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The Market as God
We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1–35) has returned in … the idolatry of money.… In this system … whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market.
—Pope Francis
In November 2013, the recently elected Pope Francis issued a document entitled “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel). Neither in Latin nor in English was the title designed to attract a huge readership. But as the news began to spread of what it said, the fifty-thousand-word “apostolic exhortation” became one of the most controversial and widely discussed writings in recent memory. Undoubtedly the reason for its instant notoriety was that the pope includes a stinging critique of today’s unbridled consumerism and “economy of exclusion and inequality.” He notes that “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” His Holiness begs to differ. “This opinion,” he says, “expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.” Meanwhile, “the excluded are still waiting … [and] a globalization of indifference has developed.” Later he speaks about a “deified market” and “ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace”—a system, he says, “which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits.”1
These are bold and controversial claims, of a kind one does not normally expect from papal statements. But Francis is speaking as someone who, unlike most previous prelates, knows poverty firsthand. He has spent many days visiting his people in the crowded tarpaper slums of Argentina. His first trip as pope was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where the bodies of desperate refugees who tried to flee hunger wash up on the shore. More recently he visited with the excluded and exploited indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico.
The importance of this document, however, is that Francis goes beyond the moral outrage many feel about these injustices. What caught my eye in particular was the pope’s use of explicit religious language like “the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system” and “a deified market.” What was Francis intending with these phrases? Was he just waxing metaphorical, or was he lifting the ordinary critique of the suffering caused by economic inequality out of the strictly moral idiom in which it is usually phrased, and raising it to a theological level? Did he really believe that what he called “unrestricted consumer capitalism” had become a quasi-religion, maybe even a heresy?
These questions piqued my interest because I had personally spent some time considering the nature of our society’s faith in markets.2 Some years ago, a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should skip the front page of the New York Times and turn immediately to the business section. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons, so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary.
I did not. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were strangely familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Economist turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine’s City of God. Behind descriptions of acquisitions and mergers, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow and the NASDAQ, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things go wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. Here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of over-regulation, captivity to faceless business cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt-tightening along the way for those economies that fall into the sin of arrears. I realized then that my many years of studying religion and theology had prepared me to approach this mysterious thing called the economy more knowingly than I could have guessed.
On June 18, 2015, Pope Francis released a longer teaching he entitled “Laudato Si” which addresses the growing planetary crisis brought on by climate change. In this encyclical the pope continued to decry those who put profits above the health of the earth, and questioned the idea that “current economics” or “market growth” could head off the climate catastrophe toward which we are hurtling, or the starvation and poverty it will bring. I have never believed the old Vatican adage Roma locuta, causa finita (“Rome has spoken, the matter is closed”) but I was gratified to see that, at least in this matter, the bishop of Rome and I were on the same page. The crisis that our current economic practices have created for what he calls “our common home” is not just an economic one, and even more than a moral one. It is a spiritual, even theological, crisis and must be understood at that level.
I do not believe Pope Francis is speaking just metaphorically any more than I believe he is indulging in hyperbole when he equates the early death caused by economic inequality with the murder forbidden by “thou shall not kill.” He is drawing our collective attention to what has become a powerful and all-encompassing worldview, a vision of reality that pulls everything into its orbit and that should therefore be recognized as a kind of religion. The phrase “religion of the market” is not just a figure of speech. Faith in the workings of markets actually takes the form of a functioning religion, complete with its own priests and rituals, its own doctrines and theologies, its own saints and prophets, and its own zeal to bring its gospel to the whole world and win converts everywhere. The fact that acolytes of the market faith do not formally acknowledge it as a religion does not change this reality. Only when we have seen it for what it is can we appreciate the profound challenge the market faith poses and the depth and scope of our global crisis.
Encouraged by the example of Pope Francis, I took up again my excursions into what had been for me the unexplored continent of business and finance. I soon found that a theological lens provides an illuminating way to understand economic debates. The troubles with countries from Japan to Greece, I recognized the Market’s votaries to be arguing, derive from their heretical straying from free-market orthodoxy—they are practitioners of “crony capitalism,” or “ethno-capitalism,” or “statist capitalism.” Like those of ancient Arians or medieval Albigensians, their theories are all deviations from the one true faith—in other words, heresies. In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, I saw the kind of crisis that shakes the foundations of belief. But faith is strengthened by adversity, and the market religion emerged buttressed and renewed from its trial by financial heterodoxies. The banks that were “too big to fail” are bigger than ever. In a modern age when arguments from design no longer suffice to prove any god’s existence, the god of the market is like Pascal’s deity—believed in despite the evidence. A decade ago Alan Greenspan evinced this tempered but stalwart faith as he testified before Congress. A leading hedge fund had just lost billions of dollars, shaking market confidence and precipitating calls for new federal regulation. Greenspan, usually Delphic in his comments, was decisive. He believed, he said, that regulation would only impede these markets, and that they should continue to be self-regulated. True faith, Saint Paul tells us, is “the evidence of things unseen.”
