It's true for the last thousand years at least. A thriving middle class appeared in northwestern Europe a thousand years ago, a middle class of merchants and other businessmen.
The funny thing about all those guilds, as those were necessary to create something of a non-peasant class in the cities, is that zhey were absolutely not free market. They fixed prices, limited output, set salaries, limuted the number of workshops. In a sense, they were as much labor union as they were oligopols.
What we consider free market came with the industrial revolution and colonialism and the national companies created to exploit those colonies. The first signs of that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse. Those were still subserviant to nobility and aristocratic rule so, while the industrial revolution capitalists and colonial companies were much less so.
Fun fact: The workers building cathedrals were fully unionized, with all the benefits that's with that: limited work hours and days, health care, social security.
The places were the guilds had power were the prosperous places up until the early modern age and the rise of manufacturing in the run up to the industrial revolution: medieval towns and cities, added benefits if those towns had noble rulers that allowed, for various reasons, a high degree of independence.
Examples include the Hanseatic League (run by the various merchant guilds as a de-facto state) ans every single city in what now is Germany or Austria. Up to the point the rural nobles constabtly feuded with those cities.
You saidb t yourself, the textile manufacturer guolds of the low countries contributed a lot to the prosperity of those places, same for England. And for a long time, the trade between those cities was run by the Hanseatic League (which were arguable a lot closer to modern day capitalism than a local crafts guild).
Linking all of Europes success during history, up to WW1 arguably as far as sucess goes, to Christianity is at best a fringe view.
What does the book have to say about which kind of christianity is the source of all of that? Cathlocism, protestantism (which one?), the orthodox church (again, which one?)?
And how does Enlighment fit into all of that?
Edit: Focusing on the West is also extremely reductive. Up until colonialism really got started, the Mongols dominated the far east, China was a major economic and scientific power. None of which were even remotely Christian. It is true so, that the Western form of guilds is directly linked to European christianity. As the mongols and China show us so, there are more ways to prosperity than the "Christian" one.
Why not take a look at the book? It's an easy read, and there's far too much of interest to quote here.
The religious angle is not relevant to this discussion. It's about the emergence of free markets in the Netherlands, and the results.
As for China, China invented a number of things, but failed to apply them like the West did. For one take on why, see the book "The Triumph of the West" by Roberts
I don't know those specific books. I do know the pop-history trend of late that paints European dominance, starting in the 1500s and ending somewhere around WW1, in a certain way. Meaning Western capitalism, bonus points for including a religious angle, as the absolute superior. And that ignores a number of things:
It fails to look at the medival period as different, distinct periods. It also fails to brake those down by region. That can be called cherry picking.
It fails to look at all of that im context, especially by ommitting the history of the other side of Western dominance. That history is directly linked, after all Western dominance required a counter part to be dominated. So whatever happened at the other end is crucial to understand the shared history. This can be called ignorant.
And last but not least, this view on history is used to drive political narratives. As is the opposite political bias that shows in other books and papers. I do not like neither, historians shoupd at least try (one cannot be fully neutral ever) to be impartial and provide an objective study of history. Late pop-history doesn't do that.
