Church, State, and the Common Good

Capitalism is best understood as the modern ambition to order and value all available resources solely on the basis of market principles. As an “ism,” it functions as an ideal. We never achieve the all or the solely. At various stages in many countries, however, great efforts have been made to realize the ideal, with dramatic consequences for the way we live. In his classic historical study, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi documents the paths by which capitalism invades and reorganizes traditional forms of life. The agricultural village becomes tenements surrounding cotton mills. Old ranks of honor give way to new hierarchies of wealth. The meaning and function of family relations change. Anyone reading Polanyi comes away with the conviction that the power of the market should never be underestimated.

There are two lines of argument favoring the imperial ambitions of capitalism. The most common is ­utilitarian. As Friedrich Hayek observed at a time when far too ­many were infatuated with socialism, markets allocate ­resources more efficiently than planners do. But more important to Hayek was what he regarded as the moral superiority of the price mechanism. Buyers and sellers are drawn together by mutual interests. Thus, Hayek argued, markets maximize freedom by organizing society in a non-­coercive way. Milton Friedman puts this claim at the center of his influential book, Capitalism and ­Freedom.

Hayek’s and Friedman’s arguments for the moral superiority of capitalism have captured the imagination of intellectuals and politicians on the right. In The ­Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak developed his own subtle, multi-faceted version. (I wrote about ­Novak’s book in a column a few years ago, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” October 2017.) The virtues of a free-market economy are many, but a one­-sided enthusiasm for the promise of capitalism is ever falsified by experience. The notion of the “wage slave” bespeaks a truth about life for asset-poor workers in a modern capitalist society. And, of course, because it homes in on satisfying our desires, an ever-expanding market does the opposite of what the classical tradition counsels. Rather than encouraging the discipline of our wants, which is the only path to lasting freedom, capitalism stokes those wants, and we sell ourselves as slaves to the worldly regime of sin and death in exactly the way St. Paul bemoans.

We don’t need to argue its pros and cons to see that capitalism makes alluring promises, some amply ­fulfilled—and produces bondages and pathologies, too, some severe. As Polanyi recognized, the combination of capitalism’s indispensability and its downsides has shaped modern political economy.

One response to this situation concentrated on removing the limits on market transactions. In the early stages of capitalism in England, guilds and other monopolies were abolished. But economic freedom required more than deregulation. Market participants needed to be empowered with legal inventions, such as the limited liability corporation. When constraints on trade and innovation are removed, people mobilize resources, both natural and human, to everyone’s ­benefit—or so it was argued. The marginally employed were compelled to enter the labor market by the repeal of the poor laws that had functioned rather like a guaranteed universal basic income. Traditional village life was disrupted, but productivity increased and the industrial revolution produced tremendous material wealth.

The other project of modern political economy moves in the opposite direction. It limits capitalism’s imperial ambitions and counters the new forms of bondage it creates. America’s generous tax treatment of charitable donations is meant to nurture endeavors and institutions that are not governed by the profit-motive. Our labor laws protect workers from exploitation, which they cannot avoid simply by exercising their nominal free choice not to work. Tariffs and industrial policy aim to secure the non-market goods of solidarity and national security. Parks cordon off land, and environmental laws protect the public commons.

I share Polanyi’s anti-utopian view. The give-and-take between the two aspects of modern political economy is inevitable. Every generation must rethink and redraw the laws that encourage and restrain commercial life, as well as ensure that its costs and benefits are shared. After a long season of ideological slumber induced by the utopian belief that markets are self-correcting and self-limiting, conservatives need to do that rethinking and redrawing.

It’s intellectually dishonest for the right to speak of policies that limit or guide markets in the interest of the common good as unprecedented“government intervention,” or—and this mindless epithet is too often used by those who wish to sustain free-market ­utopianism—“conservative social engineering.” Polanyi shows that the triumph of capitalism required sustained political efforts, which continue to this day. The World Trade Organization and other pillars of today’s global economy were constructed by governments, not markets. Moreover, using the power of government to limit capitalism must be part of any conservatism that takes the lives of ordinary citizens into account. The Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli established the first elements of the welfare state, not in order to undermine the British economy, but to secure its popular support. Government action and capitalism have always been intertwined.

