The Capitalist Spirit: Toward a Religious Ethic of Wealth Creation.

The Capitalist Spirit: Toward a Religious Ethic of Wealth Creation

Caesar's Due

AT A PRESS conference in New York City a few years ago, Mother Teresa was asked her opinion of liberation theology. "I don't know about liberation theology," she replied. "All I know is that theology is supposed to be about God." Unsatisfied, the reporter rephrased the question, asking whether the Church should not only feed the poor but also help them reform unjust regimes. "How can you change a society," Mother Teresa asked, "if you don't first bring individuals face to face with God?" Like Jesus when baited by his enemies, she did not avoid the questions, she transcended them. Rather than debate Christianity's compatibility with Marxism, she pointed to the ultimate purpose of Christianity which renders economic debates largely irrelevant.

There are instances, however, when rebutting ideologies on theological grounds is necessary, as when the U.S. Catholic bishops were writing their pastoral letter on the American economy. In the early drafts of their document on nuclear weapons, which questioned the morality of nuclear deterrence and President Reagan's military buildup, and in their criticisms of U.S. support for the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras, the bishops appeared to be tilting left. Catholic conservatives therefore sought to counterbalance the influences that could cause the bishops to tilt against capitalism.

In the debate preceding the bishops' 1986 publication of Economic Justice for All, Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute emerged as the leading Catholic apologist for free enterprise. At a time when the nightly news featured interviews with indigents at the soup kitchen and many Catholic intellectuals embraced Daniel Ortega as a champion of the poor, Mr. Novak was dusting off the works of Adam Smith and calling attention to the undervalued virtues of democratic capitalism.

In this collection of essays by authors of various religious backgrounds, the discussion led by Mr. Novak continues. Edited by Peter Berger, director of Boston University's Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, the volume mentions the macroeconomic arguments for capitalism, such as its efficiency in distributing more goods to more people. However, the authors' main objective is to analyze the apparent hostility of religion toward wealth.

As Mr. Berger points out in his introduction, Judaeo-Christian thought "has had a very hard time dealing with the moral challenge of modern capitalism," the viability of which depends on the individual pursuit of prosperity.

The origin of this difficulty is traced to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures by Robert Grant, professor emeritus of religion at the University of Chicago, and David Novak, professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. The imperative of hard work aside, an ethic for creating wealth is lacking in both the Old and the New Testaments, though there are plenty of warnings against hoarding it. "The Hebrew Bible seems to be concerned only with the just distribution and redistribution of necessary things," Professor Novak observes. The same holds for the writings sacred to Christians.

In the Middle Ages, Mr. Novak's essay points out, there was little cause to ponder economic ethics beyond the Biblical and scholastic condemnations of sloth, avarice, and usury. With trade minimal and local economics based on agriculture, he writes, the teachings of Judaism and Christianity "made direct and simple sense to the medieval serfs and peasants, among whom prosperity made slow headway." Also, with its otherworldly orientation, Christianity tended to disdain moneymaking as a morally inferior occupation.

Enter mercantilism and international trade, followed by the Industrial Revolution. In adjusting to the socioeconomic changes sweeping through Europe, eighteenth-century intellectuals began re-evaluating the code of economic behavior based on an extinct feudal society. Philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume "did not so much repeal the old table of virtues and vices as reform and revise it," Mr. Novak explains, "so as to call to attention newly recognized moral failings and fresh moral possibilities." By contending that the liberating forces of commerce and free markets would allow men to better not only themselves but also society at large, Smith and Hume remarkably advanced "a moral argument for capitalism before its triumph."

The proclivity of American Catholic bishops to reject Enlightenment economics is examined in this book by George Weigel, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Antebellum American Catholics were primarily Irish immigrants who characteristically romanticized the Middle Ages and identified capitalism with Protestantism, individualism, and greed. Given its working-class constituency, the Church after the Civil War concentrated on the concerns of labor. "The focus remained, through the Great Depression and World War II, on the ethics of distribution, not creation."

But why does this focus continue to the present day when the system of capitalism is the engine that moved American Roman Catholics from working-class immigrants to middle-class suburbanites? "Parallel to the rise of what we might call the Catholic CEO class over the past generation, there has developed a new class of Catholic intellectuals and publicists," answers Mr. Weigel. Highly influential in Church institutions, these people have "a standard 'new class' animus toward the old business-class elite."

Though overlooked, there are resources within Catholic thought for building an ethic of wealth creation, Mr. Weigel suggests. Among these is the creation-centered theology of Pope John Paul II, in which the economic initiatives of man flow from his being made in the image of the Creator.

But contributor Walter Block, director of the Center for the Study of Economics and Religion in Vancouver, turns from religion to libertarianism for an ethic of wealth creation. The inclusion of his essay in the book is puzzling, because the title implies, and the preceding essays supply, an analysis of religious thinking on the subject.

The book returns to this objective with a final piece by Richard John Neuhaus, director of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City. The reason an ethic for wealth creation appears to be lacking in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he says, is that in the end wealth does not matter much, "so long as one is not attached to it, and so long as one shares generously with those in need." He notes that Christian theology is better off paying little attention to economics. While "jeremiads against pride, greed, and avarice will always be in order," efforts to "theologize economics tend to produce dismal theology." Both liberation theology and the prosperity gospel exemplify his argument--each, in its own way, giving Caesar more than his due and neglecting what is God's.

Mrs. Dudro is a freelance writer in Tempe, Arizona, and a contributor to the National Catholic Register.