Capitalism and Christianity
For years, a debate has waged between prominent Christian and secular scholars, teachers, and thinkers, and the question has been this: Has the Church supported or opposed capitalism historically? Furthermore, is there a causal relationship between Christianity and capitalism, and if so, what role did the Church play in that relationship? Our duty today is to follow the historical relationship between capitalism and Christianity and discuss exactly where the two intersect. To begin our discussion, we must first define capitalism. Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights, in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market. For most of Christianity’s nearly 2000 years, it has not only looked down upon capitalism and its characteristics of individual and property rights, but has banned it altogether. For over 1500 years, the Church banned charging interest, and looked down upon what we today call “unearned income”, the lifeblood of capitalism through which we make money on money: interest, capital gains, and investment income. ... " (NASB) Considering these Christian sayings on money and wealth, how then did it come to be that capitalism today is widely accepted and promoted by Catholicism and the Protestant faiths? Michael Novak, in his work “How Christianity Created Capitalism”, has a few important points to make, and actually challenges the notion that the Church always opposed capitalism. In fact, Novak and a few of his contemporaries directly assert that not only did the Church promote capitalism, but actually laid the foundation for it to flourish in Western civilizations. “Capitalism, it’s usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment—the eighteenth century—and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism. Max Weber (1864-1920) located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today’s historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life.” (Novak) It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Max Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for trans-generational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings.