Attending to the Theology of Capitalism

 The first time it struck me that the relationship between Christianity and capitalism might be fraught, I was sitting in Harvard’s Langdell Library reading room, and one of my friends, a Catholic, was asking me what I thought my faith tradition had to say about our plans to become corporate lawyers at large Wall Street law firms. I think I might have mumbled something about not really seeing any conflict before quickly moving on to other less troublesome topics. As a purely descriptive matter, I suppose I still agree with my response—with some exceptions, there isn’t a whole lot of anxiety among Latter-day Saints when it comes to the Christian message and matters of economics. Sure, we should be charitable and all that. But in any Sunday School lesson where the topic comes up, widespread support will greet the inevitable comment that wealth itself isn’t the problem; it’s what you decide to do with your wealth that can lead you down a morally perilous path. And I suppose that sentiment is true up to a point. But it always seemed to imply that one could sort of have one’s cake and eat it too—living the life of Riley with all the outward signs of financial success while also fulfilling one’s Christian duties. And maybe that was right? After all, hadn’t I seen numerous examples of extremely wealthy co-religionists who managed to live a life of material luxury while at the same time giving generously to those less fortunate? Heck, didn’t I probably view myself as falling into that same group, even after leaving Wall Street for academia, provided that one applied a more global definition of the term “wealthy” rather than the one that might be used in the most well-heeled American enclaves? 

At the same time, there was the somewhat inconvenient fact that my nineteenth-century forbears practiced a form of small-c communism, just like Christians in the early church—yet another of the founder Joseph Smith’s “restorations” of ancient practices. And though the so-called united order was discontinued not long after it began (it turns out that having one’s economic surplus re-distributed according to perceived need is a difficult principle to live by even for people who have already renounced creature comforts to cross the plains and join an exotic religion gathering in the West), it persists to this day through modern practices like tithing, a requirement for qualifying to enter Latter-day Saint temples. But any latent anxiety that a defunct frontier communism, or some modern variation, might be a truer form of Christian living than the contemporary analogues is always easy to balance out against equally extreme views at the other end of the spectrum. For example, we hear seemingly innocuous observations about how a church member’s material wealth reflected God’s favor or the tendency for the Latter-day Saint lay clergy to be chosen from among the well-heeled. It is always easy enough to just ignore the nineteenth-century voluntary Christian communism and the twenty-first-century prosperity gospel lite and choose the moderate middle—a sort of Christian version of noblesse oblige that one sees embodied in lots of religious American capitalists. 

Latter-day Saints’ embrace of capitalism probably wouldn’t surprise Benjamin Friedman, the Harvard economic historian. In his 2022 book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Friedman argues that religions like that of Latter-day Saints, which reject predestination, helped pave the way for the development of modern capitalism. In making this argument, Friedman is self-consciously inverting Max Weber’s famous thesis about the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Calvinism’s notion of predestination—the idea that one’s salvation is entirely up to God’s grace and not the result of any merit on the part of the individual—led people to work to acquire outward material signs of belonging to the elect, and that this work ethic, striving for stuff, outlived the relevance of Calvinism. Friedman’s argument is that Weber’s thesis doesn’t explain the thinking of modern economics and economists, who were on the scene a century or so before Weber, at a time when core-Calvinist doctrines were on the wane. His argument is that it is actually these theological developments—the decline in popularity of predestination and utter depravity and the adoption of a general belief that the universe exists to promote human happiness—that were responsible for Adam Smith’s revolution in economics and the advent of modern capitalism. It permitted Smith to develop an economics premised on the idea that people acting on their own natural desires can improve not only their own material lives but others’ too and in so doing achieve the designs of a benevolent God to make his creation happy. According to Friedman, this spirit of improvement brought about by the desires of a rational humankind was further enlarged by a move away from pre-millenarian theologies to post-millenarian ones, which is to say a move away from the idea that Jesus will return and set things right only after things get really bad and toward the idea that Jesus’s return will occur only after humanity achieves a millennium of peace and prosperity.

In Friedman’s telling, there is a sense that early Puritan theology could have led the country toward something less liberal and more communitarian than the capitalist system it ended up with. For example, John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, argued that predestination favored “a communitarian stance toward one another—in attitude and in action as well—reminiscent of the mutual charity advocated by Paul and the early Christian church. Self-interested individualism might be good enough in the already established world of the England they were leaving, but conditions in their new home rendered other considerations essential.” The late eighteenth-century economist Daniel Raymond took Winthrop’s views and turned them into economic doctrine. In doing so, he argued against what would eventually become the orthodox view in economics of what counts for “efficiency,” or in other words, a situation where the benefits outweigh the costs. It’s one thing for me, as an individual consumer, to determine that some decision, say purchasing life insurance, is cost-effective, the benefits of providing for my family in the event of premature death outweighing the monthly insurance premiums. It’s another thing entirely to analyze whether some collective decision, say Obamacare, is cost-effective because the costs and benefits aren’t distributed uniformly. In such cases, there will be some winners and some losers. Is that efficient? Modern economics would answer in the affirmative, as long as the winners are better off by more than the losers are worse off.  But Raymond, influenced by Winthrop’s theology, rejected this notion: “If the whole territory, and all the property of a nation is engrossed by a few, while a much greater number are sunk into a state of hopeless poverty and wretchedness, it matters not how great the sum total of individual wealth may be.”

