Notes

Preface

1. Will Deener, “Working?” The Dallas Morning News, July 13, 2009, 4D, notes that, unlike in the previous four recessions, more than half of the layoffs will be permanent.

2. See Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 207), 11 and 21, n. 38.

3. One recent exception is Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

4. See, for instance, Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), and Duncan K. Foley, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

5. In this context, Economist Foley’s efforts to write an “economic theology” should be welcomed as a helpful first step, as he raises some critical questions about the weaknesses of capitalism. Of course, Foley attempts to rescue capitalism for a new day and age.

1. No Rising Tide

1. The median income was $2010 lower. These numbers are based on figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau in August 2008. In addition, the inflation-adjusted incomes of median households rose by 1.3 percent in 2007 from the previous year, from $49,568 in 2006 to $50,233 in 2007 (2007 dollars), while the overall poverty rate increased slightly, from 12.3 percent to 12.5 percent. Jared Bernstein, “Median Income Rose as Did Poverty in 2007; 2000s Have Been Extremely Weak for Living Standards of Most Households,” August 26, 2008, Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/webfeatures_econindicators_income_20080826/ (accessed 7/1/09).

2. Wage growth repression was accomplished to a substantial degree through the Federal Reserve’s efforts at raising interest rates. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006), 255. According to Brenner, Tobin’s Q, indicating the ratio of companies’ stock value to their net assets, was at 130 percent in 1998, the highest value since 1920 (251). Brenner predicted the unsustainability of this scenario already in 1998 and foresaw “a serious turn downward of the world economy” (266). The other part of the bubble in more recent years was, of course, the housing bubble. Brenner notes it in a 2006 afterword to his book (313–17). Housing, through equity withdrawals and other gains, accounted for 27.1 percent of the GDP between 2000 and 2005 (319). On this topic, see also the work of Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

3. “WTO Chief Warns of Looming Political Unrest,” AFP Report, February 7, 2009, http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/407470/1/.html (accessed 7/1/09).

4. Thomas Friedman, “Elvis Has Left the Mountain,” The New York Times, January 31, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01friedman.html?th&emc=th (accessed 7/1/09). A version of this article appeared in print on February 1, 2009, on page WK9 of the New York edition.

5. See special report on Forbes.com, “The Forbes 400,” ed. Matthew Miller and Duncan Greenberg, September 7, 2008, http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/16/richest-american-billionaires-lists-400list08-cx_mm_dg_0917richintro.html (accessed 2/28/09).

6. This is the lowest tax rate since the IRS began tracking the four hundred largest taxpayers in 1992. “Under Bush, Tax Rate of Richest Averaged 17.2 Percent,” The Dallas Morning News, February 3, 2009, 4D.

7. Tom Hertz, Understanding Mobility in America (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2006), ii, http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf (accessed 2/28/09).

8. Claire Prentice, “ ‘Econocide’ to Surge as Recession Bites,” BBC News, March 11, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7912056.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7912056.stm (accessed 4/29/09).

9. Some of these stories are described by Nick Turse, “The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis,” January 28, 2009; the number of calls rose to 568,437 in 2008, compared to 412,768 in the previous year. http://brechtforum.org/human-costs-economic-crisis?bc= (accessed 2/28/09).

10. Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences (New York: Zed Books, 2001), 9.

11. Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), x, feels that works on theology and economics have too often started with this insight, but we should add that at this point none of the mainline discourses of theology have been influenced in substantial ways. Tanner’s own effort to link the discourses of theology and economics from the other end—via economy rather than theology, of course—also ends up forging a link between religion and economics.

12. Paul Tillich, as is well known, talked about matters of God as our “ultimate concern.”

13. Fredric Jameson has talked about the “political unconscious.” See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).

14. Between 1997 and 2001 the top 10 percent of U.S. earners received 49 percent of the growth in real wages and salaries, and the top 1 percent got 24 percent of the total, while the bottom half of workers received less than 13 percent. William K. Tabb, “Wage Stagnation, Growing Insecurity, and the Future of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review 59 (June 2007): 2, http://monthlyreview.org/0607wkt.htm (accessed 3/6/09). One of the most notable things about the economic growth of the 1990s was that only the elites truly benefited from it. The compensation packages of CEOs, for instance, increased at incredible rates. Even though some still contend that many people have never been as well off as now, starting in the 1990s in the so-called first world more and more people, including significant numbers from the middle class, began to take significant economic hits. See also William Wolman und Anne Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

15. Hugo Assmann and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, trans. Horst Goldstein (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1992), first published in Portuguese as A idolatria do mercado: ensaio sobre economia e teologia (Sao Paulo: Vozes, 1989); see also Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism, trans. Philip Berryman (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1986); and Jung Mo Sung, Desire, Market and Religion (London: SCM, 2007).

16. Of interest is also the work of Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen, perhaps the only professor of economic theology, formerly at the University of Nimwegen. His major work is in Dutch: De Nacht van het Kapitaal: Door het oerwoud van de economie naar de bronnen van de burgerlijke religie (Nimwegen: SUN, 1984).

17. M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

18. The afore-mentioned book by Hinkelammert and Assmann, for instance, was first published in Portuguese and is available in Spanish and German but not in English. See also the work by Alexander Rüstow, Die Religion der Marktwirtschaft, 2nd ed. (Lit Verlag: Münster, 2001) (German).

19. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 82.

20. Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); and Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).

21. Nelson, Economics as Religion, xiv, “The Interior Department was often a battleground for a modern form of religious disputation.” “Economists played their most important role in American society in the twentieth century as theologians and preachers of a religion” (8).

22. Paul Knitter and Chandra Muzaffar, eds., Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy, Faith Meets Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002), 10.

23. “I do not mean to employ theological reflection as an argument for or against any form of political economy. My aim is more modest. The point of Incarnation is to respect the world as it is, to acknowledge its limits, to recognize its weaknesses, irrationalities, and evil forces, and to disbelieve any promises that the world is now or ever will be transformed into the City of God.” Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: American Enterprise Institute, Simon & Schuster, 1982), 341. The third part of the book, from which this quotation is taken, is titled “A Theology of Economics.” Novak’s titles speak for themselves. See also his book Toward a Theology of the Corporation, rev.ed. (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1990).

24. One discussion of this problem was put forth in Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html (accessed 7/1/09).

25. Meeks, God the Economist, xi.

26. This is discussed, for example, in Christianity and the Culture of Economics, ed. Donald A. Hay and Alan Kreider (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). The book contains contributions from a team of European economists. Donald A. Hay, dean of social sciences and professorial fellow of Jesus College in Oxford, points out the tensions between Christian values and the values of the free-market economy and considers them in light of the personal ethical dilemma of the individual economist (166 and the following).

27. Handelsblatt, April 9, 2003, 1.

28. Sarah Anderson and others, Executive Excess 2007: The Staggering Social Cost of U.S. Business Leadership (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy), 9, www.ips-dc.org (accessed 2/28/09).

29. Anderson and others, Executive Excess 2007, 10.

30. See the article by Jaqueline L. Salmon, “Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds,” Washington Post, June 24, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/23/ST2008062300818.html (accessed 7/6/09). Thirty-nine percent attend religious services at least once a week, and 33 percent attend once or twice a month. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles. In one of the largest polls on religious beliefs ever conducted, the Pew Forum interviewed more than thirty-six thousand adults.

31. With the “church-growth movement,” a whole branch of the church is busy applying the insights of mainline economics. The way capital campaigns are run provides another example of this trend.

32. Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 23.

33. The privatized German Postal Service might be considered an exception to this rule, as things are going fairly well at the time of this writing, especially for the largest customers. However, many services to individual customers have been eliminated, and the Postal Service receives government subsidies for those parts of its work that are not lucrative, like sending mail carriers to remote settlements or to islands in the North Sea.

34. Beverly W. Harrison, “The Fate of the Middle ‘Class’ in Late Capitalism,” in God and Capitalism: A Prophetic Critique of Market Economy, ed. Norman Gottwald, Mark Thomas, and Vern Visick (Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1991), 53.

35. Nelson, Economics as Religion, xv.

36. See Dirk Baecker, ed., Kapitalismus als Religion (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 7.

37. Neoclassical and neoliberal theories “have been able to sustain themselves for more than a hundred years without any fear of contradicting reality.” Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital, trans. Elaine Griffiths and others (New York: Zed Books, 2004), 142. The importance of the Chicago School is undisputed; this school has housed more Nobel Prize winners and John Bates Clark medalists (the two most prestigious prizes in economics) than any other.

38. While my description may be seen as somewhat of a caricature, this is also the way in which the standard economic textbook of Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 828, describes the Chicago School. Named in particular are economists Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich von Hayek.

