Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Benjamin M. Friedman.
(Review Michael Shermer in The American Scholar—considerably abridged).
Market Morality: The divine underpinnings of Western prosperity
Over the years, some religious conservatives have strained to attenuate Christianity’s doctrinal role in some of history’s darker moments—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European witch hunts, pogroms against Jews, and the slave trade. Some have gone so far as to credit Christianity for the core institutions of modern industrialized democracies, including and especially capitalism.
Max Weber’s highly influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)…argued that Calvinism’s doctrine of predestination helped fuel the secular institution of capitalism. [Weber’s contemporary, R. H. Tawney,] countered that it was the spirit of individualism and the ethic of self-help and frugality that drove early capitalism, not Calvinist theology.
A century on, the author of this book develops Tawney’s thesis to its fullest, arguing that It was human potential in this world, not predestinarian beliefs about the next world, that drove capitalism. Religious doctrines, promulgated by preachers from the pulpit, from which the faithful derived ideas that undergird capitalism, fueled its eventual development–for example, emphasis on human agency… and belief in the efficacy of markets to bring about personal and social goods….
In shaping this compelling narrative, the author has marshaled considerable historical evidence in its favor. But why, to consider counterexamples, did not all societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion show Western forms of capitalism and democracy? Obviously other factors were at work, such as geography and chance, that allowed capitalism to develop where and when it did in Europe.
Clearly, different peoples inculcated different forms of Christian beliefs, even within one denomination. Consider the current divide between “prosperity gospel” Protestants, who believe that financial blessings come from God and hard work, and for whom conspicuous wealth is acceptable, and “social gospel” Protestants, who emphasize the obligation to reduce poverty, income inequality, crime, racism, and child labor, and for whom great wealth, if earned, should not be on public display.
Either way, the link between religious belief in individual agency and resultant economic success is what energizes most American Protestants today. As the author notes, whereas 30 percent of Americans believe that luck plays a substantial role in determining one’s income, 54 percent of comparatively nonreligious European hold that view….Also, only 26 percent of Europeans agree that poor people are poor because they are lazy, compared with 60 percent of Americans. Finally, and to the author’s point about agency and prosperity, 71 percent of Americans think that the poor can lift themselves out of poverty through hard work, compared with only 40 percent of Europeans.
Those numbers reflect what is called the “Just World” Theory of how lives turn out: if you are rich and successful, it is because you are hardworking, intelligent, creative, and willing to take risks, and you have been justly rewarded for your discipline and self-control; if you are poor and unsuccessful, it is because you are lazy, unintelligent, unimaginative, and risk averse, and you have been duly punished for your lack of will power and self-persuasion. Thanks to the author, I can now see that this belief has its origin in the 18th century. Of the many factors that went into the construction of the modern economic worldview undergirding capitalism, he has successfully added religion back into the causal equation.