Friedman depicts Raymond and Winthrop, and Cotton Mather before him, as a road not taken in American economic thought. Instead, he places at the vanguard a series of preachers, including perhaps surprisingly Jonathan Edwards, who developed a line of religious thinking that legitimized self-interest as a matter of morals while at the same time trying to regulate it.  There were certainly benefits, and not just material ones, from the system that Adam Smith developed. Indeed, many theologians and economists in Friedman’s story hold the view that commerce leads to peace and perhaps moral virtue as well.

At the same time, one wonders if this history is really as contingent as Friedman makes it out to be. It’s often said that Communism has a worldview. So, why doesn’t capitalism? The answer is that it does, and curiously enough, that worldview shares certain key features in common with that of Communism, such as regarding technological innovation and material abundance as ultimate goods, elevating economic policy as the primary way of solving social problems, and blessing the accumulation of stuff to satisfy desires shaped by purely material dynamics. To borrow an insight from Richard T. Ely (the founder of the American Economic Association who also helped organize the Christian Social Union of the American Episcopal Church), in laissez-faire capitalism, the invisible hand becomes an almost secularized form of predestination, where what the market delivers has little relationship to human effort and thus is immune to human questioning and unaffected by human agency. In this regard, one thinks of the television personality and stock picker Jim Cramer, who in a feisty 2009 interview in the wake of the financial crisis explained to an incredulous Jon Stewart that he does what he does, making stock recommendations that likely cost retail investors millions during the crisis, because that’s what the market wants. It also wants hookers and heroin, Stewart quipped. 

In making that statement, Stewart was pushing back against the normative side of capitalism. But this fact—that capitalism, like Communism, might contain its own worldview—makes one wonder if Friedman has the causation right in his story. In other words, in considering the relationship between capitalism and theology, is the causation one-sided, with theology influencing economic ideas but not the other way around?  Or might it also go in the other direction, with capitalism’s worldview influencing theology? One sees hints of this even in Friedman’s telling. For example, take Henry Ward Beecher’s Gospel of Wealth, which saw in business the gospel in action and viewed wealth as the surest way to live a moral life. It’s no coincidence that Beecher’s theology was developed at a time when the country was experiencing tremendous economic growth, of which his affluent parishioners were the primary beneficiaries. It’s hard to imagine that his theology that the gospel is basically just doing good by doing well as a successful capitalist was derived from first principles rather than heavily influenced by capitalism itself.

Eugene McCarraher has something to say about the other direction of this two-sided causation. According to McCarraher, capitalism is not just a political economy but also a moral imagination, a certain kind of spiritual formation, an actual spiritual force. In his book The Enchantments of Mammon, McCarraher builds off an insight from Walter Benjamin that “capitalism is a religion as well, a ‘cult’ with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose ‘spirit . . . speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.” McCarraher is primarily interested in what it means to think of capitalism in this way, as a type of religion with its own eschatology (the acquisition of wealth), its own iconography (advertising), its own canon (the unending lists of “books that have changed my life” on the platform formally known as Twitter, all perhaps written in an attitude of contemplation, but which have to do with getting rich) and, I might add, its own itinerant preachers (the increasing hordes of thirty-something men on the same aforementioned platform preaching without purse or scrip of their “Road to Damascus” moment when they were able to offload their burgeoning car wash empire with a high seven-figure exit). As James K.A. Smith points out in Desiring the Kingdom, capitalism even has its own liturgy. As such, a trip to the mall communicates not through theology and belief so much as through embodied practices that shape our desires about “the good life.”

This way of viewing capitalism might help us better understand how Friedman’s book, which is surely a “major work,” as the New York Times announced, also leaves one asking a lot of questions. Principal among these is why Friedman decides to focus on post-Enlightenment developments in theology in investigating the theological pre-conditions to the rise of capitalism in the New World. If one were really interested in identifying how theology made way for capitalism as a political economy, private property, and markets, it seems that one would focus on a different period and a different set of theological developments. The early church eschewed capitalism, preferring a form of voluntary communism, though without any utopian project that such a term might suggest. And well into the patristic age, from around the end of the first century to the end of the eighth, we see that some of the greatest theologians of the church were conscious of the spiritual harm of private wealth and in some cases even private property. An examination of the theological conditions giving rise to modern capitalism then would probably focus on how these early practices and beliefs gave way to a Christian appeasement over private property and individual ownership.

