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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Theologizing Economics

11/21/2007 14:49:21

One of the most engaging panels I attended this week at the American Academy of Religion was one called "Theological Readings of Economics." As uncomfortable as I was surrounded by the odd crowd of professional theologians way out of their economic league (as I am myself), the conversation was fierce and sparked a lot of questions in my mind. It served as a mirror against which I could reevaluate the tendencies my economic thinking has so far had (here and here) As ever, I can use all the help I can get sorting through these things.

First, a rundown of the positions presented:

John Milbank - This almost Catholic "radical orthodoxy" thinker has made a name for himself by arguing that Christians should split from the atheistic social sciences, for theology should be sufficient onto itself. In keeping, he argues that churches should establish alternative financial institutions founded in an economy of the gift.

Fr. Albino Berrera - A guarded effort to put theological (Thomistic) underpinnings beneath Christians' understanding of economy. Not to disrupt secular economy (faith and reason show that people are to be materially sufficient onto themselves), but to think rightly about it.

Paul Oslington - From an Australian Calvinist economist, a paper about the failure of attempts to reorganize economic thinking on neo-Calvinist grounds.

Kathryn Blanchard - A fascinating book report on the work of University of Maryland economist Robert Nelson, who argues that all economics, like Marx, is basically an act of secular theology. For this reason, wants to limit the influence of economics on public policy, relegating it to the realm of business and accounting. Moral, not economic frameworks, should run society.

Rebecca Todd Peters - Her impassioned paper argues that economics is a value-laden system, invested with the ideals of rich white men, and needs to be restructured on the basis of morality, not profit.

First of all, I came out convinced for the moment that indeed it is possible and necessary to rethink certain basic economic assumptions. For example: profit and efficiency need to be maximized; economy is the chief goal of government; free markets conform to natural law (etc., etc.). There are other ways of thinking about the governance of society that seem to have been forgotten, and which may have great possibilities in the new age. Sociologist Philip Rieff famously proposed that "economic man" is only one epoch in the human story, which he places after the political and the religious, but before the psychological. The priority of self-interest, material salvation, and mechanistic distribution is a choice, not an imperative.

I might still draw back to Pierre Bourdieu's economic reductionism, in which not just money but also prestige, social capital, and other invisible accumulations account for the other modes of politics, religion, and even psychology. Even in this formulation, though, to describe all politics in terms of money economy, for example, is a misrecognition. Misrecognitions like this make it all the more clear why we need to be attentive to the forms of exchange we devote our lives to: this is the job of philosophical and even theological thinking.

I mean this: even if all life is really a kind of economic exchange, we still have the power to decide what as a society we value the most. At first glance, it seems like perhaps we have chosen to focus on money out of a kind of laziness in the circumstance of pluralism, a frustration with trying to agree on common values other than that.

That said, I am deeply suspicious of some of the theological programs currently being proposed. Milbank's the the most inflammatory and reckless of course; how would trusting finance to the churches solve anything or bring us anywhere past the very corruption that spurred the Protestant Reformation? This is a flight of hubris possible only for the truly fundamentalist. Berra's proposal is blessedly modest, but irrelevant for all but convinced Thomists. Oslington usefully reveals a kind of "intelligent design" of economic theory with the same uselessness as its analogy in biology.

Still, interesting things can emerge out of the encounter between theology and economics. This came through especially in the talks by Blanchard and Peters. But, unlike Milbank, I do not think that religion is in a particularly privileged position for rethinking economy. This panel made me all the more keen to look at work like environmentalist Bill McKibben's recent Deep Economy, which attempts to do this on rather secular terms. I have argued previously that economics is in a position to produce some powerful, integrative work in the coming years, and I think this calls for people from all sorts of directions to be attentive of it and willing to criticize it. As these theologians recognize, the economic assumptions our society holds are busy forming the future in their own image.

re: Theologizing Economics - 11/22/2007 00:51:04
Posted by nathan

All my reflections on political economy, it should be noted, have at the back of them this theory of mine that the religious revival is a consequence of what neoliberal economics does to politics. See my post on the subject, as well as the paper that came out of it.

re: cynicism - 11/22/2007 01:03:09
Posted by nathan

And here's a little cynicism to top off my noble striving for justice.

re: Islamic Finance - 11/22/2007 12:45:00
Posted by nathan

Today the New York Times has a useful article on the booming business of Islamic finance. I was surprised to see, on my trip to England this past summer, the plethora of London banks that offer financing that conforms with Islamic law. According to the article, even some non-Muslims are choosing Islamic options because the deals are good.

The position of Islamic law to usury is not unlike that of early Judaism and Christianity, which look down on instances of money giving birth to money - an illegitimate creation. It is unearned income, support gained from no human activity. This history of usury prohibitions is an excellent synopsis, as well as an argument for the relevance of these traditional critiques of usury in the modern world.

The Islamic banks, unlike Milbank's ideal, are not run by religious authorities. They do, however, have scholars of religious law on advisory boards, which gives them claim to an Islamic imprimatur. They are, without doubt, a notable experiment, an effort to go on living in the modern world healthy and wealthy in a different way.

Undoubtedly it would be worth investigating the period during the Renaissance when the Latin church assented to modern banking - I understand it had to do with the Florentine Medicis, who made their fortunes lending to the popes. How was this reversal theologized and explained and justified? According to the article linked above, the decisive moment was the Protestant Reformation, which broke the Church's prohibitions and made it necessary for Catholics to eventually charge interest just to compete.

What I am concerned with is the extent to which, like Adam Smith's invisible hand, conventional, interest-charging banking became understood as an inevitability, as natural law. Grasping the extent of this seems key to thinking our way out, toward alternatives: more functional and equitable, no less natural.

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