Stark on Christianity and Capitalism

While I'm posting things some readers will find of interest, here is another one: the sociologist Rodney Stark's How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science from (of all places) The Chronicle of Higher Education. He lists several achievements of Western civilization, noting that other civilizations, some at one time more advanced than the West, never managed them.

The reason this "Western dominance" occurred "only in Europe," he says, is "the rise of capitalism." But

Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe's own "great leap forward," it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe.

The reason is one not often articulated, at least by academic historians and economists:

. . . A series of developments, in which reason won the day, gave unique shape to Western culture and institutions. And the most important of those victories occurred within Christianity. While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guides to religious truth. Christian faith in reason was influenced by Greek philosophy.

But the more important fact is that Greek philosophy had little impact on Greek religions. Those remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all of the other major world religions.

But, from early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress, as demonstrated by reason.

Encouraged by the scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of capitalism also was a victory for church-inspired reason, since capitalism is, in essence, the systematic and sustained application of reason to commerce — something that first took place within the great monastic estates.

He goes on to develop this argument in some detail, along the way dismissing Weber's Protestant Ethic.

Stark is, as far as I know, not a Christian. Readers interested in his understanding of early Christianity will want to read A Double Take on Early Christianity, an interview conducted by Mike Aquilina that appeared in Touchstone a few years ago.

Comments

[Arnold]

Rodney Stark's "Rise of Christianity" is a fascinating book and I suppose, the background to the interview you linked to. I learned much from it that was contrary to what most of us have supposed regarding the early Church: the high rate of conversions among the diaspora Jews; the role that Christian moral teachings against abortion, infanticide and contraception played in improving women's lives and gradually growing the Christian population; the role played by Christian charity and nursing during the plagues; etc.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Why do I have a feeling this post isn't going to generate 70 replies? [sigh]

On a brief note, the professor who wrote the article is actually Rodney Stark (you stated Clapp in the introduction).

Aside from teaching at Baylor, has one of the more extensive academic backgrounds in the sociology of religion with a heightened focus on Christianity. He is to the best of my knowledge a committed Christian and has done more than anyone else in American sociology (perhaps global sociology) to shake the cores of what he perceives to be an anti-religious bias in the social sciences. Depending on who you ask, he either gets compared with the greats in sociology like Durkheim, Weber, Mills, etc. or is attacked for his pro-religious bias. It's probably also worth noting that he has professed in interviews and other public statements that a large part of his acceptance of Christianity came from the fact that it is a religion built on reason. I have no idea what his denominational affiliation may or may not be. I suspect that as a Christian, he has little room for Weber's method of social science and the fact-value distinction.

I found the article interesting if a bit incomplete. I suppose I will have to read his forthcoming book to get a good grasp on the specifics of his thesis. It's worth mentioning that others far more critical of religion than Stark have been willing to give a nod to Christianity for both its promotion of reasoned learning and its critique of scientific charlatanism. Interesting enough, Max Horkheimer, reputed critical theorist and leftist, made numerous mention of the role of Christianity in debunking faux science in his Eclipse of Reason. This observation has been made by other continental thinkers as well. Interestingly enough, it seems there is more antipathy towards Christianity's relationship to reason and science in the "Anglo" world. I don't doubt a large part of it has to do with the public hissy fits thrown evertime the word "evolution" is mentioned or the declarations about God's forthcoming wrath because a school board decided to clean out the bozos during the election cycle.

One point I am keenly interested in is his remarks concerning private property, capitalism, and the non-Protestant Christian contribution to it. He seems to ignore in the article the Christian prohibitions on money lending and the fact Augustine and Aquinas would have held pre-modern conceptions of property in distinction from the one we take as normative today which comes down to us from Locke. And while I am sure Stark is intelligent enough to avoid forwarding arguments concerning economic determinism or the "natural course" of human history, some of his remarks walk unsettlingly close to asserting capitalism was either a natural or an inevitable outgrowth of Christianity's embrace of reason.

[Joe Long]

"He seems to ignore in the article the Christian prohibitions on money lending and the fact Augustine and Aquinas would have held pre-modern conceptions of property in distinction from the one we take as normative today which comes down to us from Locke."

