My quest to think about, address, and understand the relationship between theology and economics began when I found myself as an evangelical Christian, freshly out of Taylor University, armed with a Bible and desire to preach the Gospel as a local pastor in Honduras in the Caribbean Council of the Methodist Churches. I had never read Marx, Adam Smith, or any economic textbook. I had no clue how “value” was produced nor about the philosophical and social scientific debates over the question how value was produced. But many evenings I would give the Garifuna women who worked at the local lobster and shrimp plant a ride on by boat over to the church on the island where I preached. I heard them pray, sing, and talk about work. I saw the conditions under which they worked as we all prepared to worship Jesus together. I could not help but see their work and labor in terms of our common life as Methodist Christians, singing, praying, and preaching long into the evening at least four times a week.
Their work, as was their husbands, was demanding. They showed up when the lobster and shrimp boats arrived; boats many of their husbands worked. And then they started preparing the shrimp and lobster as a commodity for a global market. Of course, that commodity received its value on a global market; the value of their labor was determined locally. They received approximately 70 cents per hour, which was the best wage on the island (it was basically the only wage on the island). They had no pension, no health care, and no possibility of a trade union, which would have done absolutely no good anyway. They worked when there was work and as long as there was work. After a week’s work they were unable to buy the lobster and shrimp from their own waters (and those off the coast of Nicaragua that the shrimp and lobster boats ‘invaded’ to their own peril) which was then sent to land-locked people to be enjoyed at fast food restaurants as a hobby. Our rides in a boat after a long day’s work led me to think about what Jesus would say to these women.
Some theologians, pastors, Christian business men and women, economists, and social-scientists justify these practices as just the way the world is. It is necessary, perhaps a result of sin where we all must labor for our daily bread. But it seemed like some were laboring a whole lot more for a whole lot less. This led me to the question: is it true this is just the way the world is? Is it natural that some people must labor like this so that others live well? Or is this the result of human making? James K. Smith reminds us of this same question in his wonderful book Introducing Radical Orthodoxy by drawing on the movie The Mission. After a terrible slaughter of the innocent, a cardinal weeps. The Portuguese governor consoles him saying, “We are in the world; the world is thus.” But the cardinal replies, “thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.” The question is an ontological one – to what extent is economics “natural” and to what extent is it a matter of poetics? To what extent is it a brute factum where that word “fact” has lost its association with the verb “facere?” I should have not had to go to Honduras to have this question presented to me. I should have seen it in the everyday life of the people around me, especially my grandmother, who worked thirty-five years in a factory at minimum wage, retired without a pension, and lived only on social security, Medicare, and what her children provided for her. But for some reason it took those women in Honduras singing, praying, and talking to raise this question.
I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, and I’m sure there is not one answer. I recognize that some well-intended policies do produce more harm than good. But I disagree with Smith’s stoicism that good can best emerge from intentionally not intending good. For thus God has not made the world. Nevertheless, I began a quest to understand how economics works, a quest at which I was thoroughly unsuccessful, as most of my economist friends reminded me. I began reading from Smith onward through the history of political economy and into economics. I was looking for an answer to the question how value is produced and if it requires economic practices like I saw in Honduras. What I discovered is that there is no unequivocal answer to that question. There is no secret knowledge a group of experts had by which they themselves knew beyond doubt how value was produced. I discovered that economics, unlike say tuning a carburetor (a useless skill these days), is not a science that gives you exact determinations of how “value” is produced, but a historical tradition that argues over those determinations. John Maynard Keynes helped me see this most of all. He recognized that economics is a moral science; it is about human action which is radically unpredictable. We will never have a “value-producing-machine” whereby we plug in all the data and then receive unequivocally the answer to how we can maximize value, or produce the best of all possible economic worlds. There is no objective standpoint, let alone Smith’s impartial spectator, who offers a view from above the incalculable aspects of daily exchanges. But this led me to conclude that economics is more like theology than the chemistry I had studied in college. Certain dogmas had to be adopted before one could get into the discipline.
As an orthodox Christian theologian, I found that I simply could not accept those dogmas because they conflicted with too much of the Christian tradition. In fact, it became clearer to me that the “global” market was more like a simulacrum of the “catholic” church offering an eschatological, albeit thoroughly Stoic, hope than any neutral mechanism of exchange. It proclaims to us that if we adopt these dogmas, the streets will be paved with gold; we will have “the wealth of nations.”
