I have a friend named Chris whose accolades far exceed my own. I am a white guy from the South with the obligatory Southern religious cultural experiences. He’s a black atheist from New England and one of the world’s leading thinkers on black secularism. He had to fight from farther back—his life story deserves its own biopic—and he’s gone far beyond me, in part because he’s smarter and works harder. But if a black atheist and a white Protestant can both succeed beyond their wildest working-class dreams, what has faith got to do with it? Are Christianity and capitalism really joined at the hip? Does religion, any religion, help you get rich?

The usual popular narrative is yes. We Yanks like our work ethics to be of the Protestant variety. That idea appeared when a German, Max Weber, tried making sense of Americans. Why were these unusual people working so hard to get ahead? He assumed it must have something to do with those Puritan sinners in the hands of their angry God, desperately trying to prove they should be spared. The idea remains a staple of debate in undergraduate 101 classes of all sorts; in history, religion, sociology, and economics courses, students ponder why Americans are missing the “just kick back and relax” factory default setting. We feel like a society perpetually stuck in striving mode, and something must explain it. And since the US is also the most religious of all developed nations, perhaps it is in the biblical programming.

Colour me skeptical. Protestantism wasn’t fairy dust sprinkled on folks as they entered Ellis Island. The religions of my youth were stratified by wealth: Baptists sang praise songs near farmland, Presbyterians muttered psalms in the suburbs, Episcopalians sang choral hymns in capital cities on Sundays and supervised everyone else the rest of the week. I know far more poor Protestants than rich ones. Besides, history is filled with lots of unwealthy Lutherans in the same towns as hard-striving Buddhists.

As it turns out, faith does matter, just not quite the way we think. Religion shapes success because of what it drives you to and the hazards it steers you clear from. In a world where you get just one life to get it right, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are places that train us in knowing what direction to go, who to travel with, and which routes lead where. Getting rich can happen to the just and the unjust alike, but staying that way is largely a blessing that rains down on those with a sense of something greater than wealth for its own sake. At the same time, focusing only on the afterlife leads exactly where you think it would: to less treasures in this one.

The best way to test the Protestant work ethic thesis is on non-Protestant work ethics. The dominant immigrant religions of the 1800s were Irish Catholics, Asian Buddhists, and European Jews. Most arrived impoverished and discriminated against by virtue of their religion and language. They sequestered in ethnic enclaves and remained largely urban. Yet names like O’Kelley and Murphy swelled the ranks of the industrial weekly workers, while names like Strauss, Rosenwald, and Goldman issued pay envelopes. By 1970, seven out of ten Jewish men worked in professional, managerial, or technical fields, an almost inverse proportion to everyone else. When Forbes first published its richest Americans list, Jews were 75 percent of the list but just 3 percent of the US population.

Striving in this world, for this world, is not a value across every faith. It is simply too simplistic to have “Christian” or “Jewish” or even “Protestant” theologies of wealth. Religions that focus on the afterlife (or simply avoid contamination with the impure in this life) get the results they are after. They store up their treasures in heaven. This is why religious categories don’t map to any discernable financial outcomes. There is no Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Taoist financial theology. There are, however, specific beliefs that matter buried in subgroups. Pentecostals underperform other Protestants. Orthodox Jews make and keep less than Reformed Jews.

Historically, the religions that outperformed, at least on an earthly scale, sanctified success today as a divine purpose for life. Education played the largest role. The Catholic Irish put their children to work early and tended to sink all family income into owning their own homes. Eastern European Jewish families kept their children in school or trade apprenticeships as long as possible, forgoing the extra income in the name of future gains to the family. This cultural belief in education and delayed generational payouts compounded. By the late twentieth century, being Jewish equated to 1.5 extra years of education compared to others, while being Lutheran meant about half a year less. Not accidentally, Lutherans lag other Protestants in financial achievement. Some studies suggest that when accounting for schooling, much of the religious differences in financial success disappears.

Another key difference was birth control. Jewish women gave birth to fewer children, and this kept family wealth more concentrated by generations. Fewer children allowed for greater investment in education for each child, increasing the chances of each generation’s success. The same was true of the most financially successful Protestants: Episcopalians. Large families, a great strategy for rural economies, were a drag in modern industrial and post-industrial ones. Religions that embraced birth control got higher returns by not diversifying. Women not homebound by many young children were also more easily able to monetize their time, further increasing wealth creation.

