Twilight of freedom
Why did Saint-Simon’s socialism sweep Europe as it did? How did the classical liberal economists, the arch enemies of socialism, fail to persuade the people? As noted earlier, Schoeck determined that Christianity had catalyzed economic progress by restraining envy, the chief opponent of innovation, individualism and development through most of human history. Apparently, Christianity had never penetrated very deeply into French and German societies because the French Revolution easily sand blasted away the veneer.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, German theologians began to deny the basic truths of traditional Christianity such as the virgin birth of Jesus, his deity, death and physical resurrection. They claimed that Jesus never suggested that he was God and that the Apostle Paul had hijacked the movement, created a new religion by mixing his Judaism with Greek philosophy and sold it to the eleven Apostles who had been left rudderless by Jesus’ death. They denied all of the miracles in the four Gospels and expunged them of any reference to Jesus’ deity. Once they had emaciated the New Testament, they attacked the Old, or the Hebrew Bible, again dismissing all miracles and claiming that most of it had been written after the return of the exiles from Babylon.
Of course, the critics never offered any evidence for their ideas. Their “science” consisted of nothing more than asserting that science has proved that miracles are impossible. And they never explained how the Apostles had convinced themselves to die for a cause they knew they had fabricated and was a lie. People often die for false causes, such as communism, if they think they are true, but it was impossible for the Apostles to imagine that the new religion made up by Paul was true.
German theologians who denied the validity of traditional Christianity continued to call themselves Christians and even claimed to represent true Christianity because they had used “science” to chip away centuries of human corruption of Jesus’ teachings to reveal the “historical,” or true, Christianity. In response, traditional Christians began to refer to themselves as “fundamentalists,” because they insisted that followers must belief certain fundamental truths in order to be Christians. Those included the deity of Jesus, his virgin birth, physical death and bodily resurrection. They referred to the new German theologians as “liberals.”
Traditional Christianity had the goal of spreading the Gospel, which it saw as the good news of personal salvation by Jesus’ death, and converting the world. The Kingdom of God would not come until Christ returned in fulfillment of his own prophesies. But the liberal theologians no longer believed any of that and so were left dangling in the wind without a purpose. Socialism rescued them. It taught them that mankind did not need personal salvation, since people are born innocent. They turn to evil only because of oppression from society and the worst oppression came from private property, so liberal Christianity redefined salvation to mean the equal distribution of wealth and the Kingdom of God to mean a socialist society that would end oppression and restore humanity to its natural state of innocence.
One of the chief ambassadors of German liberalism and socialism to the U.S. and a founder of the “social gospel” movement was Walter Rauschenbusch. His father had been a devout German Baptist fundamentalist who pastored German-speaking churches in the U.S. and loved all things German. But Walter inherited his father’s love of Germany without a love for the Gospel, for when his father sent Walter, his two sisters and mother to Germany for four years to complete the children’s education, Walter uncritically consumed Germany’s liberal theology and socialism. In the U.S., he was influenced by two other socialists, Henry George and Richard Ely, who founded the American Economic Association.
Stanley Hauerwas wrote in his A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity that “Rauschenbusch, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, argues that the social gospel effected no significant change to any fundamental Christian doctrine” in his 1917 Taylor Lectures at Yale Divinity School. But Hauerwas’ sympathy for Rauschenbush’s socialism caused him to pull his punch. The “social gospel” constituted a radical rewriting of church history and a redefining of all of its most important doctrines. For example, like the atheists/deists of the French Revolution and Saint-Simon, Rauschenbush insisted that society, not God, makes people good and society, not human nature, makes them bad:
An unchristian social order can be known by the fact that it makes good men do bad things. It tempts, defeats, drains, and degrades and leaves men stunted, cowed, and shamed in their manhood. A Christian social order makes bad men do good things. It sets high aims, steadies the vagrant impulses of the weak, trains the powers of the young, and is felt by all as an uplifting force which leaves them with the consciousness of a broader and noble humanity as their years go on.
In other words, real sin was not personal, as theologians had taught for two thousand years, but something society causes. Society played the same role in Rauschenbush’s theology as Satan had in traditional Christianity: change the structure of society and humanity would change. Also, historic Christianity taught that it would create the Kingdom of God on earth as the world became more Christian, but Rauschenbush rejected that in favor of a “law of gradual growth” of the kingdom. Mankind did not need God to achieve perfection. We would accomplish it through our own efforts. Though he was not God, Christ initiated the kingdom through the force of his personality. Instantiating the kingdom depends upon socialists. Rauschenbush taught that democracy has saved politics in the U.S.: “The challenge before the church is to secure for the economic realm the same kind of cooperative life that had been achieved in American politics.” In other words, all wealth needed to be owned democratically, or equally, in order to complete the task of bringing the kingdom of God to earth.
