Christianity and Capitalism: Three Concepts from the Tradition, Three Challenges to the System

Abstract

There are three concepts in the Christian theological tradition to be identified and discussed in the context of capitalism and Christianity. First, however, I want to assert that capitalism is an ideology, and Christianity is not. Ideologies are always partial; Christianity is com? prehensive. Ideologies represent sets of ideas related to the good life, the way things should be. Within an ideology, the arrangement of ideas both defines values and makes them explicit. Moreover, the ideas within an ideology generate assumptions on which the institutions of a given sys? tem rest. Christianity, of course, embodies ideas and values; why then is Christianity not an ideology? Because Christianity produces ultimate meaning, and ideologies do not. They are locked into a partial perspec? tive.1 I would also note that any ism is an ideology with a distinct accent, an emphasis, a bias. Capitalism presents, as any ideology would, a sys? tem of ideas. The controlling idea within that system is private owner? ship of productive property. And the accent or bias provided by the ism in capitalism is a three-fold emphasis: (1) on private ownership, (2) on private decision-making with respect to productive property, and (3) on the free market as the mechanism for social control of the uses of property. An appropriate literary prenote to what will be said in this essay is found in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. Published in 1934, these lines refer to the personal psychological collapses, the human trag? edies which were part of the Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s: What happened in Libya Hill and elsewhere has been *0034-6764/82/1201-311/$1.50/0.