We need economic policies that encourage economic growth in the right ways—and policies that limit capitalism in the right ways. I’ll leave it to economists and policy wonks to debate what counts as “right.” More decisive is what might be called a “cultural politics” in relation to capitalism. Ever since Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, thinkers have speculated about the cultural conditions necessary for a well-functioning free-­market system. Of late, Nicholas Eberstadt has documented the decline of male participation in the labor force, a negative trend driven less by economic factors than by unhealthy cultural changes in our society. My interest is in the opposite side of the issue: a cultural politics that restrains capitalism and ameliorates its pathologies. As the Founders recognized in the design of our federal government, dangerous powers and im­perial ambitions can be limited by countervailing powers and ambitions. It is my conviction that this method of pinioning capitalism is of the utmost importance.

The family and the Church are forces capable of keeping modern capitalism within humane limits. To them I would add the nation, a more ambiguous force, but an important one. All three are what I call “love societies.” They ask for our loyalty. And they promise rewards that cannot (or at least should not) be bought and sold.

Family life is not organized by the price mechanism. The nation demands sacrifices and promises honor, both of which are perverted when they are assigned prices. The Church is more remote still from market logic. The Church’s central promise is that in Christ we can attain a pearl of great price, the treasure that is in heaven, not in this world. If we wish to sustain capitalism in the twenty-first century, then we need to use political power to renew and strengthen these non-market love societies.

Let’s consider the nation in more detail. Today, the tearing down of statues denudes the public square. Nothing is raised to replace the toppled monuments. The void is emblematic. The ideology of multiculturalism functions as did the ­Enclosure Acts in seventeenth-century England, which created private property rights over land that was once common-use. Woke activism strips away our cultural commons, making society more fully available for ­reorganization by the market mechanism. Starbucks and Netflix fill the void left when Robert E. Lee and other figures are removed. It’s no surprise, therefore, that economic neo-liberalism embraces progressive cultural fashions.

What to do? To be frank, I tire of playing anti-woke ­defense 24/7. So I’ll venture a proactive policy. Let’s require military service for those young people who, at present, are regarded as the most economically valuable. Let’s say two years of mandatory military service for all graduates of universities rated as among the top fifty in the country by U.S. News & World Report. Unworkable? Yes, but we need to think creatively about how to wrest our national life away from cold calculations of utility—and from the punitive moralism of today’s progressivism. One striking feature of contemporary Israeli society is that all the country’s youth serve in the military.

Family—here, the situation is dire. Fertility rates have plummeted. Out-of-wedlock births are the norm, or nearly so, in many parts of society. One consequence of family breakdown: The young are being reared by history’s most powerful marketing tool, the smartphone, which my colleague Mark Bauerlein regards as Satan’s favorite twenty-first-century weapon. I’ll venture that, of children who have any meaningful restrictions on screen usage, nearly all are living with both mother and father. Without the discipline of family life, we are abandoned to the marketplace, which now has the technological means to make us consumers all day, every day.

I’m no expert on family policy, so I can’t offer detailed proposals. But let me say that half-measures will not do. We need a dramatic change in course, something along the lines of significantly decreasing taxes for married couples of child-bearing age, or perhaps increasing Social Security benefits in accord with how many children one has raised. Again, I’ll concede that these ideas are radical and perhaps politically unworkable. But, again, we need to push ourselves to think big about big problems, and the decline of the family is a big problem.

Church—here, the situation is more promising. Cultural deregulation working in tandem with economic deregulation has severely damaged the family. American religious institutions are in better condition. Nominal Christianity has declined in recent decades, but church attendance has remained relatively steady, and young clergy are more inclined than their elders to take oppositional stances. The Christian committed core endures as a political and cultural force in American society, much to the dismay of many progressives who resent our influence.

In view of the continuing vitality of religious institutions, our goal should be to empower them politically and culturally. The Supreme Court has curtailed the excesses of post–World War II interpretations of the Establishment Clause, allowing for properly tailored state funding of religious schools. This approach needs to be developed wherever politically possible. We should lobby for the overturning of Supreme Court precedents from the early 1960s that deemed unconstitutional the longstanding tradition of ecumenical prayer in public schools. The Ten Commandments should be displayed in courthouses. We need to have our attention lifted toward something transcendent so that we are relieved of the false view that life is mainly about what we can buy and sell.

America once had an “integralist” tradition, until various Supreme Court decisions after 1945 dismantled its main supports. It was a Protestant-dominated, theologically vague, and politically soft religious establishment that some might deem ersatz and therefore not authentically “integralist.” I’m happy to concede that use of the term to those with purer views. But I believe that if we hope to restrain capitalism we must sift through the American tradition of state encouragement of religion to discern what can be fruitfully restored in our own time.

