Allegories of progress: Industrial religion in the United States

This essay argues that the emergence of new factory systems and market cultures in the United States included the promotion of "industrial religion." Industrial religion is a discourse that attributes suprahuman power to raw materials and the mechanical technologies employed to convert those materials into consumer goods. Through descriptions of coal production in the Appalachian Mountains, factory supervision in the South, and soap promotions in the Northeast, we survey three foci of industrial religion: material power, technologies of conversion, and cultures of consumption. We argue that American Protestant reformers and industrialists collaborated to use industrial religion in order to civilize landscapes, cleanse bodies, and convert individuals into the requisite disciplines of modern labor and consumption. The pamphlets, speeches, and prescriptions of industrial religion narrated allegories of spiritual progress even as they defined the metrics of material success.