestants agreed that the aims of religion cohered with the political principle of republicanism—or the principle that men could only achieve freedom through self-rule. Noll usefully shows that this concept of republicanism underwent a series of changes from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Beginning in the late eighteenth century republicanism referenced liberty from tyranny, man as citizen, and virtue as a kind of constraint on individual interests. Noll, however, argues that two versions of republicanism competed in this earlier period: communitarian republicanism, based in “the reciprocity of personal morality and social-well being,” and liberal republicanism, which valued the independence of the individual. Noll and Modern argue that by the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal version won out. Citizens imagined their freedom to be enabled by a market-based society more than by a community of virtue. For political historians these definitions are not new or controversial, but for historians of American religious history republicanism is an unlikely category of analysis because we see it as “political theory” rather than theology. But as both Noll and Modern argue, republicanism became the very substance of theology in the United States.

American Christianity and commerce are bound together by their mutual history. In colonial America, Puritans excelled at the skills of capitalism, and in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Christian corporations have tied together religious and corporate culture. Even when corporations and churches have maintained a distinct boundary between faith and the market, American religion and capitalism seem to be uniquely compatible. Ministers and gurus use mass media to disseminate their message (via TV, radio, bookstores). Religious folk in the United States tend to act like consumers, choosing their theologies and churches based on their individual needs and desires, rather than relying on tradition to dictate their religious practices. Selling and buying in the American marketplace share many similarities with Christian categories of piety and evangelization. Further, corporations and religious communities have since the early 20th century collaborated in politics and social movements. In much of the scholarship on Christianity and commerce in the United States, this relationship is discussed as a strategic partnership between two distinct spheres of life: religion and the market. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this neat division, arguing that the fluid relationship among commerce, consumption, and Christianity in the United States emerges from the historical co-development of capitalism and religion. If Christianity and the market in the United States look very similar, or are particularly friendly, it is because they were never separate to begin with.

This is a response to the responses on my article about Goop and asceticism. The response considers the meaning of "history" in the study of American religion today and considers possible alternatives to the types of genealogy that scholars in the field are using.

Lydia Maria Child's writing on the religious experience of urban life challenges scholarship that only considers the anti-urbanism of antebellum Protestantism. Child's Letters from New-York considered the possibility of the city as the basis for her own religious experiences and as the frame for encountering other religions. Through the new perspectives offered by the city, Child developed an urban-centric ideal of religious cosmopolitanism.