I was confirmed in this sentiment when I came across the work of Robert Nelson and Michael Budde. Nelson’s forthrightness about the market replaced the church as the institution to which we look for salvation, and his positive appraisal of it in his Reaching for Heaven on Earth, along with Budde’s compelling but negative appraisal of the same reality in his The Two Churches, led me to abandon my failed attempt to read theology from the perspective of what the economists had to say (that old correlationist theology that was still in my soul) and instead to read economists as theologians. I began trying to do this before I read John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, but that work was invaluable in showing me how not to read the social scientists. They were not theologically neutral; to accept them outside of theology is simply to fail to acknowledge the theological conditions for the possibility of their work.
Thus I began to think of Adam Smith more as a church father of this simulacrum of the church than as a social scientist. If we think of Smith as a “church” father, and read him as we would read any church father, then we will make better headway in thinking theologically about economics than if we read him as a neutral social-scientist. This by no means is to read Smith negatively, or ironically. Smith is, like Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) a fascinating character who offers us a practical reason rather than an objective theoretical science. My argument does not deny the form of Smith’s argument, but seeks to counter it on similar terms. And there is much in Smith to be affirmed, even though his legacy is as contested as that of Thomas Aquinas. (We could easily speak of transcendental Smithians, revisionist Smithians, scholastic Smithians, etc.) I think the best and most interesting development of Smith as the “market” father is Samuel Fleischacker’s On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He begins his analysis of Smith by reminding us of Smith’s imaginative economic vision centered on the role of a pin-making factory. Far from seeing the factory—and by implication large multi-national corporations—as the basis for exchange, Fleischacker notes, “His real point is precisely the opposite: that advanced economies are marked by a plethora of small, independent trades that fit into one another without deliberate organization” (Fleischacker, p. 11). If this is Smith’s vision, I think I could affirm it. I have no romantic illusions about national-socialist institutions running an economics through impersonal, bureaucratic forces. Only the most utopian ideologues deny how badly that project turned out. But if this is Smith’s vision as Fleischacker suggests, then it raises the question – why did it not work? This does not seem to be the “market” the Smithian tradition has produced any more than the contemporary mainline Protestant or Catholic Church is the Church Augustine or Aquinas envisioned.
Perhaps the tradition got hijacked? Or perhaps it had within it a contrary sentiment that led to the agonistic view of exchange that I witnessed at that shrimp and lobster plant? I do think that such an agonistic dogma is also part of Smith’s common-sense tradition, and the unquestioned assumption of this dogma has led to a heretical dogmatism (heretical to the Christian faith) that can finally not sustain such a vision of the world. In this sense, I find it interesting that the Mennonite Community known as Reba Place has been more successful in embodying the ‘orthodoxy’ Smithian vision than the Smithian tradition itself. How do we account for this?
Is it possible that something like the Christian vision at Reba Place makes possible a more fruitful conservation of the orthodox Smithian tradition than the current global market and its exaltation of freedom? This would be a wonderful irony. The antagonistic individual freedom of the current marketplace, and the corporations that look only to maximize profits, pits poor working women in Honduras against individual fast-food consumers in North America and produces large, impersonal multi-national forms of exchange that are incapable of being ordered to natural or Christian virtues. Those forms of exchange would claim Adam Smith as their father. But a small Christian community that would never claim Smith to be one of the communion of saints that makes them possible has been able to preserve something like his vision much more than Red Lobster, Wal-Mart, or Nike. Why? Could it have something to do with God or the ‘god’ each tradition set forth?
Adam Smith never avowed atheism, but he certainly expressed heretical views, and did so without concern for consequences once he no longer held a chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (Fleischacker, p. 15). Smith, like Shaftesbury, treated god as an item of common sense. They were both religious pluralists who tolerated any doctrine of god as long as it passed a moral test in that it contributed to human sociality. Smith’s philosophy eschewed metaphysics and by implication any significant engagement with theological doctrine. Instead, he looked to the everyday. For this reason Fleischacker sees Smith as an “anticipation of Wittgenstein” who does to economics what the latter did to language; they both show us the reasonableness of the everyday and thus they are both suspicious of “philosophy.” But there is a crucial difference Fleischacker overlooks; Wittgenstein thought we were held captive to philosophy because of our ordinary language, because of how the exchanges mislead us into thinking such things as that our language is private. We needed a therapy to overcome this captivity. Smith valorizes the “ordinary” in a way that never raises this question about economic exchanges. Everyday signs are “natural;” they are what they are.