39. White House Briefing, July 10, 1987. Reference on the Web: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Reaganomics (accessed 1/7/09).

40. Keen, Debunking Economics, xiii.

41. Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, 39. The authors define economics as “the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different groups” (5).

42. Here is another definition along the same lines: “Man acts to maximize utility in consumption and production. Such behavior establishes the impersonal forces of supply and demand that determine prices and quantities. Price is the governing parameter to which entrepreneurs respond, being guided by the rational behavioral principles (a) marginal cost equals marginal revenue and (b) the price of labor (and each other factor) equals the value of its marginal product. If markets should operate in a reasonably effective manner, the greatest allocative and technical efficiency will result, leading to Paretian optimality and maximum economic welfare.” William R. Waters, “Social Economics: A Solidarist Perspective,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 186. Another standard definition describes economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” Keen, Debunking Economics, 9, reference to Lionel Robbins.

43. Stiglitz made this statement in the context of the development debate, arguing that development advice should be tailored to the specific requirements of each country. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Towards a New Paradigm for Development: Strategies, Policies, and Processes” (Prebisch Lecture, UNCTAD, Geneva, October 19, 1998), 9, emphasis in original, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/CDF/Resources/prebisch98.pdf (accessed 2/28/09).

44. Keen, Debunking Economics, 2.

45. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Towards a New Paradigm,” 9. Stiglitz, of course, is a critic of applying these principles unilaterally and argues that this has led to failure. The “Washington Consensus,” a term coined by John Williamson, lists ten basic principles for the economic relationship to Latin America upheld by the three most influential Washington institutions: the U.S. government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These basic principles, in turn, reflected the “common core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists.” During the 1990s, this position became popularized as “let’s bash the state, the markets will resolve everything.” “Redefining the Role of the State, Joseph Stiglitz on Building a ‘Post-Washington Consensus,’ ” an interview with introduction by Brian Snowdon, World Economics 2 (July—September 2001): 3, 47, http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/download/2001_World_Economics.pdf (accessed 2/28/09). The term has clearly taken on a life of its own, but Williamson clarifies: “Some of the most vociferous of today’s critics of what they call the Washington Consensus, most prominently Joe Stiglitz … do not object so much to the agenda laid out above as to the neoliberalism that they interpret the term as implying. I of course never intended my term to imply policies like capital account liberalization … monetarism, supply-side economics, or a minimal state (getting the state out of welfare provision and income redistribution), which I think of as the quintessentially neoliberal ideas.” John Williamson, “Did the Washington Consensus Fail?” speech, Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 6, 2002, http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=488 (accessed 3/3/09).

46. One-page advertisement in The Dallas Morning News, February 9, 2009, 13A.

47. George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), xxii.

48. Soros, Crisis of Global Capitalism, 126–28. Soros points out that this is based on a mistaken logical dualism, which believes that if there are problems with state intervention in economics, the opposite must be the right approach: complete noninterference by the state.

49. Beverly W. Harrison, “Fate of the Middle ‘Class,’ ” 54–55.

50. James Callaghan, speech to Labour Party Conference, September 28, 1976, quoted in Milton Friedman, “Inflation and Unemployment,” (Nobel Memorial Lecture, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., December 13, 1976), 274–75, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1976/friedman-lecture.pdf (accessed 7/6/09). What better way to impose economic ideas than by quoting those under one’s own influence?

51. Friedrich von Hayek, referenced in Robert Lekachman and Borin Van Loon, Capitalism for Beginners (New York: Pantheon Book, 1991), 151.

52. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Change and the Planning System,” in The New Industrial State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8389.html (accessed 2/28/09).

53. Galbraith, “Change.”

54. Galbraith, “Change.”

55. Lekachman and Van Loon, Capitalism for Beginners, 61.

56. “Neoliberalism named a strategy that sought to place capitalism clearly back on the track of its still incomplete development by accelerating the drive to commodify, and therefore open every aspect of life to profits and the social discipline imposed by profits. This was not just a matter of the extension of markets spatially (‘globalization’), but of deepening the domestic penetration of markets into any social, personal, or cultural space.” Sam Gindin, “Anti-Capitalism and the Terrain of Social Justice,” Monthly Review 53:9 (February 2002), 6.

57. Joerg Rieger, “Christian Theology and Empire,” in Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians, ed. Kwok Pui-lan, Don Compier, and Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 3.

58. A German study, for instance, shows that social background rather than personal achievement decides who is at the very top. See the book by sociologist Michael Hartmann, Der Mythos von den Leistungseliten (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2002). What matters most for entering the highest levels of the professions in law, economics, and engineering are family roots in the upper-middle class or the upper class. Making educational opportunities more broadly available, Hartmann concludes, has not led to opening equal opportunities for top positions.

59. “Milton Friedman: Greed,” Phil Donahue interviews Milton Friedman, video on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A (accessed 2/28/09).

60. Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 21; they reference Giovanni Battista Vico, who realized this paradox early on (80–81). Another root of this thought is in the work of the British philosopher Bernard de Mandeville, who saw the beehive as paradigmatic for this reversal (82).

61. Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1904), bk. 1, chapt. II.

62. Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 97.

63. Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 99.

64. See Sheila C. Dow, “The Religious Content of Economics,” in Economics and Religion: Are They Distinct? ed. H. Geoffrey Brennan and A. M. C. Waterman (Boston: Kluwer, 1994), 195.

65. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 381; see also Waters, “Social Economics,” 180; Keynes goes a little too far when he states, “I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

66. See Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2001), ch. 6.

67. See Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), chs. 4 and 5.

68. Reference in Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Economics of British Imperialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 318.

69. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (New York: Verso, 2003), 115–16.

70. For a trenchant critique of the misleading nature of this hope, see William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Great 401(k) Hoax: Why Your Family’s Financial Security Is at Risk, and What You Can Do about It (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2002 and 2003).

71. See “Opting for the Margins in a Postmodern World,” my introduction to Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, ed. Joerg Rieger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

72. In an earlier article, “Theology and Economics. The Economy is Expanding: Theology to the Rescue,” Religious Studies Review 28 (July 2002): 3, 215–20, I discussed several books on theology and economics whose authors do not appear to be particularly worried that the economy might have the ability to take over the inner sanctum of theology. The solution, therefore, comes at the level of theological ideas. One author claims that if the church can get ahold of the imagination of the business world and the corporations, we can turn things around. A deeper analysis of the complicity of the church is not necessary since change will come “by the ecclesia through the corporation without the state.” D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2000), 260.

73. A whole book has been dedicated to this topic from the perspective of world religions: Knitter and Muzaffar, eds., Subverting Greed. Knitter and Muzaffar claim that all world religions agree that “greed is not an admirable human trait” (ix). In his chapter, titled “Conclusion,” Muzaffar notes that “the contemporary world has legitimized, sanctified, and normalized greed as no other epoch before us has done” (157). In this context, the “root cause” of economic liberalism is seen as the pursuit of unfettered self-interest (158).

74. Muzaffar, “Conclusion,” 160.

75. Muzaffar, “Conclusion,” 163.

76. See a more systematic exposition of this problem in Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), chapt. 3.

77. For the methodological details on this approach, see my book Remember the Poor.

78. Prychitko, Why Economists Disagree, 4. Note that Prychitko considers himself a follower of the Austrian school of economics, which is close to the neoclassical mainstream.

79. Keen, Debunking Economics, 312.

80. “Context is that which hurts,” I stated in my chapter, “Developing a Common Interest Theology from the Underside,” in Liberating the Future: God, Mammon, and Theology, ed. Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 129. This was said to sharpen contextual theology.

2. The Logic of Downturn

1. William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), ix, 9, 24.

2. In a court ruling of the Michigan Supreme Court in 1919 (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company), the brothers John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge, owners of 10 percent of Ford stock, challenged Ford’s decision to cut dividends in order to invest in new plants and grow production and numbers of workers, while cutting prices. Henry Ford stated: “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.” The court ruled in favor of the Dodge brothers, arguing that a corporation is organized primarily for the profit of its stockholders, rather than for the benefit of its employees or for the community. I thank Ph.D. student Meredith Minister for calling my attention to this case. See also the brief entry in Wikipedia, “Dodge v. Ford Motor Company,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company (accessed 3/3/09).

3. See, for instance, the account of Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR, 2000).

4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257.

5. Reference in: Christoph Deutschmann, “Die Verheißung absoluten Reichtums: Kapitalismus als Religion?” in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 160. They are said to infuse creativity through rationalization, new technology, new products, and advertising.

