The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

by Eugene McCarraher

Harassed in court and bullied by local landowners, the Diggers were forced to abandon St. George’s in August. The summer of love ended, and the sinful reign of law and order was restored. Other Digger colonies cropped up throughout England, but they, too, were quickly and ferociously suppressed.38 Never trained in philosophy or divinity, Winstanley forged his Christianity out of his own experiences of misery, doubt, and epiphany. Born in 1609, he had been a cloth merchant in London, but when his business failed in 1643, he was forced to move to Cobham, where he labored as a cowherd. In the tracts and pamphlets that he began writing at this time, Winstanley denounced the dubious ethics of commerce, recalling unscrupulous traders—including, perhaps, himself—who demanded “sometimes too much” for their goods. Having fallen into rural wage labor, Winstanley now knew from bitter experience the hardships and indignities of poverty: “sickness, frowns of friends, hatred of men, losses of his estate by fire … being cheated by false-spirited men.” Official religion had offered no help; though he had been an eager “hearer of sermons” and “a blind professor and strict goer to church,” no denomination offered the poor anything beyond chastisement or the afterlife.39 From this maelstrom of personal ruin and despair,