The influence of religious thinking on economic thinking: America’s social gospel, with thoughts on Rerum Novarum

Abstract

Contrary to the conventional view that modern Western economics emerged from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century with no connection to religious ideas, economic thinking at the discipline’s origins was powerfully influenced by what were then new and highly controversial lines of thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Further, as economies evolved over the subsequent centuries, and the questions economists asked and the approaches they brought to bear changed as well, religious thinking continued to shape economic thinking. The Social Gospel that emerged in America in the late nineteenth century and Pope Leo XIII’s influential statement Rerum Novarum offer an especially interesting example of this influence.