6. See also Deutschmann, “Die Verheißung absoluten Reichtums,” 161.

7. This logic of downturn is an extension of my earlier studies of the Lacanian notion of the real and the “turn to the other” in my books Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998) and God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

8. For the notion of “theological surplus,” and in particular “Christological surplus,” see my recent book, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

9. This is what the Greek term tektōn refers to; the word describes the line of work of Joseph and Jesus, and is often translated as “carpenter.”

10. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 1997). Allen has chronicled the origins of the history of the use of racial categories in the cover-up of class differentials.

11. A television series titled “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” ran from 1984 to 1995.

12. John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), xi, noted this increased tendency to blame the lower classes for their own misfortune in 1998: “Forty years ago I did not fully foresee the extent to which affluence would come to be perceived as a matter of deserved personal reward and thus fully available to the poor, were they only committed to the requisite effort.… Given such social attitudes, it could be better to be poor in a poor country than poor in an affluent one.”

13. Zweig, Working Class Majority, 10, 34–35. The middle class has limited authority and includes professionals, small business owners, managers, and supervisors; college professors are included in the middle class because they have considerable freedom, although corporate-management practices penetrate more and more deeply into this class. Many physicians are now in the process of unionizing, and even the Association of University Professors (AAUP) is adding a collective bargaining unit. For an update, see also Michael Zweig, ed., What’s Class Got to Do With It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR, 2004).

14. See, for instance, the book by Jack Good, The Dishonest Church (Scotts Valley, Calif.: Rising Star Press, 2003). Good appears to be too optimistic, though, about theological independence in the seminaries.

15. Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 27, 185, makes a valiant effort to challenge “starkly crystallized binaries, oppositions between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited.” Grau later argues that “most of us experience some degree of exploitation as well as profit from our entangled place in transnational trading.” Yet this approach overlooks that degrees of exploitation do in fact matter, that the economic problem is not just one of trade but, more fundamentally, one of production, and that it matters in what part of the production process people find themselves and how they relate to the means of production. Even when grey zones are acknowledged, the binaries produced by the free-market economy cannot be so easily overcome.

16. A new study, along the lines of H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), showing the class-based nature of denominations, might be quite enlightening in this regard. The matter today, however, might be more complicated and less defined by denominational borders.

17. See, for example, John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., New Working-Class Studies (Ithaca: ILR, 2005).

18. While following this basic definition, I do not mean to downplay the complexity of class. Sean McCloud, who is one of the few others who argue that class has a role to play in religious studies, makes his contribution in this regard. Seeking to combat reductionistic definitions of class, he suggests understanding the notion of class in terms of “socially habituated subjectivities,” picking up Pierre Bourdieu’s term of “habitus” and developing it further. Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 168. McCloud is especially concerned about deprivation theories, which argue that religious expressions are directly tied to experiences of lack and deprivation. Clearly, such theories are too narrow, as they investigate only one aspect of the matter of class. Yet the emphasis on complexity can also be misleading, and McCloud’s notion of “putting some class back into the study of religion” may not be sufficient to grasp the problem (70). The problem is that without a clearer understanding of the notion of class and the role it plays, scholars will end up picking and choosing social issues mainly based on their own personal tastes and preferences. The list of potential issues is long: in addition to class, there is race, gender, sexuality, age, and so on.

19. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 70–71.

20. Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch, 73.

21. Ehrenreich discusses some of the work of religious communities along these lines in Bait and Switch, 121–47.

22. Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch, 146.

23. Ehrenreich addresses the problems tied to the peculiar lack of professional credentials in the business world. See Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch, 213–38.

24. Beverly W. Harrison, “The Fate of the Middle ‘Class’ in Late Capitalism,” in God and Capitalism: A Prophetic Critique of Market Economy, ed. Norman Gottwald, Mark Thomas, and Vern Visick (Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1991), 60.

25. As David M. Brennan has found: “Productive employees are often invested in 401(k)s with defined contributions. Hence, current workers have an interest in increasing surplus-value extractions from other current workers. Specifically, current workers have an interest in increasing the rate of exploitation in the firms in which their 401(k) funds are invested. This causes a significant division among those who are currently working.” David M. Brennan, “ ‘Fiduciary Capitalism,’ the ‘Political Model of Corporate Governance,’ and the Prospect of Stakeholder Capitalism in the United States,” Review of Radical Political Economics 37, 39 (2005): 47. I thank Professor Christopher Roberts for calling my attention to this study.

26. There are some efforts to organize smaller shareholders and their vote, but, in most cases, alternative views are overruled easily. And since many 401(k) plans are invested in mutual funds, this option does not apply anyway.

27. For a very astute critique, see William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Great 401(k) Hoax: Why Your Family’s Financial Security Is at Risk, and What You Can Do about It (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2003).

28. Sweden is ranked 1st, with a poverty rate of 6.3 percent. See Kevin Watkins and others, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, United Nations Human Development Report 2007/2008 (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2007), 241, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Complete.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

29. In Germany, by comparison, the ratio of the richest 10 percent to the poorest 10 percent was 6.9, and the Gini coefficient was 28.3. Watkins and others, Fighting Climate Change, 281.

30. Amy K. Glasmeier, An Atlas of Poverty in America: One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960–2003 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.

31. Watkins and others, Fighting Climate Change, 281.

32. Arthur F. Jones Jr. and Daniel H. Weinberg, The Changing Shape of the Nation’s Income Distribution 1947–1998 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau 2000), 2, http://www.census.gov/prod/2000pubs/p60-204.pdf (accessed 3/3/09). The report concludes wisely: “Whether the trend toward increasing income inequality the country has seen in the 1970s and 1980s will continue, or whether it has stopped or even reversed itself, remains to be seen” (10).

33. Jones and Weinberg, The Changing Shape, 1.

34. The reasons for this arbitrary cutoff are unclear. Is it perhaps because these numbers are considered statistically irrelevant? But why would they be, if another significant change in numbers would be the result? Michael Parenti reports that a Census Bureau official told his research assistant that “the bureau’s computers could not handle higher amounts.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 130, n. 4.

35. These numbers are reported in Robert Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9–10.

36. Glasmeier, Atlas of Poverty, 3.

37. See Overview: Growth for Human Development, United Nations Human Development Report 1996 (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 1996), 2, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_1996_en_overview.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

38. Richard Jolly and others, Globalization with a Human Face, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: United Nations Human Development Programme, 1999), 3, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_1999_EN.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

39. Jolly and others, Globalization with a Human Face, 3.

40. Philip Alston and others, Human Rights and Human Development, Human Development Report 2000 (New York: United Nations Human Development Programme, 2000), 82, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2000_EN.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

41. Kevin Watkins and others, International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World, United Nations Human Development Report 2005 (New York: United Nations Human Development Programme, 2005), 4, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR05_complete.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

42. See Frank, Falling Behind, 13.

43. Tom Hertz, Understanding Mobility in America (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2006), i, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

44. Hertz, Understanding Mobility, i. “Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.”

45. Watkins and others, Fighting Climate Change, 352.

46. According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 23, paragraph 4: “Everyone has the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests,” http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a23 (accessed 5/20/09). The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church state, for instance: “We support the right of all public and private employees and employers to organize for collective bargaining into unions and other groups of their own choosing.” The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church 2008 (Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 2008), paragraph 163, B, 119.

47. See Michael Payne, “Unionization: A Private Sector Solution to the Financial Crisis,” Dissent (Spring 2009): 59. The AFL-CIO estimates that 60 million workers would like to be organized in unions, while opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act reduce this number to a still sizable figure of 25 million workers. For religious positions on the organizations of unions, see What Faith Groups Say about the Right to Organize, compiled by Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) (Chicago, IL: Interfaith Worker Justice), http://iwj.org/template/page.cfm?id=62 (accessed 5/20/09).

48. Sam Stein, “Bailout Recipients Hosted Call to Defeat Key Labor Bill,” The Huffington Post, January 27, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/27/bank-of-america-hosted-an_n_161248.html (accessed 3/3/09).

49. The common argument that allowing workers to vote for a union through “card check” (that is, by voting without secret ballot) would be undemocratic is distorted. The “card check” option exists already, but it is the choice of the employer whether it can be used or not. The Employee Free Choice Act would afford this choice to the employees as well, as they are the ones who would be voting.

50. Heather Boushey, Equal Pay for Breadwinners: More Men are Jobless While Women Earn Less for Equal Work (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2009), 1, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/01/pdf/gender_paper.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

51. Boushey, Equal Pay, 4.

52. Glasmeier, Atlas of Poverty, 1.

53. Glasmeier, Atlas of Poverty, 1.

54. Glasmeier, Atlas of Poverty, 1, 28.

55. This is according to 2006 numbers, the most recent data available. See Facts on Health Insurance Coverage (Washington, D.C.: National Coalition on Health Care, 2009), http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml (accessed 3/3/09).