I thought the idea was one of progression; not modern capitalism springing full-armed from the early church like Athena from Zeus' forehead, but earlier developments laying the groundwork for later. Locke, in other words, could only emerge in the society Augustus and Aquinas had shaped. I'll buy that.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Joe,

You may be correct and I would accept that if it Stark (or someone) could demonstrate it convincingly. I don't believe it is a radical or controversial thesis to assert that Christianity laid the groundwork for a lot of things; what is more difficult to argue is how these things we take to be normative today have a substantial connection to that groundwork. As the most expansive, consistent, and controlling worldview in Europe for 1,400 years, it would take a blow of amnesia roughly equivalent to that found in, say, the European Constitution, to deny the contribution of Christianity in some way, shape, or form to just about everything. The short and the long of my point is that I am unsure how Stark is going to convincingly demonstrate Aquinas and Augustine's thought in particular laid a serious foundation for capitalism as opposed to simply contributing (albeit in a significant and serious manner) to the larger backdrop of thought from which capitalism, liberalism, scientism, etc. sprang.

[GL]

Professor Stark's observation should give pause to conservative Christians who seek to use government (i.e., law) to impose Christian morality on society. For some time, I have come to believe that many of the leaders of the religious right are putting the cart before the horse. In Stark's interview with Mike Aquilina to which the original post links he states the following:

Constantine didn’t cause the triumph of Christianity. He rode off it. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say he had many harmful effects. I don’t believe establishment is good for churches. It gets them involved in the worldly realm in ways that are unsuitable and corrupting. By the end of Constantine’s reign, we see people competing madly to become bishops because of the money. After that, Christianity was no longer a person-to-person movement.

You look at the spread of Christianity beyond the empire, and you see that it was almost entirely by treaty and by baptizing kings. I think one reason medieval church attendance was so bad in Scandinavia and Germany was that these people weren’t really Christians. If it hadn’t been for the establishment of the Church, they might have been. Their lands would have become Christian because many people would have gone door-to-door to make Christians out of them—and then baptized the king. It was bad for the Church.

I believe that some of the efforts of the last 25 years have been an attempt to convert Constantine (the government) in the hopes that it will lead to the conversion of the masses. Some, by no means all, leaders on the Christian right seem to focus almost all their efforts in "converting" the government. "Converting" the government without converting individuals will, at best, lead to the damned being better behaved, but they will still be damned. Converting sufficient numbers of individuals will, especially in a democratic republic, lead ultimately to a government that reflects the values of its citizens.

The notion that America is in moral decline because of its courts or other branches of government is confusing cause and effect. Our courts and other branches of government have abandoned traditional morality in response to its earlier abandonment by most of our citizens, including its churches.

For example, it was Protestant churches, beginning with the Anglican Communion in 1930, which abandoned the strictures on contraception. By 1965, when the Supreme Court struck down laws restricting contraception and information about it, just about every major Protestant denomination approved it and applauded the ruling. The Court was following the population into Sodom, not leading it. The Court's ruling did not cause a majority of couples to use contraception; it merely decriminalized what they were already doing. To a lesser extent, the same was true of abortion, with many Protestant denominations applauding when the Court handed down Roe v. Wade.

A more recent example is the Court's Lawrence decision a couple of years ago striking down criminal laws prohibiting sodomy. Much of the population already thought homosexuals should be free to have sex and that it was none of the business of government--just look at poll numbers. The Court was not so much leading as following.

If we want to restore a moral society, it will take more than converting Constantine. Indeed, that is a distraction from the real work that it needed. We must convert individuals, one at a time, and, like the early Christians, have more children than the non-Christian population and rear them in the Faith.

[Tony Esolen]

According to Joseph Schumpeter, probably the greatest historian of economics who ever lived, Thomas did not condemn the lending of money at interest tout court. I'll have to search for this through the writings, but Schumpeter says that Thomas conceived of a fair-market value for money, since money, like the use of everything else, commands a price. This line of thinking was then developed further among other Dominicans, I think particularly in Spain, before the Renaissance. What Thomas really condemned was what we would call loan-sharking (which for him meant the lending of money at the exorbitant rate of ten percent per annum, or less, if memory serves me). It was Dante who departed from his master in this regard, condemning all moneylending, regardless of circumstance or price; but that was a function of the poet's hatred of the values of the new mercantile class, and his championing of the honest lives of old aristocrats.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

GL,

I sympathize with some of your sentiments and I certainly share in your conclusion that, "[i]f we want to restore a moral society, it will take more than converting Constantine." I do believe the observations about Constantine being an opportunist who exploited Christianity for his own political gain is a left over bias handed down from Edward Gibbon. The fact that Stark appears so eager to embrace it still in order to fit his liberalist thesis on the importance of the individual is annoying, but not surprising. The disruptions and corruptions of the Christian Empire are no doubt distressing and unfortunate; they are not neccessarily good grounds for condemning it absolutely.

