‘Investments in the Kingdom of Christ’: home missionary fundraising and investor capitalism in the late-nineteenth-century USA

ABSTRACT

This article examines the issuance of ‘certificates of stock’ in return for financial donations towards missionary chapels and schoolhouses in the late nineteenth-century American Presbyterian home missionary enterprise. No dividend or interest payment was made by the missionary agency. Instead, fundraisers explained that the ‘dividends’ on these ‘investments’ were spiritual, promising donors an improvement in their spiritual lives now, and potentially even greater ‘returns’ in the hereafter. The emergence of this method of raising funds is an example of how American religious organisations have used the methods of the commercial world in their fundraising strategies. However, as this article shows, it also sheds light on the mutual entanglement of religion and economy, values, and finance in the spheres of both the market and the church. At a time when many American Protestants were morally ambiguous about investor capitalism, the emergence and development of this mode of fundraising represented one of the ways investor capitalism was legitimised as a necessary, and respectable, economic activity for Protestant believers in a modern capitalist economy. At the same time, it also reflected a broader reframing of financial donations as worship within the Presbyterian Church.

KEYWORDS:

• Investor capitalism
• stock market
• protestantism
• missionary fundraising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All estimated equivalents are taken from Williamson 2018.

2 The full verse of Proverbs 19:17 (KJV) reads, ‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.’

3 The full verse of Luke 6:38 (KJV) reads, ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.’

4 The practise of the ‘Weekly Offering’ or ‘Sabbath Offerings’ was formally standardised in 1886, when the General Assembly of the PCUSA agreed to a revision in the denomination's Directory of Worship to include a new section entitled ‘Of the Worship of God by Offerings.’ See PCUSA 1896, Directory for Worship, Chapter VI, 76–77.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Short

Andrew Short recently completed his PhD at University College London (UCL).