Yesterday I recorded a series of short interviews that will be aired on the Moody broadcasting network sometime in the next few weeks. We were talking about the imminent release of Is Christianity Good for the World? and in that context the impact of the Christian faith on culture came up. In the course of our discussion, I was pointing out the good that the Christian faith had done for the world in the realm of politics and law, science, the academy and the arts.
But in each of these realms, we are now dealing with representatives of each one, telling us that Christianity actually poses a grave threat to the blessings we currently enjoy in each of those realms. It is astonishing to me that Christians can be cowed by this kind of nonsense. The Christian faith invented our political freedoms. We gave birth to the rise of modern science. The Royal Society at its founding was dominated by Puritans. Artistically? Well, let’s just put Bach, Dante, Milton and the builders of the Salisbury cathedral on the field, and then call the game on the slaughter rule. The university is a Christian invention. I mean, give us a break, for pity’s sake. Now my reason for bringing all this up is that the same thing goes for free markets.
One of the books I am currently reading is William Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed, with a subtitle of “Economics and Christian Desire.” I enjoyed his Theopolitical Imagination, and I think this book will be engaging as well. But I already more than half suspect that the same kind of confusion is going on here.
Autonomous “capitalists” whoop and holler about the power and authority of free markets in themselves. This is obviously economic idolatry, and Christians are rightly put off by this. And yet at the same time some Christians are ignorant of the Christian contribution to the rise of our (comparatively) free markets in the first place. Suppose the prodigal son not only bought drinks for everybody at the tavern in that strange land where he had got to. Suppose further that he was telling everybody there lies about how the money he was spending was actually money he had earned all by himself. Some disapproved of his behavior, but for some strange reason they believed him on the question of where he got his money. That is what is going on here.
Concerning the form of government we were given in the Constitution, John Adams once said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people. It is wholly unfit for any other. This is completely wise and true.
A biblical view of self-government and free markets works this same way.
Now what I am now describing here is not a contribution from me. I did not develop this, or come up with it. I inherited this from my Christian fathers. This is what we have taught for centuries. There are three governmental institutions established by God among men. They are family, church, and state. In order for freedom to exist in any of these institutions, it is absolutely necessary for the men and women making them up to be self-governed. The free market doesn’t make them free. The Holy Spirit of God sets them free from their passions and lusts, and then (and only then) freedom becomes possible in family affairs, ecclesiastical affairs, and civil affairs. This means that unless men are bound to God, markets cannot be free. This is because slaves to passion cannot be free in any other significant sense.
While godless “capitalists” might point out various economic truths of interest here and there, their ideology is no savior. Jesus is the only Savior. But the thing that must be insisted on here is that godless capitalists want autonomous markets for the same reason and in the same way that advocates of scientism want to forget their Christian roots, why the lonely bohemian artist wants us all to forget a millennium of Christian art, and why the ACLU wants to protect our republic from the people who came up with it in the first place.
Idolaters say that if you leave capitalism entirely unbound, it will by itself create good and prosperity. That is a lie. But it is also a lie to say that this kind of capitalism is capitalism “as traditionally understood.” If someone wanted to say that science “as traditionally understood” stands for Darwinism, say, that “traditional understanding” is leaving out of our discussion a number of very important men and centuries.
So free markets do not create free men, and never have. Rather, free men create free markets. Unless you have men set free from their bondage to sin, economic liberty is not a possibility. Impose a “free market” on a society of sin-slaves, and you will get a plutocracy in about fifteen minutes. Bring the gospel effectively to any nation, and you will see institutions of freedom, a market without state coercion among them, taking deep root over the course of several generations. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.