The religious right are following a carrot the Republican Party has wisely dangled in front of their eyes for the past 25 years. The Republicans surely have to know that if any of the great sweeping reforms the religious right ever sought were to be fully attained (e.g. prohibitions on abortion, stem-cell research, marriage amendments), they would risk losing their political base. More importantly, there are enough conservative Christians out there who do not neccessarily see eye-to-eye with the religious right who would retract their support if some of those ends were met in the way the religious right desires.

I do believe, however, that you do not give nearly enough credence to the role of law in shaping the moral character of a society. The fact that opinion polls and social science data may indicate that at X moment in time, the population held Y opinion neither justifies nor condemns the content of the law per say. For the courts to concede fully to the will of the people is to ignore the purpose of law; it is to embrace positivism which amounts to no more than making the "Is" into an "Ought."

The fact a significant portion of the country one time believed the African to indeed come into the world saddled and for a portion of the white population to be booted and spurred to ride them did not make the laws that upheld that system by any means just. It did not and could not justify the decision of the Court in Dred Scott to deny a truth fundamental to the nation itself, i.e., "that all men are created equal" as is known by "the laws of nature and of nature's God" (see The Declaration of Independence). The courts were conceived to do more than capitulate to the masses, though I would also emphasize that the people, through the legislative branch of government, ultimately excercise control in a democracy.

The decisions in Roe and Casey were poor because they were predicated upon an idea of a right that could not justly be said to exist in either in the positive law of the Constitution or by "the laws of nature and of nature's God." The issues at hand in those cases were not legitimate constitutional issues that the Court ought to have adjudicated; they were issues left to the people to decide. The fact that the people had not decided that contraception was a good thing that ought to be legalized or that abortion was to be permitted by law ought to indicate the Court overstepped its bounds, regardless of who may have applauded the decisions.

I fear your "critique" of Christianity falls too squarely in the horizon of liberalism, though Christianity itself now basks in that light as well. (And to note, by liberalism, I mean the all-encompassing idea society now subscribes to, independent of any sub-classification of "left" or "right", "conservative" or "liberal" in the mundane sense of party politics.) Christianity does not seek to look to a new horizon nor even (for the most part) critique liberalism within the liberal horizon; it capitulates continually, even while arguing that it holds steadfast to the principles of the faith. The religious right is just a cartoon of this interplay and even if they have no real hope of having their ends met, their persistence at getting there as the distasteful effect of lowering the bar for the whole; Christians now believe they are faced--in contemporary American society--with the dichotomy of religious right politics or the sort of neutral acquiesence you seem to be suggesting. All of it is quite liberal; all of it is quite bourgeois; and all of it quite loathsome.

[Steve Nicoloso]

The take on this book over at Amy Welborn's (Catholics & Capitalism Redux, which has generated not a little interest there) seems to be more of Catholicism gaving birth to Capitalism than of Christianity and Capitalism leading to science. I suppose this all hinges on what we mean by capitalism, which as others have pointed out hardly seems the right word to use when we speak of ancient or medieval Christianity's view of property, however entrepreneurial it may have been. AFAIK, it was protestant, specifically Calivinist, Christianity that first allowed the charging of interest between "Christians", which is a necessary (tho' not sufficient) condition to have anything called "capitalism". I think it is fair to say that Christianity has generally embraced reason and logic, especially in the Middle Ages, and it is quite fair to say that reason and logic generally ennervate entrepreneurship and hard work. But entrepreneurship and hard work are not the same thing as capitalism, and even less so government investment (of gold, ships, and guns) in the privatized exploitation of remote colonies.

It is easy to see why Western dominance is due to Capitalism, but lets not lay the blame for Capitalism on medieval Catholicism.