By Sally Morem
Andrew Bernstein has written a provocative essay in which he depicts the establishment and spread of capitalist economies around the world as fundamentally anti-religious developments. He criticizes Christian thought for opposing the profit motive, for claiming all goods of this earth must be held in common (religious socialism), and for insisting on the subordination of the individual’s mind and interests to the dictates of a higher authority. The following is my response to that essay.
Religious thought, specifically Christian theology, includes two peculiar political stands with which I disagree: (1) pacifism and (2) a presumption that wealth is inherently evil. I’ll leave discussions on pacifism for another time.
As for its anti-wealth aspect (inherited largely from Judaism), I believe this to be an artifact of Biblical times and societies. Those Middle Eastern societies were pre-industrial, agricultural societies with very few ways of generating new wealth. Therefore, any truly wealthy man (such as the man who asked Jesus how to get to heaven) was assumed to have gotten his wealth by personally taking it from others or by inheriting it from an ancestor who stole from others. Economics was a zero-sum game. By the standards of those times such judgments were almost certainly accurate.
But technology marched on and generated industrial societies—the first societies ever known to produce prodigious amounts of new wealth. Our post-industrial, information society (Third Wave, in Toffler’s terminology) is even more fecund.
Consider some of the many ways you could get rich in America 2000: You could hit home runs for the Minnesota Twins. You could write a best-selling novel. You could build a better mousetrap and watch the world beat a path to your door. You could win a Nobel Prize for you groundbreaking research in the human genome. I could go on, but you get the idea. Today, most rich people did not steal what they have from others. Nor (surprisingly) did they inherit it. They created their wealth anew.
Christian theology has failed miserably in keeping up with technological developments in various professional disciplines and areas of life. Theologians also failed to note their profoundly revolutionary effects on everyday life and the continuing fundamental reshaping of societal institutions—for example, the resulting growth of democratic capitalism in the West and in the Far East.
The growth of capitalism went on to stimulate the further growth of technology, which went on to stimulate the further growth of capitalism—and so on. All those inventors. All those marketers. All those consumers. Capitalism and technology continue to grow in a mutual catalyzing upward spiral of development to which Christian thought is blind. Christian anti-wealth rhetoric can be seen as one aspect of today’s theological intellectual failure and malaise.
Freedom and religion have traditionally been at odds, nowhere more so than in economics. Religion calls for top-down, hierarchical decision-making processes in all aspects of life, especially in how goods and services are made and distributed, as opposed to the freely established, self-organizing networks of exchange characteristic of capitalist societies. Combine that fact with the anti-wealth statements found in the Bible and you will find an irresistible theological call to the religious-minded for the establishment of socialist societies and economies—never mind that none have ever been found to work. The best that can be said about them is they’ve made members of socialist societies equal—equally poor.
Free universe, free society, free minds. Libertarian thought links naturally with non-religious thought. I agree with Bernstein’s essay. My only criticism is the lack of historic context in it.