American Protestants and Sanctified Capitalism

In my view, the greatest single virtue of Lehmann’s approach is his firm rejection of reductionism, his refusal to assume that Protestantism’s accommodation of the capitalist agenda has been purely reactive and one-directional. He argues convincingly that standard secularization theory has never applied in America; religion here has hardly faded away in the face of secular imperatives, but an evolving religion has consistently cleared the way, spiritually, for capitalism’s next advance within a newly-cleared psychological and political space.