Compatibility (motivation, ownership, mutuality)
The chief end of human beings
As stated above, the first place where laissez faire economics and Christianity experience the friction of incompatibility is over their respective understandings of the chief end of human beings; that is, their view of human purpose. From the perspective of the Reformed theological tradition, the purpose of human beings can be summarized in the first question of the Shorter Westminster Catechism, one of the confessions guiding our interpretation of the Bible: “What is the chief end of man [sic]?” The answer is that the chief end of human beings is to “glorify God and enjoy God forever.” For our purposes, I propose that “enjoying and glorifying God” can be understood through the Decalogue, as well as through other pivotal pieces of Biblical instruction such as the Shema and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Based on these pivotal scriptural admonitions, the specific content of enjoying and glorifying God forever necessarily includes loving one’s neighbor as oneself (as per the summary of the Decalogue found in Matthew 22: 36-40) and also seeking out “blessedness.”
Blessedness is indeed all of those things articulated in the Sermon on the Mount: poverty of spirit, mourning with those who morn, meekness, a thirst for righteousness, being merciful, having a pure heart, being a peacemaker, enduring persecution for the sake of righteousness. (Notice there is nothing written about the blessedness of thinking first and most often of one’s own material welfare.) Blessedness can also be understood through the model of Jesus, as abiding in a deep relationship with the Father (or Divine Parent) through the power of the Holy Spirit. Within the parameters of that relationship, and the relationships with others that are its product, lies God’s provision for the perfection of the human personality. No, not one of us is perfect but there is in Jesus Christ a vision of what it means to be most fully alive, most fully and authentically human. And full humanity, perfect humanity in fact according to the Bible’s worldview, consists of exactly what Jesus revealed most clearly through his sacrifice on the cross. Perfect humanity is grounded in obedience to the Father’s purposes of reconciliation, forgiveness, self giving, and an almost “militant” insistence on mutuality, care for the other, even unto death.
On the other hand, according to the theory undergirding the U.S. economic system, the chief purpose of a human being is to produce the wealth which will ensure that person’s own well being. Human beings are “welfare maximizers.” They enter into economic exchanges in order to increase the number of goods and services to which they (and those who contribute to their wellbeing) have access. The theory argues that as individual actors make their fully autonomous and self-centered decisions, their decisions contribute to the common welfare by growing the economy through an increase in the total amount of goods and services in the marketplace. And, as those goods and services increase, there are more goods to go around. Interestingly, however, economic theory makes no attempt either to distinguish among goods and services or to order the desires of those acting in the marketplace to increase their own welfare. One of the fundamental incompatibilities between Christianity and capitalism, then, is that the latter makes no distinction between an increase in goods and an increase in good. For the purpose of dominant economic theory, one is the same as the other. If someone desires something, and someone else is willing to provide it, it then contributes to the welfare of the individual and thereby, the community.
Within the realm of economic theorizing, desire alone is primary. The choices people make within their varying constraints (i.e., the limit of their financial and other resources) to meet that desire are not evaluated by economics. Its concern is simply that individuals are allowed free choice in how they will use their resources. There is, in this world which economic theory creates, no appropriate “object” of human desire, there is just the shrill insistence that each individual be given an inalienable right to choose his or her own object, to name for himself and for herself what he or she wants, and, if he or she has enough money, to get it. I assert that the very refusal to order human desire is to take a moral stand, and that stand is to abstain: To abstain from making any judgment about what is good, what is beautiful, or what is true.
As a result of this “valueless” science’s unwillingness to place any objective above individual freedom in the marketplace, our economic system has a very difficult time distinguishing between wants and needs. Should a rich person be able to accumulate five homes and a yacht before a poor child in the same society has adequate healthcare? The economic system we have constructed is not good at distribution partly because, when markets are left unregulated, wealth, and not need, determines the goods that are produced, who gets them, where they are produced, and who is left vulnerable to the waste that is left in the wake of that production.
The Bible does not leave the ordering of desires to individuals. The Bible, in fact, asserts in no uncertain terms who and what is worthy of being desired. And, what is worthy of being desired is a relationship with God and others. In fact, the very desire to decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil, what is worthy of our time, attention and resources and what is not, is precisely the desire that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Our so called “right” to value people and objects (and to value some people over other people) according to our own wishes is called, in the Bible, “sin.”
The Bible offers a very different definition of freedom than the one provided by capitalism. In the Bible, freedom is not understood as a freedom from all constraints—a freedom which ultimately leads us to enslave ourselves to the narrowly defined interest of “me, myself and I.” Instead, Christian freedom is that freedom won for us by Christ, a freedom from sin for service to God and one another. Biblical freedom is a freedom that leads not to unlimited material prosperity and the maximization of individual welfare, but instead, leads to a hungering to perform service to others, the satiation of which leads to peace and joy and to a transcendently grounded understanding of what is true, good and beautiful.
The Bible’s view is that human beings, apart from the grace of God, are apt to use their freedom to enslave themselves and others to darkness. In fact, the Bible asserts that, far from needing to be set free to choose, we instead need to be set free from the sin that prevents us from choosing the right thing! The Biblical view of human nature is that, when humanity chose against service to God and others in the Garden, we chose instead a self serving agenda that ends up trapping us in prisons of anxiety and fear—the anxiety of lives poured out in an endless striving for material security.
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I regret to say that I find Reverend Owen’s article frustrating. It would have been helped if she had started with a definition of capitalism. An acknowledgement of different types of capitalism would have clarified that her real beef is with totally laissez faire markets. One could then ask whether this is the political-economy we have, or whether it is an ideology vying to reshape our common life. This would have strengthened her argument which seems more oriented to reforming capitalism rather than replacing it with some other economic system.
She names Max Stackhouse as a defender laissez faire. She can only do this because she seems to have no idea what he affirmed or why. The choice, Stackhouse says, is between locating the economy in the family, the state, or the social space between them that had been carved out by the church – corporations. Separating the economy from the state allows states to engage in the sort of regulation she suggests in her conclusion.
Her characterization of is also unfair because Stackhouse brings considerable theological and ethical resources to bear to critique and humanize capitalism. Indeed, this is the church’s vocation! Engagement with his ideas would have clarified Owen’s muddle on the relationship between economics and theology. In all of this his is closer to a “New Deal” affirmation of capitalism than laissez faire. And so is she!