Capitalism, it’s said, works because of “human nature.” But while self-interest is a natural human impulse, modern market behavior is anything but instinctive. A rich social environment allows us to fill our wants by trading pretty green pieces of paper with total strangers. Try to imagine teaching a hunter-gatherer about money, property rights, and wage labor – much less banking, the stock market, fiscal policy or international trade. You can see why sociologists and economists spend so much time studying the interaction between culture and markets.

Max Weber famously argued that Protestantism, and specifically Calvinism, had been the driving force behind the development of modern capitalist society. Quakers, for instance, were instrumental in British industries like iron-working and banking. They also invented fixed pricing, which brought speed and transparency to markets. Because they trusted one another, they built a revolutionary network in which distant strangers could trade confidently.

Recent studies seem to bear out Weber’s arguments. One study of different religious groups within 66 countries indicates that certain religions, particularly Christianity, produce better capitalists. And a recent paper by Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary shows that countries with higher prevalence of religious beliefs, particularly the belief in heaven and hell, do tend to be wealthier. But, interestingly, they also find that religious observance is negatively correlated with growth – suggesting that religion’s effect comes from altering individual’s behavior, not creating institutions.

So was Protestantism necessary or incidental: Could a network of dog fanciers or Dutch refugees have done just as well? Did economic activity flourish through the “Protestant work ethic” or did Protestant sects enable capitalism by smashing old hierarchies and freeing up capital from the powerful Church? Was the power in the heresy, or the fact that those who espoused it were heretics?

I had hoped Mark C. Taylor’s new book, “Confidence Games” (University of Chicago Press, 392 pages, $32.50), would address some of these topics. Alas, I was thoroughly disappointed. Mr. Taylor’s ambitious book attempts to bring together art, philosophy, technology, religion, and economics, but his attention span is limited to a few pages per topic, after which he leaps to the next, never lingering long enough to develop a theme or give his readers a thorough grounding. His prose is opaque and jargon filled, a deadly liability in an interdisciplinary book.

The sections on economics are redolent of outdated pop Keynsianism. He breathlessly presents such innovative economic insights as: the financial markets are like gambling, people are interdependent, and markets are influenced by expectations as well as reality.

To link these sections to the non-economic ones, Mr. Taylor often relies on strained wordplay to force otherwise tenuous connections. Thus a slave dialect passage in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Gold Bug,” introduces the gold standard:

“It is of a brilliant gold color … the antennae are – “

“Dey aint no tin in him, Massa Will, I keep tellin’ on you,” here interrupted Jupiter; “dey bug is a goole-bug, solid, ebery bit of him, inside and all, sep him wing – neber feel half so hebby a bug in my life.”

“No tin.” These words can be read in two opposite ways: the gold bug is pure because it has no tin in it; or the pure gold of the gold bug is specious because it is really notin – nothing. No tin or notin? Infinitely valuable or useless?

There is something deliciously postmodern about mining a bad pun to produce another bad pun. But I cringe to see a professor pulling the sorts of tricks I used as a literature major to fill out word counts – especially since I could suggest many areas of the book that could benefit from the extra space. Occasionally I questioned Mr. Taylor’s understanding of economics. In 1979, Fed chief Paul Volcker let interest rates go painfully high to defeat double-digit inflation. The book’s treatment of this is replete with technical terms, but the big picture is awry. Astoundingly, Mr. Taylor ignores the havoc inflation was wreaking and argues that Mr. Volcker’s act was a radical ideological shift in favor of capital. This is naive: Runaway inflation helps debtors, but does more for Donald Trump than for the homeowner whose mortgage is easier to pay, but whose grocery bills are outpacing their paycheck.

As with markets, so with religion: He seems to have neither sought, nor gained, any but the most superficial understanding of his subjects. He has lots of ironic uses for the word God, but never grapples with what the word means to sincere believers, even when he is quoting theologians. The final chapter shows this to be a lack of imagination. Where he should be pulling together all the disparate threads of his book, he instead descends into a rant about American conservative Christianity.

Every word seeps contempt. He first declares that conservative Christians are all simplistic and reductive, then simplistically reduces them to caricatures, hiding in their religion from an increasingly insecure world. This tired claim is patronizing, and historically suspect. The four “Great Awakenings” of religious sentiment (we’re currently in the fourth) don’t seem to correspond particularly well to periods of instability – the last one ended just as America headed into the Great Depression. They are also unconnected to markets, art, or any other part of his ostensible subject.

Mr. Taylor ends the book with his own “solution” (the problem being evangelicals): He wants to offer them a different religion, one that “can engender uncertainty, leave things fuzzy, and make people insecure.” This seems unlikely to appeal to anyone, much less his allegedly terrified targets. Unfortunately, the same is true of his book.

Ms. McArdle last wrote for these pages on free trade.