The Protestant Ethic or the Spirit of Capitalism

Christians, Freedom, and Free Markets

Kathryn D. Blanchard

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606086599
  9781498211819
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890690
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Since the publication of Max Weber's classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, it has long been assumed that a distinctly Protestant ethos has shaped the current global economic order. Against this common consensus, Kathryn D. Blanchard argues that the theological thought of John Calvin and the Protestant movement as a whole has much to say that challenges the current incarnation of the capitalist order. This book develops an approach to Christian economic ethics that celebrates God's gift of human freedom, while at the same time acknowledging necessary, and indeed vital, limitations in the context of material and social life. Through sustained interaction with such unlikely dialogue partners as Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Deirdre McCloskey, and Muhammad Yunus, this book shows that the virtues of self-denial, neighbor love, and sympathy have been quite at home in the capitalism of the past, and can be again. Though self-interest has enjoyed several decades as the unquestioned ruling principle of American economics, other-interest is steadily coming back into view, not only among Christian ethicists, but among economists as well. This book explores the important implications of this shift in economic thinking from a theological perspective.

1

Children, Not Slaves

John Calvin on Human Beings, Law, and Freedom

It may surprise some readers that this book looks to John Calvin for
hints of what a truly liberating freedom would look like in an economic system. If we have any mental picture of Calvin at all, it is probably of a pale, gaunt, and joyless face framed by an imposing robe and a funny hat. We may have a vague notion that he ruled Geneva with an iron fist, imposing strict rules and terrorizing his subjects with the severe doctrine of predestination. We may have even heard that he was responsible for the burning of an unfortunate heretic who crossed his path. While there is some truth in this picture, those who take the time to read and wrestle with his writings, both public and personal, will be rewarded with a picture of this formidable character that is closer to being three-dimensional. Most importantly for the topic at hand, Calvin presents a complicated but keen interest in the subject of human freedom that includes (but is not limited to) freedom in everyday economic matters of employment, wealth, and consumption.

Take, for example, the following excerpt in which Calvin muses empathetically on the material concerns that face his well-intentioned, middle-class Christian contemporaries. The scrupulous American reader may find it humorous, if not painful, in its accuracy:

For when consciences once ensnare themselves, they enter a long and inextricable maze, not easy to get out of. If a man begins to doubt whether he may use linen for sheets, shirts, handkerchiefs, and napkins, he will afterward be uncertain also about hemp; finally, doubt will even arise over tow. For he will turn over in his mind whether he can sup without napkins, or go without a handkerchief. If any man should consider daintier food unlawful, in the end he will not be at peace before God, when he eats either black bread or common victuals, while it occurs to him that he could sustain his body on even coarser foods. If he boggles at sweet wine, he will not with clear conscience drink even flat wine, and finally he will not dare touch water if sweeter and cleaner than other water. To sum up, he will come to the point of considering it wrong to step upon a straw across his path, as the saying goes.1

One can easily imagine a modern paraphrasing of this dilemma, no doubt involving issues such as whether a Christian can buy regular coffee or must only buy organic coffee; and can she buy the organic coffee at Walmart, or does it have to be purchased at the local co-op, even though it costs twice the price, thus presenting conflicting issues of stewardship; or do Christians living in the northern hemisphere have to forego coffee altogether, because it not only presents economic and political challenges related to issues of fair trade, but also requires the environmental degradation that accompanies the use of fossil fuels to get coffee beans from Colombia or Vietnam or Kenya to Michigan?

Thus Calvin, in spite of being separated from us by more than four centuries, speaks in a voice that still rings true for middle-class American Christians, who are collectively among the richest and most privileged people in the world (recessions notwithstanding). Like us, Calvin lived in a context of expanding markets, new media, increased immigration, and people of varied incomes. Like us, he lived among increased consumer options and faced economic choices that had been inconceivable to the previous generation. Like us, Calvin had to wrestle with the question of how best to live in this new economy, which brought with it not only new products but also, more importantly, new neighbors. In forging a new kind of politics against (what he saw as) oppression by the Roman Catholic Church and other medieval social institutions, he was adamant that freedom had to remain paramount—but what kind of freedom? And how is this freedom related to the true nature of human beings?

Before we answer those questions, it is worthwhile to turn briefly to a summary of Weber’s influential investigation into the historical and sociological connections between Calvinism and capitalism. Even those who have never read Weber may have acquired the vague impression that Calvin paved the way for unfettered markets with his particular brand of innovative theology. I will argue in this chapter that Calvin’s theology does indeed hold certain goods in common with classical economic thought—especially individual freedom, even freedom to make consumer choices. But Calvin’s understanding of freedom was always paired with his equally important teachings on neighbor-love and self-denial, thus leading him to a markedly different economic vision than a dog-eat-dog world. (Readers already familiar with the Weber thesis may choose to skip the next section and delve right into Calvin’s own theological teachings.)

Does Calvinism Breed Capitalism?

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has done more than perhaps any other work to foster the widespread idea that Calvinism and capitalism go hand in hand.2 While he did not go so far as to say that Protestant religion actually caused capitalism, Weber believed the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century phenomenon of greater economic growth in Protestant regions than in Catholic ones demanded some explanation. He concluded that Calvinist doctrines fostered capitalist practices through a unique mix of, on the one hand, a newfound sense of legitimacy about creating private wealth (to aspire to a worldly rather than monastic lifestyle), and on the other hand an increased sense of powerlessness to change one’s eternal destiny (predestination). Somewhere between these two movements, what Weber saw as the “spirit” of capitalism was born—the need to work but not to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. It is important to note, however, that Weber’s analysis was predominantly of early Calvinists rather than of Calvin himself.

