Capitalism is a system braced by stories. Consider the rise of the liberal individual, a kind of atomistic personhood, distinct from all other persons. It seems the whole Enlightenment had a hand in creating this particular view of man—yet the concept was unknown to the people of the medieval and ancient worlds. The idea was not intentionally developed as a thread in capitalism’s web of self-justification, but it has been recruited for such purposes, where it underwrites much free-market discourse about the primacy of the individual over the collective. This is only one of the many accounts which have been absorbed into the vast narrative support structure of capitalism—that is, the series of stories that make life under capitalism seem plausible, positive, and even necessary. In the United States, Christianity might be capitalism’s most impressive conscription so far.

In Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the author lays out a deftly detailed history of Christianity’s service to capitalism in the United States. Christianity was brought into the service of laissez-faire economics in Puritan devotion to work and thrift, but the decisive moment at which Christianity fused with free enterprise in the American psyche occurred, Kruse argues, in the middle of the twentieth century. Nicole Aschoff’s The New Prophets of Capital, on the other hand, offers a series of case studies on the storytellers whose narratives about free enterprise and well-being are shouldering capitalism along today. Kruse’s investigation begins around the time of the New Deal and follows the emergence of our distinctly American capitalist Christianity through its zenith in the 1980s. Aschoff picks up this story with a close look at today’s charismatic capitalists: Sheryl Sandberg, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, among others.

But in the gap between these two books—between the late ’70s and early ’80s, where the bulk of Kruse’s narrative leaves off, and the postmillennial world we know today—the ground has shifted. The preoccupation with Christian doctrine that animated the ardent pro-capitalists of yesteryear has subsided to a vaguely spiritual moralism. We now live in the age of “moral therapeutic deism,” where the shapes and colors of religion are imported into mass-market self-help schemes. And while the Christian right persists in the same old political battles (sexuality, marriage, education, et cetera), its strength appears to be waning: The once coherent evangelical voting bloc is splintering, and titans of industry intent on fostering a pro-capitalist politics no longer seem reliant upon it to bolster their project. Our most ardent pro-capitalists, as Aschoff demonstrates, don’t generally speak in terms of Christ and country any longer, but rather in modes of self-improvement and actualization.

Will the fates of Christianity and capitalism depart, or have they been too tightly interwoven in American thought to adopt diverging paths? What will become of Christianity in the United States once capitalism is done with it, and vice versa? This is where Kruse and Aschoff, with their careful surveys of the past, offer guidance to the future.

Kruse’s One Nation Under God opens with a moment of widespread anti-capitalist sentiment. Following the desolation of the Great Depression, Kruse reports, mistrust of financiers and their associates was at a perilous high. In the early years of the twentieth century, a large population of people depended not upon the abstract dealings of people and assets, but upon the tangible fluctuations of earth, weather, and disease. Famines, pestilences, and storms all had their own narratives, but the Great Depression was a new kind of plague, and it produced a new kind of story, with the greed and pride of the rich as the catalyst for destruction.