Is capitalism Christian?

IS CAPITALISM CHRISTIAN

IS CAPITALISM CHRISTIAN? (Crossways Books/Good News Publishers, Westchester, Ill. 60153; $9.95), edited by Franky Schaeffer, is a hefty, 461-page testimonial to the Gildered Age, extracted from the works of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Warren T. Brookes, Paul Johnson, P. T. Bauer, Humberto Belli, Jean-Francois Revel, Michael Novak, Thomas Sowell, Paul H. Weaver, Peter L. Berger, and Richard John Neuhaus, to give a partial list. Although a perhaps insufficient number of the selections address directly the question at hand, they do (as was no doubt the intention) provide it with a broader frame of reference by means of which the reader is led toward the conclusion that capitalism is as natural to the economic life of mankind as sexuality is to the biological, and that it is therefore, and to the same degree, "Christian.'

Which may, of course, throw some light on the queasiness with which Christians, in recent times as in the past, have tended to regard the workings of capitalist economies. No man, it has been said, once privileged to witness himself engaged in the reproductive act, would be likely ever to debase himself so again; while there is little reason to believe that the board of directors of General Motors, or the owners of a mom-and-pop stationery and tobacco store, would react similarly to watching video replays of their quotidian economic activities, there is certainly no lack of people who feel themselves compelled to provide vicariously the appropriate response.

It is, in fact, precisely the naturalness of both the capitalist and the sex acts that has historically disturbed Christianity as a system of belief whose paramount truth is that man is essentially a spiritual being; although it was not until recent times that an influential minority of Christians concluded that the appropriate response to man's fallen nature is active defiance in place of sorrowful humility, and formulated a kind of dialectic of naturalnesses according to which lust, owing to its revolutionary significance, represents Good Nature, while greed, as the Moloch of counter-revolutionists everywhere, represents Bad Nature. It is this minority, of course, that finds itself irresistibly drawn to the Marxist dialectic with its promise of Heaven on Earth through the eventual realization of the classless society without stain of sin or corruption, and that is therefore hell-bent in its assault on Bad Nature, the metaphor for which might be a systemic enclosure of Chinese boxes labeled, from the outside in: Capitalism, the International Bourgeoisie, the Caucasian Race, the West, the United States, the Multinationals, the Defense Establishment, Big Business, General Motors, the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, the White House, Nancy Reagan's Dressmaker, NR.

Lest it appear that the reviewer is shirking his responsibilities to the art of book-reviewing, let me hurry to state that the majority of the titles borrowed from this very readable and useful anthology have been reviewed, if not in this space, then at least in this periodical: Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up, Brookes's The Economy in Mind, Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Johnson's Modern Times, Bauer's Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, Revel's How Democracies Perish, Sowell's Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, Rael Jean and Erich Isaac's The Coercive Utopians, and Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square. Complementing excerpts from the above are a number of articles, excellent in their own right, among which I recall particularly Lloyd Billingsley's "Compassion and the Poor,' in which the author repeatedly hits the nail directly on the head, as when he remarks: "On the one hand, they say poverty is abominable, and God's wrath is called down on us for allowing it (even though Jesus Christ Himself said the poor would always be with us). On the other hand, radical Christians lead us to believe that poverty is the only acceptable lifestyle for Christians and hence desirable. One cannot have it both ways.'

Finally, there is an interesting introduction by Schaeffer himself, who, after demanding to know whether any economic system has proven itself better at preserving Christian and humane values than capitalism has, fires a few volleys at that "diabolical marriage between the worst of Puritanism and Socialism,' at "Christian New Age liberals, evangelical and Catholic alike, [who] combine hatred of the flesh with coercive utopianism,' at the "pernicious ideology that tries to make ordinary people feel guilty just for being alive' and ends by impoverishing whole peoples and nations. The plain truth is that, when it comes to discussing matters pertaining to either Christianity or economics, the radical Christian movement is talking through its hat, and Schaeffer and his gang know it.