56. Rik Kirkland, “The Real CEO Pay Problem,” Fortune (June 30, 2006), http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380799/ (accessed 3/3/09). The Muncer and Bush quotations can be found there as well.

57. Tom Gardner, “Hundreds Should Go to Jail,” The Motley Fool (January 29, 2009), http://www.fool. com/investing/general/2009/01/29/hundreds-should-go-to-jail.aspx (accessed 3/3/09).

58. Zweig, Working Class Majority, 75.

59. Religion is left underanalyzed even in terms of currently popular cultural-linguistic or sociological notions that do not address the question of political or economic power.

60. Note that even the current emphases on matters of context and embodiment do not alleviate this problem significantly if they fail to address the question of power. In this sense, even so-called Christian Realism does not necessarily measure up to a deeper understanding of what is going on if it does not engage in investigations of power in particular historical settings, which include the realities of class and views from the underside.

61. Victor Claar and Robin Kendrick Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Academic, 2007), 211.

62. This particular board was founded by my colleague at Perkins School of Theology, Isabel Docampo, and myself. For basic information on Workers’ Rights Boards on the Jobs with Justice website, see http://www.jwj.org/projects/wrb.html (accessed 3/3/09).

63. This is exemplified by Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies, who studies working-class Christians without any notion of what this class is struggling against.

64. Some of these attacks become public only in hindsight, as the most blatant efforts are being reversed. A recent Associated Press report, for instance, notes that President Obama has signed a number of executive orders meant to “level the playing field.” In this context, the following Bush administration policies were reversed, exposing only the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly slanted playing field. These orders will: “Require federal contractors to offer jobs to current workers when contracts change. Reverse a Bush administration order requiring federal contractors to post notice that workers can limit financial support of unions serving as their exclusive bargaining representatives. Prevent federal contractors from being reimbursed for expenses meant to influence workers deciding whether to form a union and engage in collective bargaining.” “Obama Touts Middle-Class Task Force Led by Biden,” AP Report (January 30, 2009), http://www.msnbc.msn. com/id/28933206/ (accessed 7/1/09).

65. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006), 336.

66. In negotiations with unions, for instance, a company can argue that certain measures are not affordable, and the law requires them to open their books. There is no case where unions, after being shown the facts, have pushed unreasonable demands. See Michael Payne, “Unionization: A Private Sector Solution,” 58.

67. Michael Zweig, “Economics and Liberation Theology,” in Religion and Economic Justice, ed. Michael Zweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 38.

68. Robert Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshall’ of the Bush Plan,” The Nation (April 26, 2001), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010514/dreyfuss (accessed 3/3/09).

69. John K. Williams, “Churchpeople, Socialism and Capitalism,” in Reader on Economics and Religion, ed. John Sparks (Grove City, Pa.: Public Policy Education Fund, 1994), 34.

70. This insight is also part of the wider Christian tradition, although it is often overlooked in contemporary mainline Christianity. It is one of the key insights, for instance, of the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury.

71. Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 55.

72. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Scribner’s, 1944), ix.

73. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” originally published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (February 1844; repr., Marxists Internet Archive, 2009), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm#05 (accessed 3/3/09). Citations are to the Internet version. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.” Emphasis in original.

74. Barbara Ehrenreich talks about the plight of white-collar workers in Bait and Switch; see, for example, 218.

75. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 244.

76. See, for instance, the account of Herbert G. Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” in Protestantism and Social Christianity, vol. 6, Modern American Protestantism and Its World, ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992); and Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Craig mentions, for instance, a Christian socialist movement in Oklahoma and Texas, which in 1912 brought 20,000 people together for a meeting in Snyder, Oklahoma (109).

77. In the United States, I would like to highlight the work of Jobs with Justice (JwJ) and Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). The tradition of the Roman Catholic Worker Priests in France goes back to the middle of the twentieth century and initially inspired several Latin American liberation theologians.

78. Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch, 236.

3. God and the Free-Market Economy

1. Any Internet search on this topic provides a large number of hits. For example, http://www.ceofellowship.com/ (accessed 7/1/09); this organization was founded by Joe Greene, a former president of operations for Humana, who started his own company “based on biblical principles.” The only example for the basis on biblical principles given on the website is that he used to pay his bills as early as they came in, not waiting thirty to sixty days in order to maximize interest. There is no mention, however, of whether he treated his workers differently than others in his position. See also http://www.ceoministries.org (accessed 7/1/09). The website advises: “The most important appointment in your day planner is your daily personal appointed prayer and study time. You must have an established daily appointment with the Chief Executive Officer of the Universe.” It then asks whether the CEO has “established a time of corporate prayer with your business leaders and/or staff daily.” See http://www.ceoministries.org/seminars.htm (accessed 7/1/09).

2. Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2000), 86–87, emphasis in original.

3. See: http://www.thejabezprayer.com/ (accessed 7/1/09). The link is to http://www.scripturalbusiness.com/ (accessed 7/1/09). This concept appears to be so natural that the Scriptural Business website does not even need to post a rationale or a mission statement. It simply states the following: “Welcome to the Scriptural Business website. Here you will find up-to-date articles on business, management, employee relations, hiring/firing, leadership, more than 18,000 downloads and a wealth of resources.”

4. David Van Biema and Jeff Chu, “Does God Want You to Be Rich?” Time (September 18, 2006): 12, 48–56, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1533448,00.html (accessed 3/3/09).

5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed., 1789 (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1904), bk. IV, chapt. II, par. IV. The full quotation reads thus: “But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, chapt. II, par. IV.

7. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New Rochelle, N. Y.: Arlington House, 1969), 264–65.

8. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 265.

9. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 265.

10. Claudius Luterbacher-Maineri, Adam Smith—theologische Grundannahmen (Freiburg: Herder, 2008), 331.

11. Smith prefers talking about the nature of things rather than about God, although the outcome is the same. In Wealth of Nations, bk. I, chapt. II, he argues that human nature is the reason for the division of labor. He finds “propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” In addition, he argues that, while animals are independent, human beings need each other. In Franz J. Hinkelammert, “Wirtschaft, Utopie und Theologie: die Gesetze des Marktes und der Glaube,” in Verändert der Glaube die Wirtschaft? Theologie und Ökonomie in Lateinamerika, ed. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (Freiburg: Herder, 1991), 68, the author identifies the early roots of this approach, which claim that the laws of the market have been established in nature by God, in historical developments between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century.

12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his famous play Faust, has Faust search for “that which keeps the world together at its core.” (“Das, was die Welt im innersten zusammenhält.”)

13. See also Luterbacher-Maineri, Adam Smith, 408.

14. Luterbacher-Maineri, Adam Smith, 409, reference to Alexander Rüstow, Die Religion der Marktwirtschaft (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2001), 27 and 31.

15. The Longview Institute, for instance, defines market fundamentalism in this way: “Market Fundamentalism is the exaggerated faith that when markets are left to operate on their own, they can solve all economic and social problems. Market Fundamentalism has dominated public policy debates in the United States since the 1980’s, serving to justify huge Federal tax cuts, dramatic reductions in government regulatory activity, and continued efforts to downsize the government’s civilian programs. While Republicans and conservatives have embraced Market Fundamentalist ideas, many Democrats and liberals have also accepted much of this mistaken belief system,” http://www.longviewinstitute.org/projects/marketfundamentalism/marketfundamentalism (accessed 3/3/09).

16. Duncan K. Foley, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 3. “The most important feature of Adam Smith’s work is not what it tells us concretely about how the economy works (although it tells us a great deal about that), but its discussion of how we should feel about capitalist economic life and what attitude it might be reasonable for us to take toward the complicated and contradictory experience it affords us. These are the discussions above all of faith and belief, not of fact, and hence theological” (xv).

17. Jung Mo Sung, Economía, tema ausente en la teología de la liberación (San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1994), 207.

18. Hugo Assmann and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, trans. Horst Goldstein (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1992), 27, referencing the book by George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

19. Yale literature professor David Bromwich, “Our God That Failed,” The Huffington Post (February 4, 2009), http://www.huffingtonpost. com/david-bromwich/our-god-that-failed_b_164112.html (accessed 3/3/09).

20. See the reference in Sheila C. Dow, “The Religious Content of Economics,” in Economics and Religion: Are They Distinct? ed. Geoffrey Brennan and Anthony Michael Waterman (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 197.

