By Request: Economics and Christianity

I’ve always felt this quote of Lewis’s clearly expressed a libertarian, or at least anti-Big Government sentiment:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Not that I think there isn’t some reason for tension between religious belief and economics or libertarianism. It’s not irreconcilable but it’s there.

As for the quote in particular, it’s worth remembering that Screwtape’s advice doesn’t ultimately work. Being a demon, Screwtape certainly thinks he knows how to lead people to damnation, and part of the point of the Screwtape letters is that Screwtape has some clue what he’s talking about (and thus, he is meant to make it clear to us exactly what evil is) but if he were completely right, Wormwood would have succeeded in damning the Patient.

As a last aside, some recommendations for readers unfamiliar with the Screwtape Letters: Letter XXVII is a critique of Historicism, which may be of great interest. The later, “sequel” essay Screwtape Proposes A Toast, is a critique, although not of public education per se, of certain problems with it we know to be endemic. It’s also probably one of the most political of Lewis’s works.

My main concern about the confluence of economics and Christianity flows from interpretations of John Locke that may very well have led him to retract some of his main works had he known what ideological ends his worked would be appropriated for. Namely, that if someone else is making less productive use of something than you think you can, or you think should be made of this resource/asset at the present moment, then there is a divine responsibility, say, to colonize Africa and take all the land from the indigenous peoples of the Americas (but not, say, teaching them about those alternative ways of working the land, etc).

This connection is readily acknowledged among historians familiar with his works and the role of his philosophical works both as a matter of history and as a matter of the development of political philosophy, and is reputed to have been a key contributor influencing the political and social thought which underlies the American constitution.

As a result, instructors of his famous book may do well to introduce his “Letters on Toleration” which argue that it is inherently wrong to try to force someone else to accept your vision of what leads to heaven and hell, because this may precisely lead to hell for that second person according to their ethical system. For example, Protestants who believed that reciting your praises one way could lead to heaven and another to hell, whereas the opposing theological perspective preached (to say the least) an strictly opposed alternative vision. The context was a period of revolution and religious war where English kings sought to free themselves from the religious authority of the Vatican.

When you look to the key directives of Christianity, there is ample room for analysis where economists can demonstrate that various forms of charity and public sector activity can effectively free people by enabling them to pursue and achieve diverse opportunities by accessing things like credit (not usurous, of course), education, social networks (and here a good number of Christians would do well to ask themselves how relatively willing they are to recommend an equally qualified Christian and non-Christian), etc. Unless you focus on the story of the talents and then berate the heck out of anyone who ever failed to make a mint with an opportunity, or the claim that “God helps those who help themselves”, then most right wing policy is essentially strongly in contradiction with key teachings from the stories and lessons of Jesus, and focuses quite heavily on the sorts of puritanship that characterized the Pharisees from whom Jesus sought spiritual freedom.

Economics provides analytical tools which can plaster up the above arguments to high heaven with regard to the general abuse of economic analytical tools by modern-day Pharisees.

Jesus’s second command “love your neighbors like you love yourself” is not compatible with capitalism.

And where we get the right to do allowing? It is property right, i.e. landlord’s right to make rules on its land.

Art,

Thanks for this post. As a fellow Christian economist I appreciated what you had to say. I also really enjoyed your last two posts on big box retailers, and for my money they are your best posts on EconLog.

Consider the rhetoric of public policy and ask how often you hear someone ask “should we allow people to [use drugs/sell sex/whatever]?” I wonder where we get the right to do the allowing, or where we get the presumption that something must be allowed by a human authority in order to be legitimate or acceptable.

The right to do the allowing stems from the fact the behaviors are currently disallowed. For example, the policy issue regarding drugs is often one of choosing between restricted use, decriminalization, or legalization. All of which would allow to varying degrees behaviors that are currently disallowed. Rather than ask whether government is empowered to allow — clearly it is because it assumed the power to disallow and the citizens accepted that as legitimate — the better question is whether the disallowing was appropriate in the first place.