One of the things I've been doing over the past few months is reading some of the books that have been sitting untouched on my shelves for a long time.
Back on the 1980s IVP published a number of 'four views' titles, designed to present readers with some alternative Christian views on contentious subjects. This one is edited by Robert G. Clouse, with contributions by Gary North, William E Deihl, Art Gish and John Gladwin. Each contributor contributes a lead essay outlining their viewpoint on the topic - these are around 30 pages each - and then provides a brief response to the other three. North is touted as representing 'Free Market Capitalism' , Deihl's view is labelled 'Guided Market', Gish is 'Decentralist' and Gladwin is labelled 'Centralist'.
A while ago, a friend passed on a copy of a book called Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views on Economics, published by the evangelical publishing house Inter-Varsity Press back in 1984. It had been sitting on her shelf for a long time, and has been sitting on mine for the past year or two.
The result is fascinating, but not necessarily as enlightening as the publisher was hoping for. Let me provide you with a brief outline.
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The first essay is by Gary North, who at the time of writing and for many years after was the Director of a think-tank called the Institute for Christian Economics. Over the years he has been closely associated with US libertarian politician Ron Paul. His view is titled 'Free Market Capitalism' in the book but this makes him sound like an orthodox conservative economist. He is anything but. In his essay, and in his responses to his fellow authors, North hammers a single central message - Biblical Law provides a model for economics that is applicable now and which present-day societies can and should follow. By Biblical Law he mainly means the law of Moses.
This view is odd for a number of reasons, but whatever its oddness, it would be easier to take it seriously if North did so himself. In practice he plays fast and loose with the law he professes to revere. His basic framework comes from Deuteronomy 28, in which God promises blessings for Israel if they follow his laws, and hardship of they don't. This conveniently ignores various passages in the Bible, especially the New Testament, which promise suffering to those who are faithful to God, but don't let that bother you. What is really interesting is the way North is able to so glibly twist the Law to support his own viewpoint.
This view is odd for a number of reasons, but whatever its oddness, it would be easier to take it seriously if North did so himself. In practice he plays fast and loose with the law he professes to revere. His basic framework comes from Deuteronomy 28, in which God promises blessings for Israel if they follow his laws, and hardship of they don't. This conveniently ignores various passages in the Bible, especially the New Testament, which promise suffering to those who are faithful to God, but don't let that bother you. What is really interesting is the way North is able to so glibly twist the Law to support his own viewpoint.
For instance, the prohibition on theft is used to argue that the Law respects private property, and therefore that any attempts at redistribution amount to theft. He then cites the tithe (10% of produce) as definitive limit on the level of taxation. Redistribution is out of the question as this is theft, and implies taxation above the 10% threshold. What of the various other parts of the Mosaic law which require the cancellation of debts every seven years and the redistribution of property every 50? Best not to mention those. And how does a contribution of 10% of income to the temple and its officials get converted into a taxation law for the secular government? He fails to explain.
Then there are the laws of inheritance - he notes that property is to be distributed evenly among all the person's children, leaving aside some caveats and complexities. This, he says, is far better than redistribution as over time everyone would end up with similar modest holdings. Not sure how that works if some families start out with nothing, but in any case with bewildering speed he flows from there into share-cropping and joint-stock companies as if these just appear logically out of the text.
What appears at first glance to be a rigid biblicism turns out to just be a thinly veiled religious justification for libertarianism. It would be laughable if it were not for the fact that North and his cronies have been quite influential in the American religious right, turning American Christians into Tea Party activists intent on stripping away the few remaining protections available to the poor. If this essay does nothing else, it exposes on what feeble foundations this identification rests.
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William Deihl is or was (I can't easily work out if he is still alive) a Lutheran layman, a civil engineer and sales manager who wrote a number of books on issues to do with the spirituality of work, 'Monday to Friday spirituality' as it is sometimes called. Rather than the kind of pseudo-literalism presented by North, he outlines three Christian principles relevant to economics - freedom, responsibility and justice. These, roughly, suggest that people should be free to live their lives without unnecessary interference, should take responsibility for themselves and one another, and are entitled to economic justice.