The social gospel took over the old mainline Protestant denominations, the Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist churches. Today, only about 10 percent of the churches in those organizations cling to traditional Christianity. Of the major denominations that existed at the turn of the last century, only Baptists have managed to maintain fundamentalist Christianity in a majority of churches. As people abandoned traditional fundamentalist Christianity for the liberal version, they broke the chains that constrained envy. Socialism made envy not only acceptable, it elevated envy to a virtue by redefining justice to mean equality of material goods, and as Schoeck made clear the demand for material equality has been the chief manifestation of envy through history.
Christianity’s vital role
Many academics recoil at the thought of attributing any good outcomes at all to religion, but there is growing evidence of the important role Christianity played in economics and science. Alfred North Whitehead and Rodney Stark, quoted earlier, attributed the rise of science in Western Europe to Christianity. Helmut Schoeck, Rodney Stark and Larry Siedentop, also quoted, ascribed Western individualism (Hayek’s true individualism), which was an absolute necessity for economic development, to Christianity. In addition, Hayek wrote about the vital role of religion for transferring vital institutions across generations in his last book, Fatal Conceit. Hayek launched the chapter “Religion and the Guardians of Tradition,” of that book with the earlier quote from Adam Smith on the importance of religion. And Hayek was quoted earlier on the role of religion in preserving values such as respect for private property, saving, exchange, honesty, truthfulness and contract. Hayek understood that his endorsement of religion would arouse opposition in many academic circles. He wrote the following in Fatal Conceit:
In closing this work, I would like to make a few informal remarks – they are intended as no more than that - about the connection between the argument of this book and the role of religious belief. These remarks may be unpalatable to some intellectuals because they suggest that, in their own long-standing conflict with religion, they were partly mistaken - and very much lacking in appreciation...
Even those among us, like myself, who are not prepared to accept the anthropomorphi
c conception of a personal divinity ought to admit that the premature loss of what we regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a powerful support in the long development of the extended order that we now enjoy, and that even now the loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, creates great difficulties.
...even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilisation but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.
Hayek argued that the pseudo-reasoning springing from the French Revolution with its false individualism jettisoned the traditions of property, saving, exchange, and contract because they could see no immediate benefit in them, whereas the short term profit of abandoning them and redistributing wealth was obvious to most people. Religion had kept those long-term values alive, not because of their reasonableness but because of fear of God and his “thou shalt not” commands.
As an agnostic, Hayek had little interest in religion so he can be forgiven for thinking that religion in general perpetuated the values that advanced freedom and created wealth. But the fact is that the explosive growth in wealth catalogued by McCloskey, Maddison and others did not exist for most of human history. It did not happen in the Greco-Roman world of the Greek gods. It did not happen in cultures dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam, or for that matter Eastern Orthodox Christianity. And it did not happen in Western Europe during the first fifteen centuries in which Christianity dominated. The hockey stick launch of per capita income took off only in the seventeenth century and only in the Dutch Republic. For the next 200 years it spread only to Western Europe and the U.S. So religion in general provides a necessary but insufficient cause of the transmission of the values necessary for development. As Rodney Stark and Larry Siedentop point out, Western Christianity was unique in its emphasis on free will, reason, individualism, freedom, property, savings, commerce and contract.
Hayek appreciated the work of the scholars of the University of Salamanca, Spain, in the sixteenth century and praised them as proto-Austrian economists. He insisted on having one of the meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society, which he had created, in Salamanca, Spain, in honor of those theologians. But it seems to have escaped Hayek that those scholars had built their economics on the foundation of the Bible’s teachings on the sanctity of life, liberty and property. Those principles did not exist in other religions and cultures. Hayek hoped that agnostics such as him could personify abstract traditions and “worship” them as a kind of god. He wrote in Fatal Conceit, “Yet perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in ‘society’ in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions? On that question may rest the survival of our civilisation.”
Hayek’s last sentence punctuated the end of the chapter on religion and exudes an air of desperation. But in a way, Hayek was guilty of the scientism that he had attributed to Saint-Simon and against which he had fought for decades. Hayek vehemently opposed scientism in economics, but by trying to create a new religion based on science he committed the same error of invading theology with scientism. And Hayek’s statement about “such scientifically unacceptable factual claims” is another fallacy of scientism because the natural sciences have no tools for examining theology. Trying to use the natural sciences or economics to investigate theological truths would be like dressing a camel in a tutu and expecting it to dance ballet; it would be irrational.
