Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

Christian Century, March 27, 2002 by Daniel Rush Finn

As part of his narrative, Long praises the Association for Social Economics, a heterodox group of economists who share most of his misgivings about both economics and the dominant capitalist culture. This makes it seem that his ultimate goal has significant support among social scientists. He is either badly informed or is trying to re-narrate this professional society's history for his own purposes. He describes ASE members by saying "they no longer seek to reconstruct the social order, but merely to find a space for a Catholic social economy." As a past president of the association and an active member for the past quarter century, I am flabbergasted by this description. While a handful of (very quiet) members may take this more sectarian approach, the vast majority of the economists who make up the association have not given up on democracy's capacity to alter the economic order, and the group is far too ecumenical to endorse a Catholic economy of any sort.

This type of inaccurate and self-serving narrative unfortunately characterizes too much of Long's argument. His method undermines his credibility, for example, when he presents the reader with a choice between two incommensurable options: "Either the church and its spokespersons or the contemporary market and its spokespersons must finally persuade us." For most Christian intellectuals today, life is not this dualistic.

I share most of the criticisms that Long (and Milbank and MacIntyre) make of mainstream economics and capitalist institutions and culture, and it is clear that many of these problems are tied to broader advances that come under the banner of "modernity." Still, it is telling that the advocates of this more sectarian Christianity almost completely ignore the morally important advances that have been made under this banner, without which Christianity either might not yet have moved or would surely have moved more slowly. These issues arguably include the abolishment of slavery, the improved status of women, public education of the poor, social mobility, due process, democracy, and civil and human rights. For all the morally damaging developments in the modern world, there are a great number of morally precious ones, though it is all too easy to ignore them because so many have become firmly a part of the quotidian presumptions of both church and sect.

The genius of Catholic--and indeed Christian--social thought is that, at its best, it is catholic, open to the world, reaching out to gather in the best insights and energies that the world has to offer while steadfastly criticizing the world's failings. In Long's hoped-for future, Christians will have not only their own theology but their own economic science and, to the extent possible, their own economy, a divine economy. Long's book does a fine job of examining the faults of capitalism and the weaknesses of mainstream economic method, but such a withdrawal from the world as he envisions would require a far more persuasive re-narration of Christian theology and history.