American Christians have always been suspicious of commerce

I'm listening to a job talk by Mark A Peterson, an American historian at the University of Iowa. Peterson is currently working on a fascinating set of issues about the 17th-century Atlantic world.

He argues for a curious connection between coins and slaves. Slaves exist at the intersection between empire and commerce, like coins.

In utopian, city-on-a-hill Boston, slaves were unavoidable in Boston’s relationship to larger trading community. Did slaves belong to Caesar or to God?

Boston's "Pine Tree Shilling" -- an illegal coin in competition with English coins, bearing a tree rather than the image of the English king -- symbolized both New England resistance to London, and Puritan suspicions about rendering to Caesar things (like human faces) that belong to God.

By the 1680s, a few forward-thinking evangelical Protestants like Samuel Sewell and Jonathan Belcher were hoping that Massuchusetts' connection to a larger trading empire was an opportunity for reforming the evils of Atlantic trade through Christian charity.

Would that present Christians may embrace that vision, rather than the later opportunism and worldliness that infected other stages of the American past, when the church would be turned in favor of slavery and unbridled capitalism. Liberal Christians need not reject America's past: they only need understand it beyond the simplistic terms to which it is sometimes reduced.