In the centuries between Jesus and the European Reformations, Christian theologians had exhibited a lasting uneasiness with regard to the “spirit of trade” and its concomitant material gains. A deep suspicion of wealth (“that which by nature is a weight”) stemmed from an ancient, even pre-Christian sense of tension between earthly and heavenly pleasures.3 The Roman Catholic tradition, while generally affirming the necessity and goodness of private property, nevertheless held up priests, monks, and nuns—those who renounced not only sex but also private ownership—as the highest exemplars of Christian living. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught that usury, or the lending of money at interest, was “unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice.”4 Thus in theory, if not always in practice, the church discouraged Christians from any kind of economic behavior that smacked of money-grubbing; those who came by their wealth “naturally” (that is, through the luck of good birth) were relatively safe, but those who came by it through their own bourgeois efforts were to be censured.

But although usury and other proto-capitalist practices were frowned upon by the late medieval and early modern churches, it nevertheless took place, though much penance was required—often followed by gifts of art and architecture to the church. The answer to why development flourished in Protestant areas, Weber argued, lay not with any ecclesiastic, economic, or governmental structures that could be found on the books, but rather with the kind of “spirit” that took root in individual Protestant consciences as a result of their religious formation.5 “Even the Spanish,” he wrote, “knew that ‘heresy’ (i.e., the Calvinism of the Dutch) ‘encouraged the spirit of trade’.”6 Weber traced the first cracks in traditional (Catholic) economic thought to Martin Luther’s innovative teachings on “calling” or vocation. Early in his ministry, Luther began to experience a growing distaste for monastic life. Withdrawal from secular life to pursue quiet and prayer seemed to him a selfish luxury, a temptation for people wishing to shirk responsibility to others; it also encouraged Christians to believe that it was possible to justify oneself before God through saintly living. Perhaps most importantly, Luther thought it was harmful to the larger community (in his case, Germany) to have its holiest Christians depart from it. All of these factors led him to argue that, in contrast to cloistered life, devoting oneself to secular work was the most worthwhile Christian calling of all.7 As Weber sums up the Lutheran point of view, “labor in a secular calling appears as the outward expression of Christian charity,” an important first step toward a bourgeois mindset; but according to Weber, “[t]his view is based in particular on the argument that division of labor forces each individual to work for others, an extremely otherwordly argument which is almost grotesquely at variance with Adam Smith’s well-known dictum.”8

This insistence on other-interest, Weber concluded, was an important part of why capitalism did not flourish in Lutheran areas. Although Luther opened a door out of the monastery by sanctifying worldly work, he resisted other economic practices that were essential to capitalism. In particular, because of his traditional suspicion of usury (as well as his German nationalist horror at all things Italian, including trade), “Luther expresses unambiguous views on the nature of capitalism which . . . are, from the capitalist point of view, quite ‘backward.’”9 Moreover, Weber argued, Luther’s particular idea of the calling had the flavor of resignation to it; he emphasized the need for Christians to “submit” to God’s work assignments more heavily than he emphasized calling as a “divinely appointed task,” through which one could serve God.10 This emphasis corresponded to an attachment to the status quo among Luther and Lutherans, and to a reluctance to see radical socio-political changes accompany the upheaval in the churches at the time. The freedom of a Christian to defy the Pope did not extend to rebellion against worldly authorities, before whom submission remained the proper Christian posture. Weber argued that Calvin finished what Luther had only started, for “although the Reformation would have been inconceivable without Luther’s personal religious development and has always borne the stamp of his personality, his work would never have achieved outward permanence without Calvinism.”11 In Weber’s estimation it was Calvinist ethics—the way his theological beliefs took shape on the ground—that set it apart from both Lutheranism and Catholicism. While the latter two upheld rather than challenged European political and material life, Calvinism had a uniquely embodied form, an “ascetic morality” that “redirected ethical objectives from traditional social relations to impersonal moral laws, thereby internalizing discipline.”12 Calvinist Christians were not to rely on priests or other authorities to tell them how to live well; they took sola scriptura to its natural end and looked to God’s law alone, as mediated by their own consciences.

Reliance on their own consciences, however, did not relieve Cal-vin’s late medieval audiences of anxiety about the afterlife. “Without the power of this idea, which towered above all else,” Weber argued, “no moral renewal seriously affecting practical life could have been put into effect.”13 The most important and unique doctrine of Calvinism, in Weber’s analysis, is the doctrine of election—the belief that an omnipotent God has predestined some humans for heaven and some for hell, with absolutely no possibility for humans to change the plan. Although Calvin did not invent predestination (indeed, he believed he got it from the Bible and Augustine, as Luther also did), his determination to release Christians from the power of the Pope gave it a more prominent place in his preaching. Weber’s account is indeed terrifying:

God was not there for the sake of men, but men were there for the sake of God, and the exclusive purpose of all that happened—thus also the fact (about which Calvin was in no doubt) ...

Table of contents

• The Protestant Ethic or the Spirit of Capitalism
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Children, Not Slaves
• Chapter 2: “We are not our own”
• Chapter 3: Love Yourself as Your Neighbor Loves You
• Chapter 4: Splitting the Adam
• Chapter 5: “The Charming Conceit”
• Chapter 6: Expanding the Conversation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index