21. Dow, “Religious Content of Economics,” 199, 200. One of Dow’s examples is the work of Chicago School economist Frank Knight.

22. This is a radically different way of interpreting transcendence, which in modern times has been established by the work of Karl Barth (see Joerg Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001], ch. 2), as well as by certain liberation theologians. A recent approach that also takes up such an alternative notion of transcendence is Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Transcendental Theology of God (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

23. Warren J. Samuels, “The Methodology of Economics,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 360.

24. Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences (New York: Zed Books, 2001), 3; emphasis in original.

25. In Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 187, Krugman supports a “good old Keynesian fiscal stimulus.”

26. The reforms that Krugman suggests have to do with tighter regulations on the financial sector that resemble regulations for banks and a stronger safety net for the financial sector. Return of Depression Economics, 189–90.

27. Krugman, Return of Depression Economics, 182, notes the attraction of supply-side economics in recent years. But he calls it a “crank doctrine that would have had little influence if it did not appeal to the prejudices of editors and wealthy men.”

28. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), 435.

29. Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 464.

30. Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 464.

31. Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 465. Self-interest is nevertheless the guide even here: “The very reason we need to support the United Nations and the IMF, NATO, the World Bank and the various world development banks is that they leverage and magnify our power and our aid” (466).

32. In some ways, these reflections contradict the deeper beliefs in God’s providential ordering of the world that will make all things come out all right. The explicit theological reflections of Friedman are on 468–70, Lexus and the Olive Tree.

33. See John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004); see also Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), and our discussion of it in Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: New Perspectives in Politics and Religion, Reclaiming Liberation Theology Series (London: SCM, 2009), chapts. 2 and 4.

34. In William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Great 401(k) Hoax: Why Your Family’s Financial Security Is at Risk, and What You Can Do About It (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2003), the authors have chronicled the shift to 401(k) plans in relation to similar optimistic feelings about the market—an optimism that was never quite warranted.

35. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 15.

36. Frank, One Market Under God, 16.

37. Summers’s role is so important that he is giving briefings to the president every morning, just like the national security advisor.

38. Here is an example for a credit derivative: so-called credit default swaps (CDS) on U.S. government bonds, for instance, guarantee that if the U.S. Treasury defaults on its loans, other Wall Street companies will step in to secure the debt. The problem in this scenario, of course, is that it is not clear that private companies would be able to survive a crisis that would take out the U.S. Treasury. In other words, while a derivative carries a certain security, security is hard to achieve in a situation where the market as a whole is affected by downturn.

39. See the account by Peter S. Goodman, “The Reckoning: Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy,” New York Times, October 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html (accessed 3/3/09). For another account on the Web see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin (accessed 3/3/09).

40. Goodman, “The Reckoning.”

41. Perhaps Geithner’s additional comment that “the current financial crisis has exposed a number of serious deficiencies in our federal regulatory system” gives us more reason to hope that systemic problems will be addressed, but Geithner, himself, is deeply involved in the history of these issues. Stephen Labaton, “Obama Plans Fast Action to Tighten Financial Rules,” New York Times, January 24, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/us/politics/25regulate.html?th&emc=th (accessed 3/3/09).

42. “Geithner Apologizes for Not Paying Taxes,” Associated Press report, January 22, 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/01/22/2009-01-22_geithner_apologizes_for_not_paying_taxes.html (accessed 7/1/09).

43. Mark Felsenthal and David Lawder, “Geithner Urges Bailout Reforms, Apologizes on Taxes,” Reuters News Report, January 22, 2009, http://in.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idINTRE50K19820090121 (accessed 7/1/09).

44. Goodman, “The Reckoning.”

45. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton, “Obama Calls Wall Street Bonuses ‘Shameful,’ ” New York Times, January 30, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/business/30obama.html?th&emc=th (accessed 3/3/09).

46. Alan Feuer and Karen Zraick, “It’s Theirs and They’re Not Apologizing,” New York Times, January 30, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/nyregion/31bonuses.html?th&emc=th (accessed 3/3/09).

47. Paul Krugman, in The Return of Depression Economics, 186, has gone on record in this regard. He talks about “a full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system.” To clarify, he adds: “Just to be clear, this isn’t a long-term goal, a matter of seizing the economy’s commanding heights: finance should be reprivatized as soon as it’s safe to do to.”

48. David E. Sanger, “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look,” New York Times, January 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/business/economy/26banks.html?th&emc=th (accessed 7/2/09).

49. Quoted in Sanger, “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look.”

50. Quoted in Sanger, “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look.”

51. Sanger, “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look.”

52. See also Frank, One Market Under God, 21: “It’s not that capitalists need us to believe in order to preserve their piles; it’s that we must believe if we are to prosper.”

53. Theologians related to the Radical Orthodoxy movement tend to build on this safety of precapitalist images of God. See, for instance, D. Steven Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2000).

54. See also the comments of Christoph Deutschmann, “Die Verheißung absoluten Reichtums: Kapitalismus als Religion?” in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 157.

55. See my introduction in Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, American Academy of Religion, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series, ed. Joerg Rieger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which was written at a time when such bubbles were chasing each other.

56. Walter Benjamin, “Kapitalismus als Religion,” in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 17.

57. See Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

58. See Laurie Beth Jones, Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership (New York: Hyperion, 1995). See also Laurie Beth Jones, Jesus, Entrepreneur: Using Ancient Wisdom to Launch and Live Your Dreams (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002); and Bob Briner, The Management Methods of Jesus: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Business (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996).

59. See http://walmartstores.com/AboutUs/289.aspx (accessed 3/5/09).

60. Note that the high priests who conducted Jesus’ trials served at the pleasure of the Roman governor.

61. Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 16.

62. See David Prychitko, “Introduction: Why Economists Disagree: The Role of the Alternative Schools of Thought,” in Prychitko, ed., Why Economists Disagree, 10.

63. William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism,” in Prychitko, ed., Why Economists Disagree, 212–13, reference to the work of Thorstein Veblen.

64. Dugger and Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism,” 214.

65. Dugger and Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism,” 217.

66. Assmann and Hinkelammert (Götze Markt, 51), are right when they point out a tendency in economics to naturalize what is historical and to make that which is the product of human action—history—look as if it were natural.

67. See Ulrich Duchrow, Alternatives to Global Capitalism: Drawn from Biblical History, Designed for Political Action (Utrecht, Netherlands: International Books, 1995), 149–59.

68. Michael Zweig, “Economics and Liberation Theology,” in Religion and Economic Justice, ed. Michael Zweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 36.

69. See Dow, “Religious Content of Economics,” 195.

70. Beverly W. Harrison, “The Fate of the Middle ‘Class’ in Late Capitalism,” in God and Capitalism: A Prophetic Critique of Market Economy, ed. Norman Gottwald, Mark Thomas, and Vern Visick (Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1991), 61.

71. Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 825; Samuelson and Nordhaus also note, however, that Smith did not always trust business owners.

72. Frances R. Woolley, “The Feminist Challenge to Neoclassical Economics,” in Why Economists Disagree, 325.

73. The difference in income between men and women is well documented, as women earn, at best, two-thirds of what men earn. See Woolley, “Feminist Challenge,” 311.

74. Woolley, “Feminist Challenge,” 317.

75. Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson, Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7.

76. Ferber and Nelson, Feminist Economics Today, 8.

77. On this topic, see Joerg Rieger, “Reenvisioning Ecotheology and the Divine from the Margins,” Ecotheology 9 (April 2004): 1.

78. The Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

79. Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, 41.

80. See Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, 47.

81. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 49; for Galbraith’s account on this issue, see pages 47–49. In his further assessment, however, Galbraith moves too quickly to assume that today it is no longer capital but “organized intelligence” which is the basis of power (57).

82. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 19, 190, 203, 387.

83. See Assmann and Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, 10.

84. See the call for a processus confessionis that was passed at the twenty-third council meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1997: The Call for a Church Process, http://www.warc.ch/pc/debrecen/index.html (accessed 3/5/09).

85. For the background, see Michael Zweig, “Economics and Liberation Theology,” 25. Zweig, writing in 1991, argues that “the Great Depression demolished this theoretic complacency in all but its most die-hard proponents.”

86. The prayer can be found on the web at “The Deacon’s Bench: Where a Roman Catholic Deacon Ponders the World,” http://deacbench.blogspot.com/2009/01/rick-warrens-inaugural-prayer.html (accessed 3/5/09).

4. Consuming Desire vs. Resisting Desire

1. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), 82 and the following, has shown how desire and hope are distinct as well as related.