It's hard to argue with these principles, but they are wide enough to drive a truck through. His particular truck, perhaps somewhat conveniently, looks a lot like the US system in which he lived - a market economy with some regulation, a residual welfare system designed to ensure people's needs are met without sapping their sense of self-responsibility, a fairly narrowly-framed view of justice, and an encouragement to Christians to live more simply and care for the poor. He casts a censorious look at Swedish social democracy and a somewhat wistful one at Japanese corporate welfare, neither of which he seems to understand in any great depth, before landing at the US as the 'best of all possible worlds' with, perhaps, a little more generosity and a little less greed.
Of course he says that no one economic system has been ordained by God. But in general he seems to be pretty comfortable with the one he has. Why change what is not broken? he seems to be saying. But in the process he underestimates the level of brokenness in the world economy, the poverty of much of the world, the course of ecological destruction which was already quite clear by 1984. Perhaps he just lacked the imagination to see that something better is possible.
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Of all the four essays, I find myself most instinctively drawn to the one by Art Gish. Gish was a Mennonite and member of an intentional Christian community until his death in 2010, and is best known as a peace activist, opposing the Iraq war and standing in front of Israeli tanks in the West Bank. Of all the essays, his is the one that makes the most effort to get to grips with the Biblical teaching on wealth and poverty. He provides readers with a sample of the teachings of the Law on economic justice, a flavour of the prophetic denunciation of injustice, and a solid sense of Jesus' preference for the poor. All this leads him to a damning diagnosis of 20th century capitalism, with its entrenched inequality, chronic state of war and environmental destruction.
What, then, are Christians to do? I found myself underwhelmed by his response, which was essentially that we should withdraw from this system and build a new one, based around Christian community. The system, he appears to be saying, is irreparably broken and our only option is to start again from the ground up. This is, indeed, the life he attempted to live but I found myself wondering - is this the only way? Are there not reforms that can at least bring us closer to a just and sustainable community? Is there something that can be done for those outside the pale, for those who can't live in such communities?
Of course, Art Gish and his wife Peggy were the real deal. They walked the talk, practiced what they preached, and did a lot of good in the world. But I found myself dissatisfied with the leap between analysis and action, the 'one size fits all' solution. Perhaps I'm just justifying myself and the fact that I continue to enjoy my individualistic Western lifestyle, but I think there is something more to my objection.
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So, finally, to John Gladwin. Gladwin is the sole Englishman among a group of Americans, an Anglican clergyman who at the time ran the English church's social responsibility body and later became a bishop. His theological analysis sits, perhaps, somewhere between Deihl's and Gish's, far more attuned than Deihl to the scale of injustice but unlike Gish still seeing some hope for the system as it is. Perhaps his difference with Deihl is as much to do with perspective as anything - writing from England in the 1980s he had much more exposure to at least the English variant of European social democracy, and was perhaps more positive about government action as a result.
For Gladwin, the problems posed by modern capitalism - poverty, environmental damage - are too big to be amenable to private charity or individual Christian social responsibility, valuable as these are. Structural problems require structural solutions, and these require government intervention.
This is the position which, in practice, I have adopted through my life, both in my work and in my personal engagement. Although I have tried to simplify my lifestyle and to be generous in my giving, I have never had the illusion that this is more than a drop in the ocean. Hence, over the years I have put a lot of energy into arguing for better government policy on issues like poverty, homelessness and climate change. I have to say, the results have been somewhat disappointing and I often wonder if Art Gish is right after all - but it seems better to keep trying than to give up.
The main problem with Gladwin's essay is that he lets the side down, so to speak, by presenting his case poorly. In the end, his essay drowns in generalities and it is no clearer at the end than at the beginning what we should actually do. Yes, government needs to intervene, but how, and to what end? And why does it not?
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On the whole, I found Wealth and Poverty disappointing. I think part of the problem is simply that it is difficult, in a thirty page essay, to adequately address such a complex question. It requires both substantial theological reflection, and a thorough understanding of how a modern capitalist economy actually works. None of the authors is really able to get beyond a superficial analysis of either question.