The fact that capitalism isn’t just a political economy but a worldview itself suggests that there must be different forms of capitalism. And Friedman’s book might not really be about the theological preconditions for capitalism writ large but rather the theological preconditions for a certain type of capitalism. In fact, there might be a more esoteric reading here: how capitalism is not just a neutral technology but one that affects worldviews and that the changing theological climate in the U.S. is as much the effect of capitalism as an explanation for it. What is the modern U.S. version of capitalism? One that continues to draw on the Henry Ward Beecher idea that wealth is equivalent to moral virtue, perhaps explaining the platform given to billionaires on issues for which they have demonstrated precious little expertise. It’s interesting that the criticisms that one sees leveled at Hollywood actors for talking out of school on political and social issues rarely get made when it is a billionaire doing the talking, even though the quality of the content being shared might be similarly lacking. 

But unlike during Beecher’s time, it’s increasingly difficult to see how this type of capitalism could possibly be equated, if it ever could, with the gospel command to give to the poor, as so much of what passes for modern commerce seems reliant not on satisfying basic needs but on the mimetic desire that Peter Thiel saw at the root of social media (and that rather famously caused him to invest in Facebook) to generate the type of irrational jealousies necessary to get people to live far beyond their needs and means. In this modern age, everyone must live the life of a jet-setter and display it prominently on Instagram. What undoubtedly goes unnoticed among such influencers is the crucial role they play in generating that spirit of extreme acquisitiveness that drives this form of capitalism. In an interesting paper, two prominent corporate law professors, Todd Henderson at the University of Chicago and James Spindler at the University of Texas, made a clever though somewhat counter-intuitive argument, that corporations have an incentive to cause their executives to live high on the hog, providing them with perks like cars and country-club memberships and corporate loans and so on in order to make them dependent on their corporate jobs and prevent the shirking that might result from independently wealthy employees. They referred to such corporate perks as “corporate heroin.” In an age of social media, we are all those corporate executives—employees of America, Inc.  

In an effort to explain the dangers of this type of capitalism, in the hope that identifying the problem might help in crafting the solution, one might be tempted to point to ecological harms, which are considerable and mounting. The inexorable march of progress unquestionably leads to the despoiling of wild places and the destruction of marvelous species never to be seen or heard from again. As an aside, in college, I recall listening with some degree of incredulity to a beloved economics professor of an extreme libertarian disposition patiently explaining why his idea to privatize the Grand Canyon was a good idea. “But what if,” someone said, “some tacky, venal developer decided to build a horrendous resort and amusement park at the bottom next to the Colorado River?” When someone else in the class responded that he thought that sounded awesome, the professor left the discussion at that, apparently believing that it proved the wisdom of economics that as long as the poor benighted souls who thought such an idea was “awesome” could rally more capital to their cause than those who thought it ghastly, society would be better off. Yet further proof of McCarraher’s thesis about the worship of money. 

But despite the real environmental harms at issue, I fear that “environment” here might also serve as a metonym, a stand-in for something else, and it’s rather difficult to explain what that something else is. In a different, perhaps long-lost era, one might have said that the ultimate cost of this modern capitalism is spiritual in nature. But how does one explain such a thing in a world like ours, disenchanted and secular? One promising resource is the work of Iris Murdoch, the great British novelist and Oxford philosophy professor. Murdoch believed that to act morally required one to see others in their distinct otherness, in other words as a fellow human being and possessor of dignity. What prevents this from happening is the self, the matrix of concerns and preoccupations that make up what she called the “fat relentless ego.” Every once in a while, reality breaks through and one is confronted with the world in all its self-forgetful beauty. Murdoch would often give the example of art or nature to illustrate: how catching sight of a kestrel in flight causes one to forget one’s selfish cares and reflect on the sheer pointless independent existence of this majestic flying thing. Something similar could be said of an unexpected painting hanging on a museum wall, where suddenly all one’s attention is fixed on the back of a Danish servant girl’s neck or on a magpie balancing on a wooden fence in the snow. 

Of course, the point isn’t the need to live these moments for some subjective aesthetic experience but rather to see them as examples of the type of unselfing that needs to be done in order to access moral reality. For Murdoch, the ego is a secularized original sin and the process of overcoming the ego is something akin to agape in Christianity or perhaps devekut in Judaism or metta in Buddhism. But Murdoch refers to both the process of accessing this moral reality, as well as the achievement of doing so, as “attention” or “attending to the other,” a concept she borrowed from the French mystic Simone Weil. 