2. In Marx’s words: “The labor of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. from 3rd German ed. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 44. See also Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: New Perspectives in Politics and Religion, Reclaiming Liberation Theology Series (London: SCM, 2009), chapt. 2.

3. Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 45.

4. The only theological treatment of desire and economics from a theological perspective is presented in the Brazilian theologian Jung Mo Sung’s book, Desire, Market and Religion, Reclaiming Liberation Theology Series (London: SCM, 2007),

5. Martin Luther, “The Large Catechism,” in The Book of Concord, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 365. Luther reminds us, furthermore, that “money and possessions,” “knowledge, intelligence, power, popularity, friendship, and honor” can also take the place of God.

6. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Institutional Economic Theory,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 164.

7. Von Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 45.

8. This issue is discussed in great detail by Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006).

9. This is one of the key points of my book, Christ and Empire. We cannot assume that any of our traditions have shaped up independently of empire. The good news is that empire is never able to control everything. In order to identify where true alternatives emerge, we need to dig deeper and find the “theological surplus.” See Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

10. Victor Claar and Robin Kendrick Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Academic, 2007), 240.

11. Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 41. In this context, profits “provide the rewards and penalties for business.”

12. Walter Benjamin, “Kapitalismus als Religion,” in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 16, translation mine. “Das Verdrängte … ist aus tiefster, noch zu durchleuchtender Analogie das Kapital, welches die Hölle des Unbewußten verzinst.” In my own work, I also have used psychoanalytical models in the analysis of the social and political rather than the individual unconscious. See, for instance, Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Theological Challenge in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998).

13. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 115.

14. Galbraith, Affluent Society, 117.

15. Galbraith, Affluent Society, 120, 122.

16. Galbraith, Affluent Society, 121. “The notion that wants do not become less urgent the more amply the individual is supplied is broadly repugnant to common sense. It is something to be believed only by those who wish to believe” (124).

17. Galbraith, Affluent Society, 124, 125.

18. Galbraith, Affluent Society, 127.

19. William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 223.

20. “The businessman and the lay reader will be puzzled over the emphasis which I give to a seemingly obvious point. The point is indeed obvious. But it is one which, to a singular degree, economists have resisted.” Galbraith, Affluent Society, 128.

21. Ralph Glasser, The New High Priesthood: The Social, Ethical, and Political Implications of a Marketing-Oriented Society (London: Macmillan, 1967), 12.

22. Glasser, New High Priesthood, 9. “Just as a little boy will imitate his grown-up brother’s step and bearing in the fantasy hope that in doing so he will become infected by the real attributes of the man he wishes to become, so the imitative tendencies of adult consumers are one of the main planks in the platform of the new high priesthood in turning people’s aspirations in directions favourable to certain marketing policies” (11).

23. John Hood, Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), 223.

24. Hood, Selling the Dream, 220.

25. Hood, Selling the Dream, 221.

26. Hood, Selling the Dream, 221.

27. Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2001), 44.

28. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 55.

29. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 56–57.

30. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 141.

31. See, for instance, the account in Ulrich Duchrow, Alternatives to Global Capitalism: Drawn from Biblical History, Designed for Political Action (Utrecht, Netherlands: International Books, 1995), 35–43.

32. Michael Novak, The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 70.

33. See Bobbie7-ga’s answer to Brophy-ga’s question about advertising statistics on http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750 (accessed 3/3/09).

34. Paul King and David Woodyard, Liberating Nature: Theology and Economics in a New Order (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999), 67.

35. D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2000), 270.

36. Max Stackhouse, “Introduction,” in God and Globalization: The Spirit and the Modern Authorities, vol. 2, ed. Max L. Stackhouse and Don S. Browning, Theology for the Twenty-First Century Series (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2001), 30.

37. Long, Divine Economy, 78, 79.

38. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), 32–33.

39. Sung, Desire, Market and Religion, 32.

40. Dugger and Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism,” 214.

41. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), xiv.

42. See Míguez, Rieger, and Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire, chapts. 2 and 4.

43. Robert Frank, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 48, 50.

44. Frank, Falling Behind, 118.

45. Frank, Falling Behind, xiii.

46. Frank, Falling Behind, 25.

47. Frank, Falling Behind, 78.

48. Frank, Falling Behind, 26.

49. Frank, Falling Behind, 94.

50. Frank, Falling Behind, 116.

51. Frank, Falling Behind, 125.

52. James Twitchell, quoted in Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 296–97.

53. Frank, One Market Under God, 29; emphasis in original.

54. Frank, One Market Under God, 50.

55. Frank, One Market Under God, 247.

56. According to a 2001 survey by the Barna Group. George Barna, Researcher Predicts Mounting Challenges to Christian Church (Ventura, Calif.: Barna Group, 2001), http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/43-researcher-predicts-mounting-challenges-to-christian-church (accessed 5/21/09).

57. See, for instance, M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 171. John Milbank has argued along similar lines.

58. Meeks, God the Economist, 171.

59. Meeks, God the Economist, 171–72.

60. Meeks, God the Economist, 179–80. See also Frederick Herzog, God-Walk: Liberation Shaping Dogmatics (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis, 1988); and William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).

61. Recently, the notion of gift-giving and its function in religion has been endorsed again by Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 184. For a helpful critique of the limits of gift-giving see Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 49–61. “Gift exchange has some clear analogies with capitalist exchange,” Tanner notes, since “at stake in gift exchange is one’s social standing and social prestige” (52).

62. Meeks, God the Economist, 180; see also Meeks, God the Economist, 93: “The Gospels narrate the story of Jesus as the announcement and distribution of the righteousness of God’s reign.” Meeks understands the importance of work, but it does not feed into this conclusion: “The value of work has to do with increasing relationships among human beings and between human beings and God” (154); and “the future of democracy may be decided by the question of the democratization of the workplace” (155).

63. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 62.

64. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 68–69.

65. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 70.

66. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 128.

67. Sallie McFague’s new awareness, expressed in her book, Life Abundant, differs from her earlier work at the point where she observes that “the market ideology has become our way of life, almost our religion, telling us who we are (consumers) and what is the goal of life (making money).” Sallie McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), xi. This is a crucial insight, but, in her account, the most dangerous problem is the consumerism of middle-class people in the first world, driven by the predominant values of individual desires and economic growth (81). As a result, the gap between rich and poor is growing, and natural resources are further diminished (14). North America has a leadership role in this process, for we oppress others “by being the world’s major economic power and its chief exporter of consumerism” (33). The problem with this analysis is that we are left with the impression that things could be different if only those of us in the first world would give up our love affair with consumerism, consume less, and focus less on the individual and more on the community and on nature. The thrust of McFague’s economic analysis can, therefore, be put in therapeutic terms: we need to overcome our “addiction” to the consumer lifestyle (xii). What we need are “lifestyle limitations” and a “philosophy of enoughness” (33).

68. Stearns, Consumerism in World History, 139.

69. “As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied.… Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than at a lower one.” Galbraith, Affluent Society, 129. Galbraith calls this the “dependence effect.” “To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic” (260). In an afterword written forty years later, he pleads to add the concerns of elimination of poverty and care for the environment—in order to save the “affluent society” (263).

70. Hugo Assmann and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, trans. Horst Goldstein (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1992), 24, 39.

71. Anne Cronin, Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 132.

72. Williams’s fascinating story is told by Cedric Belfrage, A Faith to Free the People (New York: The Dryden Press, 1944).

73. See Bill Troy and Claude Williams, “People’s Institute of Applied Religion,” in On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983), 56–57. Williams also lists the “oppressors of the people and enemies of justice,” including “Ahab, Jezebel and other robber-murderers; Pharaoh with his taskmasters, magicians and soothsayers; the landlords with their winter and summer houses; church religion with its false prophets, high priests, priests of the second order; the Baals, Caesars, Herods and Pilates.”

74. Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 13: “Trying to understand Jesus’ speech and action without knowing how Roman imperialism determined the conditions of life in Galilee and Jerusalem would be like trying to understand Martin Luther King without knowing how slavery, reconstruction, and segregation determined the lives of African Americans in the United States.”

75. The real, according to Lacan, is that which “is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 53–54. The automaton here is the symbolic order, the master narratives that dominate a given context. In contrast with the postmodern fascination about metonymy—that is, the free flow of signification without referents of the dominant symbolic orders—Lacan maintains the importance of metaphor as well. Metaphor is defined as the replacement of one signifier by another in a process of repression. This process interrupts the free flow of signification and creates another level of reality underneath that which commonly counts as reality. Here is where the real is located. See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 164.

