In recent years, we have gained a fuller picture of the twentieth century Christian businessman thanks to the works of Nicole Kirk, Darren Dochuk, Sarah Hammond, and others.Footnote ¹ While these scholars primarily focus on fundamentalist and evangelical entrepreneurs, the mainline Protestant credentials of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan are also well-known. But what of one of the foremost industrialists of the era, Henry Ford? Where does he fit into the landscape?

While an incredibly well-written, thoroughly researched, and useful addition to the growing literature on twentieth-century business and religion, Assembling Religion is not a religious biography in the model of the aforementioned works. Instead, the approach of Assembling Religion will be more familiar to religious studies scholars than historians of business or economics. Curts endeavors to go beyond explaining Ford’s various religious beliefs to uncover “how Ford engineered and reassembled new religious forms and machined powerful new economies of religion,” and to “interrogate the study of religion as a field of critical possibilities, to trace its prospects in order to glimpse its limits” (pp. 21, 13).

That’s not to say that Assembling Religion does not paint a useful, comprehensive picture of Ford’s religious life. It certainly does so. For example, the reader learns that Ford was baptized and confirmed in his parents’ Dearborn Episcopal church, but that his actual relationship to Christianity was much more complicated. He was not a regular attendee, nor particularly devoted to his church in time or monetary resources. His liberal Protestantism was augmented and modified by New Thought and Theosophical teachings, Social Darwinism, millennialism, and prosperity gospel principles. These aspects of Ford’s religious life are not entirely new revelations. Instead, Curts offers a novel interpretation by arguing that Ford’s manufacturing plant was effectively his church and his business was the liturgy. To make this claim, Curts employs an expansive definition of religion familiar to religious studies scholars. Consequently, some uninitiated readers may struggle with her application of theory and some of Assembling Religion’s terminology.

Curts begins by examining how Ford’s religious ideas influenced his approach to manufacturing and time, creating a “gospel of efficiency” (p. 23). Ford’s notion of a modern-day prophet was the engineer. But this went beyond mechanizing the assembly process, and according to Curts, incorporated his ideas about “reincarnation and millennialist aspirations about messianic machines” (p. 25). Herein, Ford blurred distinctions of sacred and secular as he saw metaphysical significance to ordering work according to his principles of time and efficiency. “The work of the assembly line was never just mechanical” for Ford and was more than an actualization of the trendy scientific management theories of his age (p. 25). A proponent of progressive reincarnation, Ford learned about such beliefs from among others, Orlando Jay Smith, a Civil War general, whose writings spread the ideas of reincarnation at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the Unity School of Christianity, a community founded by Charles Fillmore, who sometimes claimed to be the reincarnated St. Paul and helped convince Ford of the power of “affirmative prayer” (p. 49). Ford claimed embracing the concept of reincarnation assured him of the innate order, direction, and purpose of the universe, all organized by a “Brain of Mankind, Brain of the Earth…Brain of the Universe” (p. 39). When applied to his ideas of manufacturing, Curts connects this religious pastiche to Ford’s belief that his new system of production would liberate his workers and provide time to pursue moral edification and enlightenment. Labor was ritualized, and Curts connects this to the ideas of theorists of religious ritual such as J.Z. Smith, calling it “rite-to-work religion, a concern for work as the source of personal redemption and social justice” (p. 59) (“Rite” is a play off the “right-to-work” concept from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Curts also highlights Ford’s notorious antisemitism, connecting it to his views of a pioneering, modernist, American capitalism in opposition to “parasitic” economic and political systems, what Curts terms a “supersessionary secularism” (the former word a term for theological claims that God’s promises to Jewish people have been shifted to the Christian church) (pp. 105, 136). Instead, Curts’ concept refers to a progressive, “broadly” Christian, illiberal (secular) ethos instead of a strictly Protestant fundamentalist one (p. 136). Finally, Curts argues that Ford’s construction of museums and exhibits at Greenfield Village is best understood as an attempt by Ford to present everyday items and inventions as a “magical economy of capitalist possession” (p. 143). She specifically devotes time to Ford’s obsession with Edison’s lightbulb and his attempt to recreate Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in Michigan, arguing this was evidence of Ford’s “enshrining relics” that could “connect Ford’s incantation of industrial origin to the brand of American abundance he most wanted to disseminate” (p. 151).

Although I am someone who appreciates the difficulty of linking religious beliefs to particular business activities, I struggled with some of Curts’ connections. For example, in the first chapter, I was utterly convinced that Ford’s smorgasbord of individualistic religious beliefs was central to his identity and view of the world; however, I was less certain of how it translated into his manufacturing system. Specifically, how was Ford’s concept of reincarnation tied to his revolutionary assembly line? In comparison, Curts is more convincing in connecting the Five Dollar Day to Ford’s religion, through the creation of its Sociological Division (renamed the Educational Division under the leadership of Reverand Samuel Simpson Marquis, Dean of Detroit’s Episcopal Cathedral)—the bureaucracy tasked with ensuring workers were living “right,” through his connection to people like Reverend Ralph Welles Keeler, a notable figure in the Christian physical culture movement. Additionally, while it’s clear that Ford was reshaping and “assembling” a personal religion from pieces of beliefs he found swirling around him in the early decades of the twentieth century, I did not finish Assembling Religion with a clear sense of how these ideas became ingrained in American religion more broadly. Certainly, a form of mass-produced religion—something we see in the production of t-shirts, music, books, and other assorted tchotchkes—has come to define much of religion in the twenty-first century, but that’s not the story of Assembling Religion.

Despite these critiques, the underlying message of Assembling Religion, that a broad conception of “religion” is vital to understand how proprietors’ values shape their marketplace activities, is one I wholeheartedly affirm. In an era where the legitimacy of what some of us call virtue capitalism is under attack (such as ESG investing and DEI initiatives), it’s instructive to remember such values-based business enterprise has a long history in America, dating back to Puritans, Sabbatarian transportation lines, Christian for-profit publishers, and urban department store magnates, just to name a few examples. Curts’ illustration of the values animating Ford Motor Company is another important reminder that while such values have often flowed from established religious systems, they are not restricted to these. They will emerge from the ideas and values of their proprietors, be they from a formalized American evangelicalism (Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby) or a westernized informal Zen Buddhism (Erewhon and Whole Foods). For historians of business and capitalism, Curts provides a helpful reminder that we need to look beyond dominant religious systems to see the myriad ways that values beyond the material have shaped the marketplace in profound ways, and how business has, in turn, shaped US religion.