When this reviewer first came across Johnson’s Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, 1989) in graduate school, it prompted a rethinking of certain standard narratives and methodologies. Johnson’s third book, The Power of Mammon, is a similar work, seeking to overturn Finke and Stark’s argument that the marketplace of religion has been the foundation of American Protestantism’s lasting vitality and relevance.1 Instead, Johnson believes that the marketplace’s influence on American Protestantism has been pernicious, because of how it “secularized New York State Baptist congregations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” leaving them “distracted” from the transcendent (xv).
Johnson effectively deploys a standard strain of secularization theory, but the strength of The Power of Mammon is its research methodology—a deep dive into the archives of New York Baptists—that mines congregational minutes, membership rosters, church judicial cases, baptisms, conversions, membership demographics, and periodicals to gauge...