OCTOBER 4 2015
Is Capitalism a religion?
Let me take a look back, a really long look back. I think the root of Capitalism appeared in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:9 it is recorded that God made trees to come out of the ground, ‘trees pleasing to the eye and good for food’. Then in the next chapter Genesis 3: 6, when the human race had a closer look at the trees, prodded by God’s archenemy, trees were suddenly seen in a different light: ‘trees good for food and pleasing to the eye’. There you have it: the order reversed, the beginning of capitalism: good for food, good to feast upon, good for profit, never mind the beauty of creation, never mind creational collapse.
In last week’s blog I defined religion as a belief or condition that is pervasive in all our actions, that motivates all of our life.
We know that in the Western world the condition what is generally defined as ‘religion’ is very much on the wane. In my neck of the woods, a municipality with 6500 people inhabiting an area the size of the city of Hamilton with over 500,000 people no more than 200 people attend church on a given Sunday, or 3 percent, mostly old people. Yet we call our nation a Christian country. The children and grandchildren of these people, by and large, never darken the doors of the church except for funerals. So what is their religion because nobody is not ‘not-religious’?
‘Not religious’ means that God and Jesus do not play a role in their lives. They never pray even though the exclamation “Oh my God” is heard quite frequently. Still the monotheistic faith-traditions have not just disappeared into the thin air of modernity. Islam is the most pious of them, perhaps because it requires work: it involves the keeping of the five all important religious duties: confession of faith, prayer, the giving of alms, fasting and the pilgrim trek to Mecca. Islamic cultures also contain strong currents of resistance to Western consumer individualism because they are perceived as decadent and nihilistic, and they are. But in the West, Christianity has lost much of its power to resist the new god that has (and is) conquering the old ones (just like Christianity did in its displacement of Roman deities). And that power is Capitalism, which has become our first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular.
Capitalism comes with its own theology.
Economics is the new theology of this global religion of the market. It has different expressions, but the overall aim is the same: consumerism is its highest good; its language of hedge funds and derivatives as incomprehensibly involved as the Christian teachings about the Trinity or Predestination. Its mantra is “Accumulate, accumulate”. Where in Islam the slogan is “God is great”, meaning Allah, in Capitalism it is “Greed is great,” something that, I think, started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, when economics- good for food- had priority over the aesthetic – pleasing to the eye.
We are all religious.
Human beings are innately religious. Nobody is not ‘not-religious’. Watching Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister fighting for his political future, outline his re-election platform, is watching religion at work: lower taxes, economic growth, balanced budgets: the trinity of Capitalistic faith. Of course the other contestants believe the same. That we live in a finite world, that perpetual growth only takes place in un-treated cancer cells, is never mentioned. That perpetual growth has given us the cancer of Climate Change is never mentioned. To say that, to openly admit that, is to question the god of our age, and that is sacrilege.
Any intervention in the “world of business” is perceived as a threat to the “natural order of things,” a direct challenge to the “wisdom of the market.” That the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, that awe for the greatness of creation and its holiness, must be observed, goes directly against the grain of capitalism. No, capitalism demands that its dogma must be applied universally, must be observed as the dominant religion of our time. The TPP – the Trans Pacific Partnership- is just the latest example.
Yes, Capitalism is a religion. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance, all the hallmarks of a (false) religion. The Bible may say that blessed are the poor, that blessed are those who put their trust in the New Creation to come, but that is seen as undemocratic. When Jesus says that “my kingdom is not of this world’, then he simply means that, as 1 John 5 : 19 says,” the whole world is under the control of the evil one,” and Jesus wants no part of the world ruled by Satan, a world dominated by Capitalism, our present world.
Shunning the consumer paradise for a life of self-sufficiency, taking in refugees, of whatever color or creed, devoting one’s life to alleviating the plight of others, pursuing a “the earth is holy” policy, all that is not an optional matter for most faith-community members: it is their holy duty.
Are the old religions are no longer viable?
How did this transition come about? The Lord’s Prayer, still somewhat in vogue today, has two striking lines right at the beginning: “Hallowed be thy name” and “Thy Kingdom come.” Most of us who utter these words have no clue what they mean. The church by and large avoids explaining these phrases because they are so totally controversial. That they mean that the earth is holy and that the kingdom is the new earth to come, and that thus our entire focus is not on “our daily bread” (which is mistranslated in that same prayer) but that we must live for “the new creation” is never preached, because it goes against the capitalistic creed.
Must we fight Capitalism?
Capitalism stares at us the minute we turn on TV or radio or open a newspaper. It is everywhere, while the old religions have given up the fight by preaching ‘heaven’ or ‘rapture’, delegating the earth to a place of non-relevance. It is sad but true that the old-time religion is only good for a very few, mostly the elderly, and they often are exposed to a distorted gospel.
Beginning in the late middle ages and reaching its first plateau in the late eighteenth century, the capitalist market began to assume an autonomous, god-like existence. Protestant believers began to measure God’s favor by their economic success. Economic success was the means to achieve the end of God’s favor and eternal salvation. Eventually, the means, economic blessings, displaced God himself. God was now The Market–the Source of all Hopes. Who disputes the gospel of sustained economic development? Even Jesus would drive an S.U.V, as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the once formidable American leader of the Christian Right, wanted us to believe.
Have we been warned?
Eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned us over two centuries ago that the market was a “dangerous system because it corrodes the shared common values it needs to restrain its excesses”. Two hundred years later, Polyani – a Nobel Prize winner – argued against a system that annihilated “the human and natural substance of society.”
Today the demands made on the physical world are all penetrating. German philosopher Habermas in his “colonization of the lifeworld,” wrote: “Doesn’t everyone know that the god we serve requires clear cut forests, depleted oceans, empty oil wells, toxics dumped into the biosphere? “ Genesis 3: 6 all over again.
Everyone also knows, deep down, in their heart of hearts, that the god we serve actually has no life of its own. In Capital, volume 1, Marx imagined that the god of the market was like a vampire who “lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” This monster feeds on the life force of the natural and human worlds. It needs men and women as slaves who have energy and the motivation to work endlessly with others to produce the goods. Even prolonging the working day, says Marx, “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.”
And then there is Jesus.
When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.
No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. Look what Volkswagen did. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. If I understand Jesus correctly, I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will we recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel if we know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.
Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighboring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.
Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else to get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.
Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered around it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold: three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave.
An idol always wants sacrifice. In our case we sacrifice the whole earth and with it our very selves.