76. One of the great advantages of Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis is that it is not limited to the analysis of the individual psyche but lends itself to the analysis of social processes, since it has been developed with broader social horizons in mind. See the use of Lacan in my books, Remember the Poor, and God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

77. This notion of ambivalence is developed by Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. It is developed further in the context of theological discourse in Rieger, Christ and Empire, 11.

78. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

79. Hardt and Negri (Multitude, 348, 356), point out that the “multitude” can be seen as a new human nature. Note also the rephrasing of Lacan’s insight that the unconscious is structured like a language: “The multitude is organized something like a language” (339).

80. Troy and Williams, “People’s Institute,” 57.

81. McFague, Life Abundant, 48.

82. This is the approach taken in Rieger, Remember the Poor, and Rieger, God and the Excluded.

83. In Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), the author has shown that slavery is more widespread and more pernicious now than at any other point in human history.

84. The person “turned in on itself,” homo incurvatus in se, was a classical way of expressing this.

85. This point is also made by an economist: see Karen I. Vaughn, “The Impossibility of a Theologically Sensitive Economics,” in Economics and Religion: Are They Distinct? ed. Geoffrey Brennan and Anthony Michael Waterman (Boston: Kluwer, 1994), 245.

86. Jim Stanford, Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pluto Press, 2008), 331.

87. See Frances R. Woolley, “The Feminist Challenge to Neoclassical Economics,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 317–18.

88. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London: NLB, 1982).

89. Rik Kirkland, “The Real CEO Pay Problem,” Fortune (June 30, 2006), http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380799/ (accessed 3/3/09).

90. Stanford, Economics for Everyone, 333.

91. Albert O. Hirschman, “Against Parsimony: Three Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 340, emphasis in original.

92. While Friedman later regretted the term, his Nobel Prize in 1976 was based in part on his study of the underlying phenomenon. “Unemployment below a structural level of balance thus leads, according to Friedman’s theory, to a cumulative increase rate in prices and wages.” This sentence is from a press release by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize; see “This Year’s Economics Prize to an American,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1976/press.html (accessed 3/3/09).

93. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 311.

94. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 336.

5. Rethinking God and the World

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 7.

2. A standard definition says that theology is “critical reflection on faith”; I have long argued for the importance of self-critical reflection, beginning with Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998).

3. Both questions—where images of God come from and where they lead us—are important and must be no longer separated. In this regard, we can learn from each of the two opposing classical approaches: the approach of Max Weber, who has shown how theology influences economic developments, and the approach of Karl Marx, who has shown how theology is shaped by economic interests.

4. This is expressed in the following famous statement of Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed., 1789 (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1904), bk. 1, chapt. II: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 120, reports about different contemporary interpretations of self-interest and the tensions among economists between the followers of Samuelson and the Chicago School of Economics.

5. Nelson, Economics as Religion, 331: “The resistance of students is more moral than intellectual. If they must be exposed to many concrete examples that show how ‘the market works,’ it is because there is a strong initial ethical predisposition to reject the message.”

6. Nelson, Economics as Religion, 9. Nelson notes the complexity: “Leading economists teach the acceptability of self interest in the market but the ‘sins’ of similarly opportunistic behavior in ‘politics.’ ”

7. I show this for the case of Christology in my book, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

8. Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Segbers, eds. Frieden mit dem Kapital: Wider die Anpassung der evangelischen Kirche an die Macht der Wirtschaft (Oberursel: Publik-Forum, 2008), 184, addressing a position paper of the German Evangelische Kirche (EKD), titled Unternehmerisches Handeln in evangelischer Perspektive: Eine Denkschrift des Rates der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008), http://www.ekd.de/download/ekd_unternehmer.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

9. In his preface to Unternehmerisches Handeln, 7, Bishop Wolfgang Huber supports profits as a necessity. The document even demands governmental protection (“staatliche Sicherung”) of competition.

10. See Stuttgarter Nachrichten, December 27, 2008, 1–2. This news report also notes that Pope Benedict XVI blamed self-interest as that which causes the fragmentation of the world in his 2008 Christmas message.

11. See also the discussion in Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital (New York: Zed Books, 2004), 204 and the following.

12. Message from the Tenth Assembly (Winnipeg, Canada: Lutheran World Federation Tenth Assembly, July 2003), 17–18, http://www.lwf-assembly.org/PDFs/LWF_Assembly_Message-EN.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

13. Message from the Tenth Assembly, 17–18.

14. Message from the Tenth Assembly, 19.

15. Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth, document GC 23-e (Accra, Ghana: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 24th General Council, July 30–August 13, 2004), http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/news_file/doc-181-1.pdf (accessed 3/3/09).

16. “Economic Justice for All: A Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy,” the United States Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops, 1986, 1, 21, on the web: http://www.osjspm.org/economic_justice_for_all.aspx (accessed 5/7/09).

17. The Social Principles, par. 163, in The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church 2008 (Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 2008), 118. See also The Book of Resolutions of the United Methodist Church 2008 (Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 2008). It should be noted, however, that the United Methodist Church considers these resolutions as nonbinding for its churches, even though they have officially been endorsed by General Conference, the general assembly of the church.

18. Nelson, Economics as Religion, 289.

19. Dirk Baecker, “Einleitung,” in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2003), 7, 9. “Whoever says money says spirit. And whoever says capitalism says religion” (translation mine). “Wer Geld sagt, sagt Geist. Und wer Kapitalismus sagt, sagt Religion” (12).

20. Christoph Deutschmann, “Die Verheißung absoluten Reichtums: Kapitalismus als Religion?” in Kapitalismus als Religion, 174; Deutschmann uses the German terms Ernüchterung and Entwöhnung.

21. John Wesley, journal entry of May 21, 1764; The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1958), 178.

22. See, for instance, Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957).

23. This structure may not be visible during normal times, but it is much more in the open during extraordinary times, such as during capital campaigns.

24. This is how his biographer and friend Eberhard Bethge summarizes Bonhoeffer’s position. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev.ed., ed. Victoria Barnett, trans. Eric Moosbacher (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 867. It was Bonhoeffer who, writing from a German prison cell, first discussed the value of seeing things from the underside. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1965), 441.

25. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2:1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker and others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 386–87.

26. See, for instance, the account in Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998); and the contributions in Joerg Rieger, ed., Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, American Academy of Religion, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

27. La Toma/The Take is a film that not only chronicles the story but also the emotional involvement and struggle of the workers in this process. It is available on the web in full length: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6939956197822128063 (accessed 3/7/09).

28. Hugo Assmann and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Götze Markt, trans. Horst Goldstein (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1992), 52.

29. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper & Row, 1959). For an account of how Barth’s theology was shaped in relation to the struggles of workers and others, see Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt, Theology und Sozialismus: Das Beispiel Karl Barths (Munich: Kaiser, 1972).

30. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 157, emphasis in original.

31. This is the point made by M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

32. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 116–17.

33. See the North American Free Trade Agreement, “Chapter Eleven: Investments,” http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/NAFTA/chap-111.asp (accessed 3/3/09).

34. Aristotle noted the problem in his own way: “It is when equals have or are assigned unequal shares, or people who are not equal, equal shares, that quarrels and complaints break out.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (New York: Penguin, 1955), V:III, 178.

35. Most interpreters are now agreed on the centrality of the covenant and of relationship in the understanding of the biblical notions of justice. See, for example, Christopher D. Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001); and Walter Kerber, Claus Westermann, and Bernhard Spörlein, “Gerechtigkeit,” in Christlicher Glaube in moderner Gessellschaft, Teilband 17 (Freiburg: Herder, 1981).

36. This is one of the basic arguments of my book, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001): inability to respect other human beings is related to the inability to respect God.

37. Karen Lebacqz, Justice in an Unjust World: Foundations for a Christian Approach to Justice (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), 11, proposes to begin with injustice not because it “offers better ‘theoretical insights’ but because it is the only honest place to begin, given the realities of our world.”

38. “Between equal rights, force decides.” Karl Marx, quoted in David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 399.

39. I attempt a search for this energy without romanticizing it in my book, Remember the Poor. Of course, this is an ongoing process, as romanticization is a constant danger.

40. Elsa Tamez, The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective, trans. Sharon Ringe (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 166.

41. In Islam, economic injustice is also seen as an important theological issue; see, for instance, the Qur’an, Sura LXX.

42. K. Koch, “sdq, gemeinschaftstreu/heilvoll sein,” in Theologisches Handwörterbuch zum Alten Testament, vol. 2, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann (Munich and Zurich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1984), 507–30.

43. Dieter Lührmann, “Gerechtigkeit III,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 12, ed. Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 419.

