Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the afterlife, and about the purpose of our existence were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived. Friedman illuminates the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences.