The Moral Requirements of Flourishing Economies

We have the problem on both sides. There are people who want to deal with the spirit and not the material things, and that doesn’t work. Then there are people who want to deal with material things, and not spiritual things, and that doesn’t work either. I think that it is imperative that the church takes the lead in caring for the poor, and some of my friends will say, “Well today the state takes the lead in caring for the poor, and the church can’t do it until the state gets out of the way.” I say, “Poppycock!” to that, and that’s not just my personal opinion.

If you look at the Mormon community they do it. There are virtually no Mormons on welfare anywhere in America, and it’s not because there are no Mormons in economic distress. It’s because their religious community has an enormous nationwide and even international system that is run by them, run by their religious community, and it delivers huge amounts of material aid to people. You know canned food, and clothing, and all that is moving through warehouses. They have their own warehouse, that’s how much stuff they’re moving, but it’s not done exclusively through material aid. There is relationship building, there’s healing, they’re addressing behaviors, and they’ve been at this for a while, and they’ve shown that it can be done.

Now when I tell people that story I will then often conclude with the following question: Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the biblical model, yes? The faith community is supposed to be doing this. Why are the Mormons doing this, but the Evangelical church is not? Somebody explain this to me, because it doesn’t look right to me. So I think we should be deeply convinced about that, but thankfully I think we are becoming convicted about it, and I think good things are starting to happen.

Then market activity, again, I think we don’t need to draw hard and fast boundaries here. There are a lot of places where you can’t really draw a line between what is Christian activity, and what is market activity, because Christians are active in the marketplace, but you know we want business creation. Ultimately the long term solution to poverty has to involve getting individuals, and families, and communities out of poverty where the church will no longer need to be focused on them, and that’s going to involve the growth of business, but the market will not automatically bring that to the neighborhoods that are in the most need.

Again, this comes back to the subject we began with, that there’s this divide, and what’s happening is there’s no counter-narrative to the narrative that the purpose of business is to make money. So the narrative that predominates in the economic world, I mean this is Orthodoxy in many business schools is that business exists to make money. There’s no other narrative in play, so of course that’s going to be the narrative that guides behavior, and I think unfortunately we have tried to fight this narrative with another narrative that is essentially negative about business activity that fails to acknowledge the goodness of economic and business activity in God’s plan for the world.

I think we don’t fight a bad narrative that’s pro-business with a bad narrative that’s anti-business, but rather with a narrative that begins with God’s intention for business, and begins with hope, and talks about the potential of business to be a force for good in the world, and not just when it’s taken over by the church, and the religious professionals are put in charge. But that business professionals have a role to play in God’s plan to do good things for the world by providing good products and services that people need that create value and make the world a better place. That I think is the answer to greed and materialism.

A very common metaphor that’s used among Christian business people who are wrestling with this –they will say the body needs blood, but the purpose of the body is not to circulate blood. Another way that they’ll put it is you need to breath, but you don’t exist for the purpose of breathing, and similarly just as the body needs blood and air, or it’s going to die, the business needs profit or it’s going to die. So it’s absolutely legitimate to be concerned about keeping your business profitable, as long as you’re doing it in a way that serves people.

We need to help people discover God can actually use financial instruments to do enormous mighty works for the good of all, to serve the common good. Most of those, and yes there are some financial instruments that were invented for the purpose of trickery, but most financial instruments exist in a form that can be and often is used to facilitate business activity that serves our needs. You know where do these microphones come from? Where did this table come from? Where did that screen come from? It came from businesses, and businesses need investments to operate, and where is that investment coming from? It’s coming from bankers and Wall Street types, and if they do their work with an eye toward promoting good business, and good activity then they’re part of God’s economy as well.

You know when you show up at work to make widgets is good and glorifies God, and to honor that without then taking away from people who are doing something that goes above and beyond the ordinary. And that’s one of the tensions that faith in work movement often has to wrestle with, because there are people who are in the faith and work movement because they’re very enthusiastic about those special businesses. There are other people who are in the faith and work movement because they’re enthusiastic about helping the people who make widgets see how they’re glorifying God, and navigating that tension is a challenge in the faith and work movement too.

Scripture rather, warns against the equal and opposite sins of squandering wealth, spending it in selfish and transitory ways, and interestingly the example that is brought up here in the appeal to Luke 15:11-32 passage, (I know a little about) is the picture of the prodigal who goes away, and had been given the gift of the inheritance of his father. So he ends up with nothing, or hording wealth. That is removing it from its use entirely, and the example here, yet another Lucan passage; Luke 12:13-21, which is the rich fool who when he gets this cash of wealth that comes in seemingly fortuitously he decides well I’m not going to use it in any beneficial way. I’m going to keep it for myself, and God addresses that attitude as basically fool that will require your soul of you. By contrast, Scripture commends caring for the needs of our own households, and other close relations, 1 Timothy 5:8, and after that generous giving for relief for other’s needs, James 2:15-17. In fact another passage jumps into my mind, the James 1 passage at the end of the chapter 26 and 27 where true religion is defined as caring for windows and orphans, and keeping ones self-unstained from the world –

This is what enabled Venice to become able to raise a large navy, whereas, now this is the part that I find fascinating, when they would capture a flagship in the Ottoman fleet, they would actually find chests of gold in the boat, because the wealthy, prominent people in the Ottoman country wouldn’t leave their money behind, because they couldn’t trust it to anybody. That’s a wonderful image of the hording behavior that people are strongly tempted to if they don’t have an functioning economic system where you can trust if you put your money in the bank; A, you will get it back. It will not be simply taken by the sultan, but B, you put the money in the bank, and you know it’s going to good use.