The American stage of the church's captivity is usually told as a story about freedom. There was no established church and no state religion, and every congregation was a voluntary society competing for members in an open market. That story is true. It's also half the story. The other half, the factory, did more to change the church's form than the market did.

The market: what disestablishment did

For the first time since Constantine, the church in America had no state behind it. It couldn't compel attendance, collect tithes by law, or punish dissent. It had to persuade. And persuasion, at the scale of a nation, rewards whoever is best at it.

The results were dramatic. The unsalaried upstarts (Methodist circuit riders, Baptist farmer-preachers) outgrew the established, educated, salaried clergy of the older denominations by orders of magnitude. The churches that treated religion as something ordinary people could do for themselves won; the churches that treated it as something professionals did for them lost. It should be said plainly that this was a real vindication of the design.

But the church also absorbed the market's own logic. If congregations compete for members, then the member is a customer, and the customer's preference is sovereign. The sentence a church can't say to a customer is we need you to stay. A market church can't practice discipline, because the disciplined member simply leaves for the church down the road. Christendom had made exit impossible; the market made it free. The design requires something in between, where exit is possible but relationally costly because you would be leaving people who know you.

In 1835 a preacher stood up and said the quiet part aloud. Revival, he said, needs no miracle, because it is the result of the right use of means. He was describing a technique. From that moment church growth was a technology, and the technicians were the ones who could manage crowds, moods, and decisions. The businessman-evangelists of the later nineteenth century applied the method more efficiently, and by the end of the twentieth century a book could be published with the title Marketing the Church and no one found it strange.

The factory: six things it changed

The industrial revolution ran through the same decades. Without a single theological decision by anyone, it changed six things the design depends on.

It separated work from home. For all of human history before it, the household was an economic unit. Production happened in it or attached to it. The workshop was part of the house, and apprentices and servants and extended family lived in it. The oikos of the New Testament was a place where people lived and worked and ate together, and the church's household form assumed that kind of household. The factory removed production from the home. Work went to another building, under another authority, on another schedule. The household stopped being a community and became a residence, a place where people slept between shifts. The household form never received a larger blow. A house church presupposes a household that's a full community. A modern house is a dormitory.

It imposed the clock. Pre-industrial work was governed by the task; you worked until the thing was done. Industrial work is governed by the clock, by the shift, the whistle and the timed process. The church absorbed the clock in its start time, its bounded hour and an order of service timed to the minute. The gathering as a scheduled process is the form of a shift. Nobody could have imagined it in the upper room where Paul talked till midnight and they ate again and talked till dawn (Acts 20:7-11).

It made Sunday the residual. The six-day factory week left one day, and all of the church's common life was compressed into a single gathering on it. The design's daily rhythm became physically impossible. Continuing daily (Acts 2:46). Exhort one another daily (Hebrews 3:13). A factory workforce can't do any of that. So the church stopped, for a reason nobody ever argued about. The reason was a shift pattern.

It invented the classroom for children. The Sunday school was created in the 1780s for children who worked in factories six days a week and could be taught only on the seventh. It's an industrial-era institution built for child laborers, and its age-graded, classroom-based form is the school form applied to children. The entire modern apparatus that separates a family on arrival and sorts its members by age descends directly from it. The generations were segregated without anyone choosing it, because sorting by age is what a school does.

It supplied the organizational model, with its division of labor, specialization and standardization, management as a distinct function, efficiency as the measure and scale as the goal. Those are the factory's principles. By 1900 they were the principles of every serious institution, and a church that wanted to be taken seriously adopted them. The pastor became a CEO, the elders a board, the members a workforce or a market, and the budget the true confession of what the church valued.

It produced the city of strangers. Migration from the land to the mills broke rural community at a scale nothing had matched. People arrived in cities knowing nobody. For them the church became a voluntary association among strangers. That's exactly the condition under which the market form makes sense, because in a city of strangers you choose a church the way you choose anything else.

Two columns

Every one of those six was experienced as progress. Most of them were. Child labor ended. Wages rose. Literacy spread, and the same Sunday schools that segregated the generations taught millions to read. The factory lifted more people out of poverty than any institution in history.

Taken together, though, the six removed the household's economic life, imposed a timetable, eliminated the daily rhythm, segregated the generations, supplied a management model, and dissolved the local community that would have resisted all of it. By the time anyone said "revival is a technology," the factory had already made the church into a place where a technology could be applied. It was scheduled, standardized and managed, and populated by strangers who had chosen it.

So the church got its incentives from the market and its form from the factory.

The self-made man and the plural you

One more American import goes deeper than the others. The culture that built the factory also built the ideal of the self-made man, the individual who owes nothing to anyone because he earned what he has by his own effort. That ideal has a theological name. Paul refused it.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? (1 Corinthians 4:7)

Everything is received. There's no self-made anything. Jesus also forbade the reciprocal networking that the self-made man's world runs on.

When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee. (Luke 14:12-14)

A table for people who can't pay you back is the opposite of a market.

The deepest import of all is invisible in English. The New Testament's you is almost always plural (ye, you all, the body). Ye are the temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16). Work out your own salvation (Philippians 2:12) is addressed to a congregation. American Christianity, formed by a culture of individuals, reads every plural as a singular and produces a faith of one person and his God. Such a faith has no room for the sixty one-anothers, because there's no another in it.

What America is not to blame for

The bend didn't begin in America. Greece made the church a school; Rome made it a government; Europe made it a territory. America inherited all three and added the enterprise. It also recovered for the church something the design requires and Christendom had destroyed. Nobody in America is a Christian by birth, so conversion is voluntary again.

But the recovery came packaged in a competitive, scheduled, managed, age-graded, individual form that no one reading the text ever chose. It was the water. Getting out of the water starts with seeing it. The timetable, the classroom, the org chart and the customer are all imports, and the design underneath them is a household, on a daily rhythm, at a table, with all the generations present, doing work that can't be recompensed.