To begin exploring the market theology is quickly to marvel at just how comprehensive it is. There are sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a liturgical year, a calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and even what theologians call “eschatology”—a teaching about the “end of history.” My curiosity was piqued. I began cataloguing these strangely familiar doctrines, and gradually concluded that there lies embedded in the rhetoric of business journalism and the curricula of business schools an entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. It needed only to be systematized for a whole new Summa to take shape. The purpose of this book is to bring that theology out of the shadows. I want to demonstrate that the way the world economy operates today is not simply “natural” or “just the way things work,” but is shaped by a powerful and global system of values and symbols that can best be understood as an ersatz religion. Both words are important. It is a religion because, as we will see in the chapters that follow, it exhibits all the characteristics of a classical faith. But it is ersatz because the market, like the graven idols of old, was constructed by human hands.
Let us begin, as many theologians do, with the pinnacle. At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God. In the new theology this celestial peak is occupied by The Market, which I will henceforth capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in its adepts. “The Market” in this book will serve as synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part is made to signify the whole. Thus “The Market” stands for the entire economic and cultural system which it pervades and in which it is the supremely powerful part.
Different faiths have, of course, different conceptions of divine attributes. In Christianity, God has sometimes been defined as omnipotent (possessing all power), omniscient (having all knowledge), and omnipresent (existing everywhere). Most Christian theologies, it is true, hedge a bit. They teach that these qualities of the divinity are indeed there, but are hidden from mortal eyes both by human sin and by the transcendence of the divine itself. In “light inaccessible” they are, as the old hymn puts it, “hid from our eyes.”
Likewise, although The Market, we are assured, possesses these divine attributes, they are not always completely evident to earthlings but must be trusted and affirmed by faith. “Farther along,” as another old gospel song says, “we’ll understand why.”
In the arguments and explanations of the economist-theologians who justify The Market’s ways to men, I spotted the same dialectics I have grown fond of across many years of pondering the Thomists, the Calvinists, and the various schools of modern religious thought. In particular, the business theologians’ rhetoric resembles what is sometimes called “process theology,” a relatively contemporary trend influenced by the philosophy of William James, who advocated a “finite deity”—that is, a divinity that was only moving toward these ultimate attributes, maybe for an infinite amount of time. This conjecture is of immense help to theologians for obvious reasons. It answers the bothersome puzzle of theodicy: why a lot of bad things happen that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God—especially a benevolent one—would presumably not countenance. Likewise for the theologians of The Market, still-imperfect capacities might help to explain the boom-and-bust cycles of dislocation, pain, and disorientation that people who live within its ever-expanding sphere undergo. Their suffering is tragic, but should not cause doubt as to the ultimate benevolence of the Market God.
For quite a long time in human history, of course, there have been bazaars, rialtos, and trading posts—all markets. But they arose only when certain conditions permitted, and for centuries people got along without them. Eventually, when the market did appear it was not God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other “gods.” The Market operated within a plethora of assorted institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi demonstrates in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past three centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic spirits to become today’s unrivaled First Cause.3 Initially The Market’s rise to Olympic supremacy replicated the gradual ascent of Zeus above all the other divinities of the ancient Greek pantheon, a climb that necessitated the defeat of a previous generation of deities, the Titans, and was never quite secure. Zeus, it will be recalled, had to keep storming down from Olympus to quell this or that threat to his sovereignty. Recently, however, The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament—not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must be universally accepted and who allows for no pretenders.
Divine omnipotence means the capacity to define what is real. It is the power to make something out of nothing and nothing out of something. The willed-but-not-yet-achieved omnipotence of The Market means that there is no conceivable limit to its inexorable ability to convert creation into commodities. But again, this is hardly a new idea, though it has a new twist. In Catholic theology, through what is called “transubstantiation,” ordinary bread and wine become vehicles of the Holy Presence. In the mass of The Market’s religion, a reverse process occurs. Things that have been held sacred are transmuted into interchangeable items for sale. Land is a good example. For millennia it has held various meanings, many of them numinous. It has been Mother Earth, ancestral resting place, holy mountain, enchanted forest, tribal homeland, aesthetic inspiration, sacred turf, and much more. But when The Market’s Sanctus bell rings, and the elements are elevated, all these complex meanings of land melt into one: real estate. At the right price no land is not for sale, and this includes everything from the forefathers’ burial grounds to the cove of the local fertility sprite. This radical desacralization dramatically alters the human relationship to land; the same happens with trees, water, air, space, and soon (it is predicted) the heavenly bodies.
At the high moment of the mass the priest says, “This is my body,” meaning the body of Christ and, by extension, the bodies of all the faithful people. Christianity and Judaism both teach that the human body is made “in the image of God.” Now, however, in a dazzling display of reverse transubstantiation, the human body has become the latest sacred vessel to be converted into a commodity. The process began, fittingly enough, with blood. But now, all bodily organs—kidneys, skin, bone marrow, sperm, the heart itself—can miraculously be changed into purchasable items, and those that are not already soon will be.
