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How Henry Ford institutionalized a social gospel
Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world.
This religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, it examines Ford’s mass production methods and bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions, illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor.
— David Morgan, author of The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions
A brilliant advance in the study of religion, this book sees through the prevailing secular myth of Henry Ford to expose Ford’s pervasive religious myth-making in American life. Assembling Religion revitalizes key terms of analysis, such as myth, ritual, and the sacred, while demonstrating how they work in the world. Kati Curts is a new strong voice in the ongoing work of mediating the familiar and the surprising in American religion and culture.
— David Chidester, author of Religion: Material Dynamics
Assembling Religion is an important book worth reading, highly creative and extremely relevant to thinking about the kinds of transformations that religion in America is undergoing today.
An incredibly well-written, thoroughly researched, and useful addition to the growing literature on twentieth-century business and religion. ... 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.
Assembling Religion is a major contribution to scholarship on religion, business, and corporatism and is required reading for anyone who wants to better understand how religion is materially made in America.