Nation, family, and Church are bulwarks against the tendency of capitalism to turn every relationship into a market transaction. We need to use the art of politics to renew and strengthen these love societies.

WHILE WE’RE AT IT

♦ Australian poet James McAuley on Catholic clergy after Vatican II who were rushing to catch up with Rudolf Bultmann and other liberal Protestant grandees:

We know all the moves,
The language-games, the ploys;
We jam the transmission
With a verbal kind of noise:

Called dialogue . . . insights . . .
Meaningful! relevant!—
Updated, Christ retires
Replaced by “the Christ-event”.

Demythologized, our
Pastors really are swine
They race us down the slope;
Turn blood into wine.

♦ Incoming medical students at the University of Minnesota received their white coats, a traditional sign of induction into the medical community. But instead of reciting the Hippocratic Oath, they were asked to repeat a woke litany, which included a pledge to “honor all Indigenous ways of healing” and to fight “white supremacy, colonialisms [and] the gender binary.” After viewing video of the ceremony, Chris Rufo, the scourge of progressive pieties, noted that the medical professor leading the recitation “almost certainly doesn’t believe in what he’s saying. But he submits anyway—because the institutional powers now require otherwise intelligent people to falsify their own beliefs and repeat left-wing copypasta.”

♦ I had to look up “copypasta.” It refers to a block of text that is repeatedly copied and pasted into contributions to internet chat groups and on social media, often because the verbiage is amusingly ridiculous.

♦ Samuel Johnson on the impulse to conserve: “Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious how we strip her.”

♦ In October, Pope Francis announced that the process of preparation for the Synod of Bishops on synodality will be extended by one year. As he explained, “The fruits of the synodal process underway are ­many, but so that they might come to full maturity, it is necessary not to be in a rush.” Writing in the Catholic ­Herald, Hugh Somerville Knapman speculates about why, boilerplate aside, the Holy Father is delaying a signature initiative of his pontificate. He notes that “lay involvement in the process has been underwhelming.” Another possible explanation for the ­delay: “The opinions and insights received from this low sample of Catholics have not met the expectations of the ­synod’s organisers.” They want more time to accumulate input that reflects their desired output. A third ­explanation, which Somerville Knapman ­develops at length, amounts to the prospect that “­synodality” ­really means a never-ending process. As a New Age guru might put it, the journey is the destination. If so, I worry that the Church will fall victim to Oscar ­Wilde’s criticism of socialism: too many night ­meetings.

♦ On Monday evening, October 3, First Things inaugurated what I hope will be an annual event in Chicago. I sat down with Ross Douthat to talk about Christian faith and its relation to political power. He had taken up the topic in a recent essay (“A Gentler Christendom,” June/July 2022) as part of an exchange with Edmund Waldstein. The event was held at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, a historic facility in the ­Lakeview neighborhood that is being restored to serve as a beacon for truth and beauty. I’d like to thank ­Lawrence Daufenbach, executive director of the ­Athenaeum, for providing the ideal venue for First Things.

♦ We held our first regional reader summit at Belmont Abbey College on October 14–15. Our theme was friendship. I delivered a lecture on Friday evening (“Civic Friendship and Polarization”), and the seventy participants met in small seminars on Saturday morning to discuss assigned readings, which included the marvelous short story by Willa Cather, “Two Friends.” I’m grateful to Belmont Abbey College president Bill Thierfelder for opening the college for our use, and to Honors College dean Joe Wysocki for developing a superb syllabus of readings and leading his expert team of tutors.

♦ The Cather story is a gem. The narrative follows two small-town businessmen who, although different in all sorts of ways, enjoy a warm friendship. One of them, Mr. Dillon, goes to the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, at which the nominee, William ­Jennings Bryan, famously insisted that mankind must not be crucified “upon a cross of gold.” Upon returning to his small town, Dillon takes up politics and the friendship dissolves in the acids of partisan passion. It’s a story sadly relevant for many of us with liberal friends who have become political Manichaeans.

♦ Jeffrey Lewis would like to form a ROFTERS group in Camden, Maine. To join, contact him at ­revcapjclewis@gmail.com.

♦ Bethany Gates of Kenosha, Wisconsin, would like to form a ROFTERS group. You can reach her at ­bethanygates@gmail.com.

♦ As you read this issue, we will be launching our year-end fundraising campaign. Our goal: 1,200 donations totaling $800,000. Ambitious, yes, but that’s to be expected. To speak forcefully about natural and revealed truths in the public square—First Things is nothing if not a bold enterprise. I thank you in advance for your generosity in supporting our mission.