44. See Jewish theologian Moshe Weinfeld, “ ‘Justice and Righteousness’: The Expression and Its Meaning,” in Justice and Righteousness: Biblical Themes and Their Influence, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1992), 238. If space would permit, a narrative approach to biblical stories about God’s justice would further demonstrate God’s struggle to establish relationship in the face of broken relationships. Karen Lebacqz, Justice in an Unjust World, works out such a narrative approach.

45. See the examples in Weinfeld, “Justice and Righteousness,” 242–43.

46. This is the point of Tamez, Amnesty of Grace. Marshall, Beyond Retribution, 93, describes what Paul and the writers of the Gospels share in common: God’s justice is “a redemptive power that breaks into situations of oppression or need in order to put right what is wrong and restore relationships to their proper condition.”

47. Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis, 1983), 8, 10.

48. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004).

49. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to George Logan, November 12, 1816,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), 69.

50. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 176.

51. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), tells the story of the various means endorsed by Friedman and his supporters, including support of the military governments in Chile and elsewhere. Friedman explicitly endorsed the exploitation of situations of suffering, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans area (410).

52. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 14–15.

53. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 15.

54. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 16.

55. Duchrow and Hinkelammert, Property for People, 33–34.

56. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 250.

57. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience (New York: J. P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), for example, talks about access as that which matters more than ownership. One example is the leasing of cars, which is preferable for car companies, because it establishes an ongoing relationship of customer and company.

58. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 26, 127–28. Emphasis added.

59. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 120.

60. For a more developed argument of this matter see Rieger, Christ and Empire, chap. 7.

61. Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11.

62. See the account in Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire, chap. 3.

63. Some exceptions are made for houses in walled cities, which do not have to be returned, but not for “houses in villages that have no walls around them,” which are “classed as open country” (Lev 25:29–31). Fellow Israelites who are in positions of bonded labor must be released, but this rule does not apply to slaves who have been acquired from other nations (Lev 25:39–46). See also Duchrow and Hinkelammert, Property for People, 21–22, who point out how these traditions were already weakened by their own times.

64. John Wesley, “The Good Steward,” Sermon 51, in The Works of John Wesley, sermons II, ed. Albert C. Outler, The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 283, emphasis in original.

65. In this sense, Wesley is more radical than John Locke, who is discussed in Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 40–46, and approaches the solution that Tanner suggests in the following sentence: “What if God does not even loan the world to us on conditions set by God’s continued ownership of it, like some big landlord in the sky? What if God simply gives us what we need in an utterly gracious way?” (47–48). Wesley is, however, more interested in a mutual relationship of God and humanity than Tanner.

66. See Rieger, Christ and Empire, chap. 2.

67. See, for instance, Tanner, Economy of Grace, 85: “The whole point of God’s dealings with us as creator, covenant partner, and redeemer in Christ is to bring the good of God’s very life into our own.” This is helpful because it opens new windows into the topic that are not commonly discussed, but the fact that God is taking a stand is missing here.

68. Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, I:14: “Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen,” http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/funktion/gesetze/Grundgesetz/gg_01.html.

69. Ronald Reagan, 1982 Economic Report of the President: “Political freedom and economic freedom are closely related.” Reference in Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 829.

70. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 144.

71. See, for instance, the assessment of the former Soviet Union in Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, 838.

72. Victor Claar and Robin Kendrick Klay, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2007), 240–41.

73. Frank, One Market Under God, 276–306; Frank also shows how “cultural studies,” an important development in the academy, often goes right along with these pro-market tendencies.

74. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89–90, argues that “the Church must understand and justify itself as the public witness and bearer of the tradition of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ of our emancipative society.”

75. Nelson, Economics as Religion, 329.

76. Nelson, Economics as Religion, 330: “The market works.”

77. By 1999, there were already one million homeless children in the United States; this number is the highest since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Dallas Morning News (July 1, 1999). In 2009, this number has risen to 1.5 million children, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. See http://familyhomelessness.org/?q–ode/1 (accessed 5/25/09).

78. Peter Senge and others, Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (New York: Currency Doubleday, 2005), 93.

79. For more information on Jesus’ radical reversal and the concomitant practices see, for instance, Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

80. The Apostle Paul, in particular, has often been mistakenly identified with the interests of the powerful and the wealthy. Yet Paul constantly dealt with the question of how privilege distorts the emerging Christian traditions. See, for instance, his comments in 1 Cor 11:17–22. See also Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis, 1994).

81. Using the example of a patriarchal context, Lacan notes that women exist “only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words.” Jacques Lacan, “Seminar 20, Encore,” (1972–73), in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1985), 144. That is to say, unlike “man” and other signifiers of privilege, “woman” is not an ordinary part of the dominant order of things. In this order, women exist only as repressed. The limited advantage of women in this position is that as such they are involved in, but not restricted to, the functions of the dominant order like men. Women participate in what Lacan calls a certain “surplus-enjoyment,” which escapes the authority and control of the powers of the dominant order to a certain degree and grants both a certain independence and a level of energy not available to the status quo (143–44). Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 52, follows up on the notion of “surplus-enjoyment.”

82. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 212.

83. See also the argument in Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 350; Hardt and Negri, though, seem to discount the value of additional meetings too easily.

84. The significance of blind spots is one of the main themes of my book, God and the Excluded.

85. Unlike Stephen D. Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (London: Routledge, 2000), who argues for the primacy of theology, I do not envision the relation of theology and economics in terms of a primacy.

86. See the prayer of Hannah, 1 Sam 2:1–10.

87. These numbers are quoted by UNICEF for the year 2007. See “Child Survival and Development,” updated May 2009, http://www.unicef.org/media/media_45485.html (accessed 7/1/09).

Conclusion

1. This issue is frequently overlooked not only by Christian theologians but by others as well. Buddhist scholar David Loy is one of the non-Christian voices who has argued that the best way to address the religion of the market would be through “traditional religious teachings, which not only serve to ground us functionally but show us how our lives can be transformed.” David Loy, “The Religion of the Market,” in Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology, ed. Harold Coward and Daniel C. Maguire (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000), 26.

2. For the latter see Heb 13:17; almost immediately following the previous passage referenced in the text above.

3. Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), chap. 3.

4. A welcome emphasis on the importance of ambiguity and ambivalence can also be found in the work of Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004). Yet Grau does not give much consideration to the need of taking sides and establishing relationships of solidarity with and among those who are forced to endure the brunt of the pressures imposed by the free-market economy. Neither does Grau’s God take sides, but becomes a “gambler and a courageous, hopeful investor in unpredictabilities, involved in subversive divine economic deals” (14).

5. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in The Collected Writings, Essays in Persuasion, vol. 9, 3rd. ed. (London: MacMillan Press, 1972), 330–31.

6. Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital (New York: Zed Books, 2004), 157.

7. Point made by Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences (New York: Zed Books, 2001), 1.

8. According to Robert Lekachman and Borin Van Loon, Capitalism for Beginners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 106, Keynes also endorsed a more egalitarian distribution of and control over investments, but this was never accomplished. David Prychitko, “Introduction: Why Economists Disagree: The Role of the Alternative Schools of Thought,” in Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, ed. David Prychitko (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 3, argues that the differences between Keynesians and Chicago School economists are not so great: “both groups held the same basic values of a dynamic, growing, efficient capitalist economy.… Keynes considered himself a realist in the classical liberal tradition.” Emphasis in original.

9. On this interpretation of Barth see, for example, chapter 2 in Joerg Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

10. Jung Mo Sung, “Der Gott des Lebens und die wirtschaflichen Herausforderungen für Lateinamerika,” in Verändert der Glaube die Wirtschaft? Theologie und Ökonomie in Lateinamerika, ed. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (Freiburg: Herder, 1991), 92. See also Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: New Perspectives in Politics and Religion, Reclaiming Liberation Theology Series (London: SCM, 2009), chaps. 3 and 4.

11. Rom 8:21: “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

12. The significance of the connection of our relation to God and our relations to other people—without identifying the two—is argued in my book, God and the Excluded.

13. Here is another place where the approaches of Max Weber and Karl Marx need to be connected. Images of God cannot be transformed in a vacuum but in relation to concrete material conditions, as Marx has rightly seen. Nevertheless, images of God that have been transformed in this way can also have important implications for social dynamics. Such implications were studied by Weber.

14. These numbers are quoted by UNICEF for the year 2007. See “Child Survival and Development,” updated May 2009, http://www.unicef.org/media/media_45485.html (accessed 7/1/09).

15. On this topic see Joerg Rieger, ed., Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, American Academy of Religion, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The preferential option for the poor gains fresh importance in a postmodern world, where concern about the poor is either seen as special interest or gets lost in pluralistic perspectives.