Also, none of the four authors is an economist. This is a curious choice by IVP, an invitation to more or less prominent Christians to opine on a subject of which their knowledge is limited. It means they are missing half the picture - they all appear to have theological knowledge but they lack the technical understanding of economics that would be needed to apply theology seriously to the subject. The result is that even their theological reflections are not that deep, and seem more or less to reflect the milieus in which they spend their lives.
The authors and editor would have done well, before embarking on this project, to read Redmond Mullin's The Wealth of Christians, published a year earlier on 1983 - although perhaps as a former Jesuit the good Evangelicals of IVP considered him beyond the pale. Mullin died in 2011 and I can't find a decent bio of him online, but from what I can glean he trained as a Jesuit and after leaving that order worked as a charity fundraiser. He wrote a number of books on fundraising and helped to found the Institute of Fundraising in the UK - I believe their office has a plaque in his memory.
He's not an economist either, but at least he spent his life thinking about how to persuade the rich to part with their resources in the interests of the poor. He also has a complete book to himself to explore the subject, although not a particularly long one at just over 200 pages - less than a quarter of the length of Adam Smith's classic economic treatise to which its title refers.
Most of the book traces the history of Christian thought on wealth and poverty, beginning with its Jewish and Stoic antecedents and taking us through the New Testament, the teachings of the church fathers and the views of prominent Christian thinkers in each subsequent age. Much of it consists of quotes from a wide range of Christian and other sources, which makes for a rather dense but enlightening read.
In Mullin's view, Christian economic ethics are not radically different from the Jewish and Stoic ethics that preceded them. All three emphasise the transitoriness of wealth, the sinfulness of greed and the duty to both justice and generosity towards the poor. What is different in Christianity is the notion of incarnation - that the other person before you, including the poorest, appears before you as an embodiment of Christ himself and must be treated as such.
This idea led to a radical attitude to wealth among the first Christians but over time, especially in the post-Constantinian church, this was moderated to a more conventional combination of charity and urgings to self-reliance. He traces a similar pattern in subsequent Christian movements - for instance, the Franciscan friars started out radically poor, but soon their individual poverty became a form within which they amassed substantial collective property. By the 19th century, the fervent evangelicals of the Clapham Sect did plenty of good without ever really questioning their entitlement to their wealth.
His conclusion is that all movements to change the game on wealth and poverty contain the seeds of their own corruption. Institutions founded on radical Christian principles soon revert to the status quo, doing good and generous work within the broad framework of accepted morality that has been the norm ever since pre-Christian times. Living a radical, incarnational view of wealth and poverty requires a new conversion in each person and in each generation.
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Mullin's view explains a lot. It explains, for instance, how it is that the authors of Wealth and Poverty, with the possible exception of Art Gish, can so fully absorb the economic ethos of their surrounding communities that they believe it to be Christian. It also, perhaps, lends some legitimacy to Gish's pessimism about the economic mainstream, although it suggests that the alternative communities in which he lived are just as prone to corruption as the monastic communities which were their forerunner. It also explains the meagre fruit of the movements for justice in which I have participated, and the fact that many of their fiercest opponents also wear a Christian label.
But it also says that there is a way forward. None of these five authors, perhaps not even Gary North for all his mendacity, will necessarily labour entirely without fruit. Even North would like people to be charitable in a strictly limited (and definitely voluntary) way. William Deihl is a very unambitious reformer but if we heeded his urgings to live more simply and be more generous we would at least be on the path to something better. The social democracy of John Gladwin ensures an adequate lifestyle for everyone, even if it may be flawed in many ways. And Gish's communities, even if they don't succeed in becoming the new normal (or change to become more normal themselves) provide a spur to us to think differently, to see new possibilities, to go further.
We shouldn't expect perfection. Richmond Mullin reminds as that the way is difficult and beset with wrong turnings, that the solutions are only ever partial. But that is our journey, individually and together, to keep moving closer to what we should be.
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