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Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

Christian Century, March 27, 2002 by Daniel Rush Finn

By D. Stephen Long. Routledge, 321 pp., $25.99 paperback.

STEPHEN LONG has written an engaging and frustrating book on the relation of theology and economics. Baptized by Anabaptists, educated by evangelicals and ordained in the United Methodist Church, Long teaches at UMC-related Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he is co-director of the Center for Ethics and Values. Just as there is diversity in his background, there is irony in his current position. For Long, most talk about values undermines what theology--and social science--should be saying about the moral life.

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Much of Divine Economy is a critique of the work of other theologians who have engaged economic life. Long's strongest disapproval is reserved for Michael Novak's defense of capitalism, but the list of those he criticizes is long and diverse. Max Stackhouse, Ronald Preston, Philip Wogaman, Dennis McCann, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jon Sobrino and James Cone are among those found wanting. I shall leave it to these able thinkers to defend their work and will instead focus on Long's appropriation of Catholic social thought to support his views.

Long operates out of the "radical orthodoxy" movement led by Anglican theologian John Milbank. The book also shows the influence of Stanley Hauerwas, with whom Long studied at Duke University, and that of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has had great influence on Hauerwas.

Following MacIntyre, Long argues that intellectual history is first and foremost a narrative history, and so he details the stories that precede and undergird the points of view he analyzes. Because he believes there is no independent standpoint from which all perspectives can be evaluated objectively, he views his role as telling the stories of his and others' traditions from his own tradition's point of view. Competing descriptions of the intellectual world cannot be objectively demonstrated to be either true or false. Rather, each narrator attempts to "out-narrate" the others and thereby persuade the listener.

Of course, Long does not reject all theological approaches to economics found in the history of Christianity or he too would be left without an adequate narrative tradition. The heroes of his story are Thomas Aquinas, Pope Leo XIII, Jesuit economist Bernard Dempsey, and the Association for Social Economics (formerly the Catholic Economics Association). In Roman Catholic tradition, Long finds the threads of an adequate argument about the interaction of theology and economic life. Long names his own ideal economic system as "pre-1848 Christian socialism," but says remarkably little about it. His primary economic agenda is to reject capitalism and to turn economic institutions, including corporations, into socially responsible not-for-profit (and, ideally, Christian) organizations.

Long's most fundamental critique is lodged against capitalism because its "cultural logic" celebrates a "universality of pluralisms" that undermines the particularity of Christian life and faith. He holds up the food court at the local shopping mall as an illustration. At the food court we are presented with a diversity of cooking from around the world, brought together in one place as only capitalism does it. But this cosmopolitan ethic presents a "false catholicity" because the underlying economic realities do not sustain but rather consume particular identity amid the overpowering requirements of profit-making firms in a market system.

The workers at these various fast-food restaurants display differing facial features, hair and skin tone, but beneath this veneer of diversity lies the bedrock of capitalist homogeneity. Each retail outlet is part of a large chain, with owners far distant. Labor is treated as a commodity. The workers make the same low wage and have almost no hope for moving up to a decent job that would support a family.

Long's excellent critique of capitalism is similar (and presumably indebted) to that provided by many of the theologians he criticizes and by a goodly number of economists who populate the "heterodox" societies within the discipline. Neither Karl Marx nor Thorstein Veblen ever ate at a shopping mall, but both spoke eloquently of the constraints on economic life that arise from the requirements of capitalism.

Long also complains that theology has been marginalized in public discourse in large part because of the way science has treated the moral life. Max Weber is the primary villain in this story, in which science becomes regarded as the rational attempt to describe the world as it is, while morality is presumed to reside in "values" which people "hold." The problem, Long says, is that Weber set up rationality as a context-independent view of the world "as it is" and reduced the pluralism of perspectives represented by the great religious traditions of human history to the role of providing competing values with which to evaluate the "actual" state of affairs as described by disembodied reason. Long argues that there are many other traditions that don't see the world this way. Scientific rationality should be viewed as but one tradition among others and should not have authority over the modes of perception embodied in those other traditions.

Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

Christian Century, March 27, 2002 by Daniel Rush Finn

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