One gets a sense of how these ideas play out in the real world by reading Murdoch’s novels, which always seem to involve characters who are truly morally awful and yet not only are unaware of this fact but seem to think of themselves as quite good people. In The Nice and the Good, for example, the main character is John Ducane, a handsome, sophisticated government lawyer who is having an affair with a much younger woman while at the same time carrying on a separate aventure amoureuse with the wife of his boss, himself a hedonist, and who is aware of his wife’s escapades. And yet all of this occurs without either of the women knowing. Ducane experiences a dramatic change in how he sees those around him, a bursting through of moral reality, but only after a truly transformative experience. He swims into an ocean cave that floods at high tide in order to rescue a friend’s love-struck adolescent son who has embarked on a self-destructive feat of daring. While the two ultimately return alive from this harrowing visit to the Greek underworld located just off the Dorset coast, they are much changed. Ducane in particular sees himself quite differently, “as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat seeking out its own little advantages and comforts.” He concludes: “Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.” And this: “The great evil, the dreaded evil, that which made war and slavery and all man’s inhumanity to man lay in the cool self-justifying ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people.” Ducane tells the truth to the women with whom he has been carrying on. And for the first time, he seems able to see a widowed friend as she truly is, a beautiful soul, and he falls in love and marries her. He quits his plum government job for a life of writing and teaching. And his hedonist friends, who have not changed in the slightest, are left a bit perplexed by the whole thing, ultimately concluding that Ducane must just not be the “wise good man” they once thought.

While Murdoch’s novel doesn’t exactly tell us how to achieve this transformative way of seeing those around us—if being trapped inside an ocean cave is required, count me out—it helps at least in clarifying the goal. It might also help us see the obstacles that are in the way. Learning to attend to the world in this way requires a certain unselfing, a process of detachment from our own egoist cares. Which brings us finally to a (secularized) description of capitalism’s spiritual harms: in its attempts to make consumers dependent on the market’s unending spoils, capitalism, at least in its modern guise, requires the creation of human consumptive desires that are precisely the opposite of those required for loving attention. Rather than a focus on the other’s otherness, one sees a rival in a competitive endeavor, where status turns almost entirely on an unending game show of conspicuous consumption, which only fans the flames of those simmering consumptive desires and starts the cycle of acquisitive yearning anew. 

To overcome such obstacles requires one, in a sense, to reject capitalism, at least in the modern form in which it currently presents itself. Not to reject markets and property rights generally; nor to ignore the obvious fact that private commerce can redound to the benefit of the many. But rather to cultivate a certain consumptive abstemiousness as a kind of spiritual discipline in response to capitalism’s spiritual harms. One needn’t take this exercise to the extremes of Murdoch’s major influence, Simone Weil, who died from starvation after deciding that she would eat no more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. But for example, one might choose, regardless of the health of one’s balance sheet, to live modestly; to reject the trappings of status; to dismiss not just the vulgar but also the refined and all other categories that betray a preoccupation not with ultimate things but with being part of the smart set; and to do so always under the broader canopy of seeking the good, the true and the beautiful. Such practices won’t exactly guarantee the type of attentiveness to the other that Murdoch sought, but it could help address some of the obstacles blocking access to that moral reality. It would at least negate the often silly reasons, motivated by the consumptive logic of the bazaar, that often prevent one from giving generously to those in need. 

The economic response to this type of argument is that it’s naive—it fails to understand economics in some sense because such self-denial will decrease aggregate demand and therefore GDP, ushering in a sort of voluntary recession. And that might be true. But this type of counter-argument is yet further illustration of the normative effects of capitalism, the fact that this extraordinary technology isn’t remotely neutral, a “just the facts ma’am” engineering marvel of private ownership and markets aimed at the purpose of allocating scarce resources. But rather it is also a sermon, a liturgy, a spiritual practice pointing to the idea that in this technology, more is always better. To the contrary, sometimes more is just more.  

This argument, inspired by Dame Iris, is not one that is likely to sway anyone who is not already committed to some type of moral realism. It’s certainly not going to convince anyone uninterested in living a life of moral seriousness. Nor is it an argument for a particular government policy, like consumption taxes. There’s nothing compulsory here. But for those who are committed to moral realism, secular humanists and theists alike, it is an argument that might just persuade: In order to treat people well, one must learn to see them in a particular way. Yet modern capitalism creates obstacles that prevent one from seeing people in this way, and the response is a type of spiritual practice. Whether it’s an argument that was needed in the eighteenth century, it’s certainly applicable to the modern Henry Ward Beechers who want to suggest that capitalism and moral goodness are not in tension or even that they are one and the same. The admonition that we must give to the poor is a good one. That will certainly benefit the poor. But one’s own salvation is at stake as well. And without an effort to overcome the obstacles to attending to others as they are, obstacles created by capitalism’s incredible spiritual force, that spiritual force will lack an effective counterweight. To repurpose a famous phrase, “The life we save may be our own.”

Zachary Gubler is the Marie Selig Professor of Law at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

Art by J. Kirk Richards, @jkirkrichards