Much is made of Jewish networks, where Jewish families lent to one another and opened business opportunities for the chaver (friends) apart from the goyim (non-Jews). This, too, was a trait that held across religions. Buddhist and Confucian immigrants created members-only hui credit associations and regularly supported one another’s business ventures. New England Puritans were equally insular and prone to supporting fellow Calvinists. Quakers cooperated on business ventures to the never-ending anger of Pennsylvania Presbyterians, who accused them of secret schemes to keep others off good land.

In some ways, Reformed Judaism was perfectly built for the US economy, not because of religious beliefs, but because of lifestyle. Every statistically relevant factor to financial success was embedded in moderate Jewish culture: immigrant drive, strong emphasis on education, tightknit communities that could reign in bad behaviour, high marriage rates, low divorce rates, delayed childbearing, smaller families, openness to women working, and a religious emphasis on saving for the future. Other sects with such lifestyles had similar outcomes. The more secular the faith, the earthlier the rewards.

Which brings us back to atheism. You would think that, since non-believers are secular by default, they would be the wealthiest group of Americans. But that is not true. The percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans (composed of atheists and agnostics of various stripes) who make less than $30,000 a year (29 percent) is nearly identical to those who make over $100,000 a year (33 percent). You can be a rich or poor atheist in the same way you can be a rich or poor Protestant. And religious participation (going to church, synagogue, mosque, etc.) significantly correlates to increased wealth compared to non-participation.

I won’t be a bit surprised if someone were to piece together the same spectrum for non-believers. If your lack of faith leads you to reject capitalism or commit your life to fight for climate justice, you probably won’t have a large 401(k). If, however, you decide that life is best spent navigating the system as it is, you’re likely to do well. Committing to the afterlife, however you see it, is usually a drag on returns. Faith helps make you rich, but too much faith can leave you poor.

If these effects hold across so many belief systems, is it the believing or the doing that makes the difference?

American religion is peculiarly non-static. It adapts to the challenges followers face, a facet that helps explain why religion in America is so enduring compared to Europe. There is nothing in Christianity that is inherently pro-capitalism. The leaders of Lancaster, Ohio, shut down students’ discussion of a railroad future on the basis that “if God had designed that his intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles per hour by steam,” then the Bible would have said something about it. As capitalism birthed a new world, people had to process how best to live in it. American Christianity adapted far faster in most places than it did in Lancaster.

Teaching people how to live their lives is what religions do. Religion helped people make sense of a world that offered new opportunities. Saving, investing, thrift, and financial wisdom transformed from descriptions of security to prescriptions for prosperity. What was once simply part of having wealth—feasting, celebration, excess—became the way to losing it. And what was once part of poverty—avoiding excess—became a path to wealth. These ideas became the fodder for sermons against sluggards and lessons on the morality of hard work. For example, in George and Lucy, a storybook Sunday school lesson for teaching nineteenth-century children to read, a boy and girl learn how to advance themselves through self-denial and how to use money on good things instead of debaucheries. In another lesson, the folly of a young boy in overspending is corrected when he learns the godlike power of compound interest.

After thrift, the next major adjustment in American religion was sobering up. As the 1800s wore on, Christians became increasingly sure that abstaining from alcohol was God’s preferred plan for life. Protestants contorted themselves to explain how a Jesus who turned water into wine didn’t want you to drink any of it. Some decided it must have been grape juice, since the Lord surely wouldn’t condone giving drunks another round. If the theology was weird, the outcomes weren’t. Booze has had a very real detrimental effect on the wealth of millions of average people. In the 1820s, relief officials toured five American cities and found that between 75 to 90 percent of all people on poor relief were guilty of “the vice of intemperance,” or drunkenness.

By preaching thrift and sobriety, churches spawned a temperance movement that gave direct benefits for working-class congregants. Most factory families in one New England town who saved money at the bank did so through “ruthless underconsumption,” including socially organizing to form local temperance societies. In that community, the few workers who drank heavily were noted to drink away their savings and eventually lose their home to foreclosure, as poor Catholic Tim Quinn did in Newburyport, Massachusetts. No wonder that Andrew Carnegie, a (quite secular) Scottish Presbyterian, listed liquor as the number-one impediment to business success for young men, followed by stock speculation and co-signing loans.