Smith offers a theological defense of these “natural” signs, leading to a correlationist theology that finally makes theology superfluous. Fleischacker recognizes the problems inherent in this position. They lose the ability to be self-critical. He states, “An important objection to any sort of common-sense philosophy is that it may leave us with no room for criticizing our ordinary views, that it can collapse into uncritical faith in whatever dogmas happened to be abroad in society” (Fleischacker, p. 25). What might that dogma be? And here is where I think Fleischacker and Smith are both right and wrong. Of course, every form of ordinary exchange assumes dogma and this is inescapable because exchanges take place in terms of signs and dogma is nothing but authorized signs. The temptation to dogma is that it becomes uncritical; it becomes dogmatism. We don’t avoid dogmatism by falsely thinking we can avoid dogma, for that would require a form of life without exchange at all. The question then is which dogmas and how can we have a proper critical appreciation of them?
I argued in The Divine Economy (p. 75) that Smith was the inheritor of a “natural theology” which assumed a Stoic doctrine of providence, this is for me the consistency between The Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Once again I think I am restating, not questioning, Fleischacker’s interpretation of Smith. He explains Smith’s invocation of a “providential God” by acknowledging, “In each of these passages, however, the invocation of God goes along with an entirely naturalistic, secular account of how the phenomenon in question works. Thus Smith does not simply say that God gave us notions of justice so that society would survive; he also shows how systems of justice arose from our natural feelings of resentment, and are enforced in part because we realize that the fabric of society would disintegrate otherwise. . . . As far as I can see, the mention of God or Providence is not necessary to the argument of any empirical claim in TMS, much less to any claim in WN, which does not even make use of religious and teleological language” (Fleischacker, p. 45). To which as a theologian who cares about how we speak about God I want to say “right, and that is the problem.” Smith invokes god without having any use for god. Everything that theology does can be done by something else. This is the dogma by which he makes reference to god so all his references are basically harmless, unless you actually think God matters. What role is left for God then? Fleischacker notes that Smith “consistently gives religion an important role in morality” for God is the “great benevolent and all-wise Being who directs all the movements of nature” (Fleischacker, pp. 70- 71). Much like Kant, Smith’s religion is a “pure and rational religion” that anticipates a “universal moral religion” (Fleischacker, pp. 71-72).
Adam Smith produces a tradition of a global ‘church’ that can speak about God without it making the slight bit of difference. The practices of exchange that have been generated from the Smithian tradition continue to speak about ‘god,’ whether the name is used explicitly or incognito as human desiring, willing, preferring, nature or just the way things are. For example, Baumol and Blinder in their Economics, Principles and Policy discuss the irrational nature of rent controls for the poor by making a dogmatic theological appeal to Smith’s invisible hand, which they never own as a form of dogmatism. They explain the inevitable negative unintended consequences of rent controls as “battling the invisible hand” which is a peculiarity found in “lawmakers and rulers . . . from Rome to Pennsylvania” (p. 102). Note that both the church and the state have to bow before the dogma that intending to do good by providing rent controls to the poor produces more harm than simply allowing the signs of the current market exchange do their work. Yet Reba Place Fellowship is a counterfactual argument to this so-called natural, or providential, invisible hand. Because they share a common life, in doctrine, sacrament, and practice, they have been able to provide rent to poorer families well below market rates and still maintain the viability of their enterprise, which leads me to believe that the Smithian tradition speaks about god falsely. What it neglects is that the signs by which we exchange with each other are never only natural; they are always also produced. We make them. And because we do not want to ask what it would take to make signs like those made at Reba Place, we appeal to dogmas and tell each other that they cannot be other. As long as we read exchanges at the lobster plant, at the drive-up window at McDonalds, at Wal-Mart, etc. in terms of the exchanges which occur in our common life as church, those Smithian dogmas cannot for long be uncritically accepted.