Abstract
This article engages with how religion and economy relate to each other in faith-based businesses. It also elaborates on a recurrent idea in theological literature that reflections on different visions of time can advance theological analyses of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. More specifically, this article brings results from an ethnographic study of two faith-based businesses into conversation with the ethicist Luke Bretherton’s presentation of different understandings of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. Using Theodore Schatzki’s theory of timespace, the article examines how time and space are constituted in two small faith-based businesses that are part of the two networks Business as Mission (evangelical) and Economy of Communion (catholic) and how the different timespaces affect the religious-economic configurations in the two cases and with what moral implications. The overall findings suggest that the timespace in the Catholic business was characterized by struggling caused by a tension between certain ideals on how religion and economy should relate to each other on the one hand and how the practice evolved on the other hand. Furthermore, the timespace in the evangelical business was characterized by confidence, caused by the business having a rather distinct and achievable goal when it came to how they wanted to be different and how religion should relate to economy. There are, however, nuances and important resemblances between the cases that cannot be explained by the businesses’ confessional and theological affiliations. Rather, there seems to be something about the phenomenon of tension-filled and confident faith-based businesses that causes a drive in the practices towards the common good. After mapping the results of the empirical study, I discuss some contributions that I argue this study brings to Bretherton’s presentation of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism.
Highlights
Introduction iationsHow is one to understand the relationship between religion and capitalism? One recurrent approach among theologians and theological ethicists is to use time1 as a central theme when analyzing this relationship
This article engages with how religion and economy relate to each other in faithbased businesses
It elaborates on the recurrent idea in the theological literature that reflections on different visions of time can advance theological analyses of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism
Summary
Christianity and capitalism in the recent theological literature. In Christ and the Common Life, Luke Bretherton highlights six different responses to capitalism from political theologies of various positions (Bretherton 2019, pp. 350–51). While using Bretherton’s categories, I will add to them literature that is relevant for the article This approach is different from, for example, Latin liberation theologies that present Christianity and capitalism as being in opposition to each other I will argue that Bretherton’s political theology would gain from including complementary ethnographic studies on the relationship between religion and economy in Christian practices. Tanner draws many of her descriptions of how capitalism “works” from (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) Related to this approach is the growing interdisciplinary field often called “economic theology” that looks into how Christianity and economics historically have been, and are today, interrelated. Contrary to the chapter on CST, the presentation of Pentecostal/charismatic political theology includes some empirical material, which is not surprising since, as Bretherton puts it, the Pentecostal movement lacks “a clear canon as well as identifiable key thinkers and institutional expressions and sociopolitical forms”. This is a term that Bretherton is using when arguing that there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for the relationship between Christianity and politics (Bretherton 2019, p. 4)
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