Contrary to popular myth, temperance and prohibition successfully decreased America’s alcohol consumption and, in turn, increased productivity and savings. Respondents to a 1908 survey listed the most popular strategy for saving money as “avoiding liquor.” Abstinence from alcohol and tobacco outnumbered having a written budget two to one. By the 1900s, a common church slogan taught that “the wages of gin is debt!”

Another new challenge was to make sense of the explosion of consumer debt. Running up a tab at local stores had been risky mostly for the grocers and butchers who lent the food while they waited to get paid. In the twentieth century, though, Americans of all religions and no religion were swept into a tide of credit cards and high interest debts that allowed people to buy joy today, paid for with future sorrow.

Consumer debt became an especially hot-button topic within Christianity. For the new prosperity gospel, access to capital made everyday people no different from Wall Street barons. Debt was a blessing, a sign of wealth to come. In 1910, Wallace Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich, but the “science” was of the pseudo variety. Wattles’s ideas became staples of future wealth seminars. To become wealthy, you first had to believe you would be wealthy. The magnetic field these positive thoughts created would radiate out and attract wealth to you. To help doubt turn to faith, believers should read aloud various wealth mantras every day. “The universe desires you to have everything you want to have,” Wattles assured readers. “To be content with less is sinful,” since “it is the desire of God that you should be rich.” Wattles’s final writings included The Science of Being Well, teaching the medical benefits of positive thought and the emerging nutrition movement, which he published at the age of fifty. He died at fifty-one.

Focus determines outcome: This became the theological underpinning of health and wellness writings for the next one hundred years. Grabbing hold of God’s unlimited promise (not wisely managing the little he’d given you) was the command. Oral Roberts condensed this into three key principles, which he discovered were the same ones “that Jesus used”: God is your source, give that it may be given to you, and expect a miracle.

These principles rested on a Newtonian-like “law of sowing and reaping.” To grow, you had to plant, and “seed faith” meant donating (often to preachers) and awaiting a miracle. Far from avoiding debt, believers should ask God to open doors to secure lines of credit. Roberts’s principal protégé, Kenneth Copeland, preached much the same message in his 1997 book Managing God’s Mutual Funds, where he taught his radio and television audiences to get their minds right and believe that God would miraculously bring wealth. “Brother Copeland, surely you’re not saying I should use my imagination!” he pantomimed before assuring followers, “Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying.”

Less known today, but immensely important in 1970s and 1980s America, was Rev. Ike (Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II). He had ministries in Boston and New York but became world famous for his nightly preaching broadcasts. For Rev. Ike, the concept of a “stingy God” led to “stingy prayers” like, “If God will give me this, I won’t ask for that.” His “Blessing Plan” involved steps to show how much money God trusted you with. If you believed, then you should show it: “Those who have, or who can get One Hundred Dollars, should send it now.”

“Send it” referred to Rev. Ike’s Boston address printed on his widely dispersed Miracle Money Book, which came with a pledge sheet to give $20 monthly for the assurance that blessings would flow in. The book included anonymous testimonies of congregants who had seen dollars rained down from on high. One woman in Philadelphia told him, “Rev. Ike, I’m now a Black Millionaire.” “Honey,” Ike replied, “you are now a GREEN millionaire. Color of skin has nothing to do with the color of money! In the American economy, the color of Power is Green.”

Ike’s fame and following were on par with the white evangelical leaders of the 1970s to 1990s, without employing their political agitations. John Lennon’s only number-one hit, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” (which probably influenced the Saturday Night Live theme), was a direct quote from Ike’s early morning broadcast. Rev. Ike also hit number one on the country charts singing alongside Hank Williams Jr.’s single, “Mind Your Own Business.” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell may have shaped the White House, but neither ever hit the Billboard charts.

There was another, completely different evangelical response to consumer credit in the Cold War era: the theology of debt slavery. The anti-debt gospel emerged at the dawn of the Reagan revolution. Just as everyone seemed to be getting wealthy on Wall Street, the slow decline of Main Street and the rise in consumer debt had church leaders rightly worried about their congregations’ financial salvation. Larry Burkett, a former atheist turned evangelical, was an engineer working on the NASA space program in Cape Canaveral, Florida. His apocalyptic vision of modern economics fit right into a generation that narrowly survived nuclear holocaust and double-digit inflation. His book The Coming Economic Earthquake was read on the floor of Congress in the 1994 budget debates.

