A Theologian Ventures into Economics

A vocational hazard of theologians and other church people is to make grand proclamations about money and the economy.

We particularly love to misquote I Timothy 6:10 to say "money is the root of all evil." It's actually "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils." Less stagey, but more accurate.

Yes, the love of money causes all sorts of evils. I think this is most iconically portrayed for American culture by Daisy and Tom Buchanan at the end of _The Great Gatsby_.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

Too much money takes your skin out of the game. You can be careless and reckless and never take the consequences.

But that, in itself, doesn't help much in trying to think through money as a system, or a store of value, or medium of exchange, or for that matter how to navigate a world in which some people are determined to secure the carelessness that wealth gives them, or people try to be very very careful and nevertheless do damage, or people who use their wealth to improve things but their definition of improvement is not the same as others.

I find that my fellow theologians tend to say two things: 1) people just _shouldn't_ love money, and 2) if they won't voluntarily give up money-loving, then we have to fix the problem structurally, and the best structural solution is socialist or communist.

To point one: telling people they _shouldn't_ sin has a venerable pedigree. It also doesn't work.

To point two: the number of leaps to get from here to there staggers the intellect, and all the more so if you actually look at the lived reality of socialism and communism.

A few years back I spent a lot of time trying to sort out communism for a book I was writing (Here I Walk: An American Girl's Hilarious and Heartbreaking Year in the Fledgling Republic of Slovakia). I was keenly aware of all the things the U.S. did wrong in fighting communism, so I forced myself to face the possibility that it wasn't worth it--that we'd messed up--that communism wasn't really so bad.

In fact, communism was way worse than I even realized.

This is so for a lot of reasons, not least of all repression of free speech, religion, journalism, and a great deal of ethnic cleansing. (Stalin hated Jews as much as Hitler.) I don't need to repeat those arguments here... though if you are in any doubt, please educate yourself on this matter and relinquish the illusions about communism, especially the old canard about "they just didn't do it right."

What has particularly come to interest me is how the human rights abuses are actually intimately connected to the economic system. They are not incidentally aligned. I plan to explore that more in future posts.

But I'll conclude this one for now by saying that I've become convinced that theologians make a horrible, horrible mistake by instinctively assuming that the Christian faith should tilt a believer, economically speaking, toward socialist or communist systems. It's a categorical and in fact imperialist error of forcing the world to be the church. It doesn't convert the world, and it corrupts the church.

That isn't to say that money is automatically done right in free market systems, or that the corrupting love of money doesn't give rise to all kinds of evil. It does. But it does every bit as much in communist and socialist systems, with less opportunity to push back.