A Brief Note on Religion & Capitalism
How Arthur Brooks and Ross Douthat can help us map out the landscape.
To begin with an obvious statement: Religious people’s engagement in politics is characterized by a plethora of differing views of capitalism. Much ink has been spilled in trying to reconcile religious morality’s rejection of naked self-interest with capitalism’s seeming reliance on it.
Of course, many religious people determine that the two are fundamentally incompatible, rejecting capitalism entirely. Among those who have mixed views of free enterprise, opinions range from mostly negative to mostly positive to even very positive.
I’d like to present a distinction among religious people who have a basically positive view of capitalism, using two conservative Catholic public intellectuals to try to parse this: Arthur Brooks and Ross Douthat.
Both thinkers’ support for capitalism is rooted in the prosperity that it brings. Brooks writes that “the right question today is: ‘Why did whole parts of the world cease to be poor for the first time in history?’” He answers his question: “it was the American free enterprise system, spreading around the world.”
However, I think there is a real difference in how these thinkers approach capitalism, despite their general agreement on its fundamental role in material prosperity.
A Harmonious Synthesis
When discussing capitalism and religion, Brooks speaks the language of synthesis. For Brooks, “systems are fundamentally amoral.” Accordingly, capitalism’s relationship with religion is effectively complementary: religion should provide the moral basis for society, and capitalism should implement this morality’s mandate to ensure the material well-being of the society’s members.
Brooks even goes beyond material wellbeing, claiming “there has never been a better system to allow people to unlock the unique sense of dignity” that comes from work. Again, Brooks speaks the language of synthesis: capitalism as the means, religious ideals as the end.
But what of the greed that accompanies capitalism? Brooks rejects the idea that capitalism exacerbates greed, claiming that because the vice is congenital to human nature, it will be just as present in any economic system. He argues, “Greed was a deadly sin long before the invention of capitalism. Free enterprise — which has brought so much good to billions of people — is not the culprit.”
Religion: A Healthy Brake on the Capitalist Engine
Douthat, however, characterizes the relationship between the church and free enterprise less as one of synthesis and more as one of tension. For Douthat, capitalism will at times implement societal changes that should concern religious people, and it is the role of the church to temper those sharp edges of capitalism.
In lamenting the Protestant Reformation, Douthat writes that a more united church “might have served as a stronger moral check on the new powers [of capitalism and technological development], a stronger countervailing force against greed and secular absolutism.”
For Douthat, it is the role of religion to abate the social developments that accompanied capitalism’s rise. He remarks of the years after the Reformation, when capitalism began to form: “This simultaneous expansion of commercial power and state power made the Western world more orderly and rationalized and much, much wealthier. It also licensed cruelty and repression on an often extraordinary scale.”
In this view, the forces of capitalism, when left unrestrained by a strong moral force in society, are not “amoral,” as Brooks would claim. They have particular, potent moral effects on the members of a society. Thus, it is the role of the Church to mitigate these excesses, while still acknowledging the material prosperity that free enterprise brings.
Who’s at Fault? Capitalism or Human Nature?
A basic synopsis of this distinction might be: For Brooks, the greed, materialism, consumerism and other related social ills that we see in modern society should be placed squarely on the shoulders of human nature, and it is wrongheaded to blame a particular economic system. For Douthat — while of course he would acknowledge these vices as endemic to our fallen nature — would still argue that capitalism exacerbates them, and therefore religious institutions should operate with a certain degree of tension toward the developments of free enterprise.
Finally, I think this distinction can tell us something interesting about religious conservatives more generally. I won’t try to extrapolate each thinker’s view more broadly as I think that that is prone to error: many pro-capitalism religious intellectuals fall somewhere in between and within various ideological camps can be found thinkers of different views of this question. However, when encountering a religious person arguing for capitalism, I encourage the reader to consider whether he is speaking the language of synthesis or the language of tension.