Burkett’s core message was about personal debt. He created the first comprehensive concordance of every verse in the Bible related to money in What the Bible Says About Money (1989). He argued that Christians should remain debt-free since “the rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave” (Proverbs 22:7). He preached a gospel of self-reliance (a paid-for home was the primary investment goal), avoiding risky investments, and diversification.

Burkett’s aggressive right-wing politics minimized his appeal. He spent the 1990s writing various novels about faithful communities that survived the collapse of the American economy in tight-knit groups practicing debt-free “Christianomics,” while urban centres collapsed into Mad Max–like chaos. His theology of debt deliverance, however, became the bedrock of most evangelical financial advice from the 1980s forward. Every major Christian leader leaned on Burkett’s ideas, from James Dobson (Focus on the Family) to Dave Ramsey.

In a world awash in credit card delinquencies, bankruptcies, and eroding job prospects, consumer debt was a new and peculiarly dangerous phenomenon. Much as liquor stole men’s productive years in the midst of the Gilded Age, so consumer debt was increasingly a way to live the lifestyle you expected, even if wages weren’t keeping up. Both were traps, one of the 1880s and one of 1980s, that were hard to get out of once you were in. Religious leaders were trying to make sense of those worlds and steer followers clear of the worst rocks beneath the surface of life’s journey through capitalism. For many, such ideas mattered as much for what they helped avoid as what they helped achieve. When a rising tide was lifting all the boats, not putting a hole in yours helped a lot.

Faith matters because of what it drives you to, what it steers you clear of, and the larger story it sets your striving inside. A religion of the afterlife only, one that is convinced the ship is sinking so there’s no need to polish the brass, leads exactly where you, me, and those believers think it would: to fewer earthly rewards. If your only purpose on earth is to save souls for later, there isn’t much need to focus on account balances. That isn’t a knock on those religions. They are putting their treasures exactly where they think they should go.

Goldilocks faiths are different. Religions that give a sense of purpose both for now and eternity sanctify success and help followers master the rules that lead there. True, the outcomes are better for some than others. The health-and-wellness gospel is especially problematic, given that only around 1 percent of high-earning Americans come from related faiths like Pentecostalism. It is well-adapted to capitalism, but mostly because such views sell well rather than work well. It is entirely plausible that the best-selling book of the past fifty years is The Secret, which is in many ways simply a rebranding of Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich from one hundred years earlier.

But babies should be separated from their bathwater before discarding. Religion shaped and sanctified three hundred years of American striving. Faith communities are, after all, intergenerational communities. They think, teach, and live a message that survived thousands of years because those who came before left something for those who came later. Even today (and even in mostly secular Europe), religious households are more likely to save, have greater desires to leave something to heirs, and think about finances in longer terms. A belief in divine order, and a community to live that faith within, means thinking about your life of striving in timeless terms that outlive you.

Many describe our historical moment as the Second Gilded Age. There is one key difference: Today’s billionaires rarely build legacy institutions. The original Gilded Age rock stars like Rockefeller, the Commodore, and the Man of Steel left behind new universities (Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt), thousands of libraries, and endowments for arts, sciences, and world peace. Whatever their personal foibles, these men took religion seriously, especially in later life. The one exception, Hetty Green, refused to leave a single dollar to charity. Today’s billionaires do donate, but beyond Bill Gates (raised Protestant and espousing faith only in a “moral order”) and his eponymous foundation with his ex-wife, few have created lasting cultural institutions for society as a whole to participate in.

The ultimate financial atheist, John Maynard Keynes, saw faith in compound interest like a religious belief in the afterlife. “Perhaps it is not an accident,” he opined, with not a little antisemitism, “that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principal of compound interest.” For Keynes, striving for an afterlife was silly, and so was putting off joy today for some mythic (and uncertain) reward in the future. The man trusting in compound interest was always trying to achieve an economic immortality by virtue of waiting, wrote Keynes: “He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens . . . and so onward forever to the end of cat-dom.” Better to enjoy the purr of the cat today.

Spoken like a true secularist. But for communities of faith, there is real value in tomorrow’s kittens, or grandchildren. There are generations before and generations behind. The pursuit of wealth in communities of faith was and is rarely just temporal. Your children, physical and spiritual, will one day sing these hymns or chant these mantras too. The genius of Weber’s Protestant work ethic isn’t that it was peculiarly Puritan, but that it captured the tension at the heart of most everyday Americans’ striving: working today for a tomorrow we will see only through faith, but that gets here only if we strive.