"You Get What You Pay For: Building a Consumerist Christianity in Early America"

For over four decades, from roughly 1820 until 1864, Alexander Campbell invested labor and capital in building a Christian business. Campbell’s work integrated religion and capitalism, joining a broader economic trend as the rise of a market-society altered the economic structures of industries throughout the nation. Campbell produced religious mass media and a suite of material religious products. They were commodities, they were instruments of commercialization, and they were his sincere theological expressions. This amalgamation was synergistic. His widely attended debates commercialized his theology, his magazines disseminated his beliefs and advertised his new products, and his products consolidated his growing religious following as well as growing his business. In a notice to his subscribers, Campbell exclaimed, “that money is as indispensable to the art of printing and publishing a religious paper, as it is to procure any of the necessaries of life.” He believed that his product was "necessary" and therefore it was valuable, because it was valuable, he expected commercial success. His characterization of “value” was simultaneously theological and consumerist. He charged that Christian products should be value-tested in the same way other commodified goods were, arguing that consumption – by informed consumers – proved a products’ legitimacy and worth. Though historians have largely ignored the centrality of business to Campbell's history, his campaign to sell Christianity went beyond the commercializing methods of George Whitefield and his media campaign and product portfolio was a harbinger of celebrity preachers in 20th and 21st centuries. Campbell's story is a significant episode in the history of consumerist Christianity in America. It reveals that consumerist Christianity, then as now, offered democratic trappings to Christian society, even while it reinstituted and strengthened traditional lines of power.