In spite of his hopes, Western atheists and deists did not even try to personify the values that Hayek esteemed; they abandoned them utterly and completely. And in proportion to the degree that the West has shaken off traditional Christianity it has embraced greater socialism, as Hayek feared.
Chapter 1 introduced the work of economist Deirdre McCloskey arguing for the importance of the bourgeois values to the explosive growth of the West over the past three centuries. McCloskey masterfully destroys the reasoning of competing theories. Other scholars also have trouble with the roundup of the usual suspects as causes of development. For example, Lawrence Harrison of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies wrote in the book Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress that,
If colonialism and dependency are unsatisfactory explanations for poverty and authoritarianism overseas...and if there are too many exceptions...to geographic/climatological explanations, how else can the unsatisfactory progress of humankind toward prosperity and political pluralism during the past half century be explained?
A growing number of scholars, journalists, politicians, and development practitioners are focusing on the role of cultural values and attitudes as facilitators of, or obstacles to, progress.
Of course, the next question is where do people get their values? The answer in Culture Matters is from religion, as the following quotes illustrate: “Religious traditions seem to have had an enduring impact on the contemporary value systems of sixty-five societies, as Weber, Huntington, and others have argued,” according to Ronald Inglehart, professor of political science and program director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Seymour Martin Lipset, the Hazel professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and Gabriel Salman Lenz, George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars wrote,
In the preceding discussion we showed that cultural variables help explain and predict levels of corruption. But what explains culture? Dealing with this complex question is far beyond the limits of this chapter. However, the social science consensus that religion is an important determinant of variations in larger secular cultures offers some helpful suggestions. Countries dominated by Protestants are less corrupt than others.
“Throughout history, religion has been the richest source of values...” wrote Mariano Grondona, professor of government and law at the National University of Buenos Aires, who added,
It was the Protestant Reformation that first produced economic development in northern Europe and North America. Until the Reformation, the leaders of Europe were France, Spain (allied with Catholic Austria), the north of Italy (the cradle of the Renaissance), and the Vatican. The Protestant cultural revolution changed all that as heretofore second-rank nations – Holland, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Prussia, and the former British colonies in North America – took over the reins of leadership.
Lawrence E. Harrison is a senior fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He coedited the book Culture Matters with Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and chairman of the Academy for International and Area Studies. Harrison wrote,
In 1968, Gunnar Myrdal [Nobel Prize-winning economist] published Asian Dreams: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations after ten years of study of South Asia. He concluded that cultural factors, profoundly influenced by religion, are the principal obstacles to modernization. It is not just that they get in the way of entrepreneurial activity but that they permeate, rigidify, and dominate political, economic, and social behavior.
There is a complex interplay of cause and effect between culture and progress, but the power of culture is demonstrable. It is observable in those countries where the economic achievement of ethnic minorities far exceeds that of the majorities, as is the case of the Chinese in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
The last quote does not mention religion, but it is well known that the ethnic Chinese minorities who dominate commerce in South East Asia tend to be Christians, many of whom fled China after the Communist takeover and slaughter of Chinese Christians. The recurring attacks on Chinese in Indonesia are partly due to their greater wealth, but mostly a result a Christian minority living among radical Muslims. Some of the amazing economic growth in China can be attributed to those Christian Chinese minoritie
s investing in the mainland after the opening of its markets. Over eighty percent of foreign direct investment in China during the early years of the opening up under Deng Xia Peng came from overseas Chinese businesses in Southeast Asia. As late as 1997, foreign direct investment from Europe and North America amounted to only $8.4 billion while that from Hong Kong alone totaled $21.6 billion.
Of course, cynics will respond with the exceptions of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, all but Japan have significant numbers of Christians. In Japan’s case, it’s possible to force economic development in nations that do not support the bourgeois values and do not have large Christian minorities as MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist and economist James A. Robinson concede in their Why Nations Fail. States can buy Western technology to replace traditional methods of farming and manufacturing and force some economic growth through greater efficiency. But as Acemoglu and Robinson point out, those nations will hit a brick wall that limits development if they refuse to continue to reform their institutions. However, the authors fail to grasp that culture builds institutions; values create culture; and religion instills values. The cause and effect relationship does not run sequentially through time, but happens at the same time, as in a building: religion is the foundation; values and culture are the walls and economic development the roof.
In addition, lacking a Christian minority does not mean that Christianity had no impact on a nation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries European and American church organizations sent thousands of missionaries to poor countries around the globe to convert people to the kingdom of God. But in the process they did much more: they built hospitals and schools, established newspapers and fought for the rights of the natives against oppression by colonial leaders. As Robert D. Woodberry wrote in the abstract to his paper “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,”
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