Still, the liturgy of The Market is not proceeding without some opposition from the pews. A few years ago a considerable battle broke out in the United States over the attempt to merchandise human genes. Banding together for the first time in memory, virtually all the religious institutions in the country, from the liberal National Council of Churches to the Catholic bishops to the conservative National Association of Evangelicals, opposed the gene mart, at that time the newest theophany of The Market. But these critics are followers of what some now call the “old religions,” which, like the goddess cults that were thriving when the worship of the vigorous young Apollo began sweeping ancient Greece, might not have the muscle to slow the spread of the new devotion. Also, the ingenuous opponents of gene vending did not recognize the full scope of what they were up against, a total world-shaping ethos in which there is nothing that is not for sale.
Occasionally backsliders try to bite the Invisible Hand that feeds them. On October 26, 1996, the German government ran an ad offering the entire village of Liebenberg, in what used to be East Germany, for sale—with no previous notice to its some 350 residents. Liebenberg’s citizens, many of them elderly or unemployed, stared at the notice in disbelief. They had certainly loathed communism, but when reunification brought with it a market economy they hardly expected this. Liebenberg includes residences, a thirteenth-century church, a Baroque castle, a lake, a hunting lodge, two restaurants, and three thousand acres of meadow and forest. Once a favorite site for boar hunting by the old German nobility, it was entirely too valuable a parcel to overlook. Besides, having been expropriated by the East German Communist government, it was now legally eligible for sale under the terms of German reunification. Overnight Liebenberg became a living parable, providing an invaluable glimpse of the kingdom in which The Market’s will is indeed done. But the outraged burghers of the town did not feel particularly blessed. They complained loudly, and the sale was postponed.4 Everyone in town realized, however, that it was not really a victory. The Market, like the Lord God of Hosts, may lose a skirmish, but in a war of attrition like the one Joshua waged against the luckless Canaanites, The Market will win in the end.
Of course, religion in the past has not been reluctant to charge for its services either. Prayers, masses, blessings, healings, baptisms, funerals, and amulets have been hawked, and still are. Nor has religion always been sensitive to what the traffic would bear. When, in the early sixteenth century, Johann Tetzel jacked up the price of indulgences and even used one of the first singing commercials composed to push sales (“When the coin into the platter pings, the soul out of purgatory springs”), he failed to realize that he was overreaching. The customers balked, and a young Augustinian monk brought the traffic to a standstill with a placard tacked to a church door.
It would be a lot harder for a Luther to interrupt sales of The Market’s amulets today. As the people of Liebenberg discovered, everything can now be bought. Lakes, meadows, church buildings—everything carries a sticker price. But this practice itself exacts a cost. As everything in what used to be called creation becomes merchandise, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see colored price tags. There was a time when people spoke of the “inherent worth”—if not of things, then at least of persons. The Liebenberg principle changes all that. One wonders what would become of a modern Luther who tried to post his theses on the church door, only to find that the whole edifice had been bought, crated, and reassembled by an American billionaire who thought it would give his estate just the old-world touch it needed. It is comforting to note that the citizens of Liebenberg, at least, were not put on the block.
But that raises a good question. What is the value of a human life in the theology of The Market? Here the new deity barely pauses. The relevant numbers could be expressed in monetary terms, although the computation might be complex. We should not presume, for example, that if a child is born severely handicapped, unable to be “productive,” The Market will decree its death. One must remember that the profits derived from medications, leg braces, and CAT-scan equipment should also be figured into the equation. Such a cost-benefit analysis might result in a close call—but the inherent worth of the child’s life, since it cannot be quantified, would be hard to include in the calculation.
Calculating the worth of a human life may sound degraded, but in the age of The Market it goes on all the time. A few years back, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency decided that the value of a life for people under seventy was $3.7 million, and for people over seventy it was $2.3 million. After the uproar that followed, Obama’s EPA decided all American lives should be equally valued, at $9.1 million a person.
That the value of some things is incalculable does not mean a price will fail to be named. How much, for example, is a tradition worth? On September 10, 2014, the Harvard Crimson reported that a wealthy Hong Kong real-estate magnate, Gerald L. Chan, had phoned his old friend William F. Lee, a member of “the Corporation” (or more formally, the President and Fellows of Harvard College), the small group that governs the university. After some pleasant chatter, Mr. Chan got to the point. How much would it cost to rename the Harvard School of Public Health for his late father? Lee quickly brought the matter to the attention of the Harvard Corporation, which fixed the amount at $350 million, which would be the largest single gift ever received by the university. Chan quickly accepted. The school is now officially the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.5
To be sure, this was not the first example of renaming things at Harvard. In the early seventeenth century, when it was only a small college in the wilds of New England with no particular name, it was christened to honor its first benefactor, John Harvard, whose private collection of books became its library. Three centuries later, in 1966, its School of Government was renamed “the John F. Kennedy School of Government,” after the Harvard graduate who had become president of the United States and recently been assassinated.
But somehow this seemed a little different. The open asking of how much such a naming would cost, and the rapid response, sounded to some people too much like a cash-on-the-barrelhead transaction, and perhaps just a bit unseemly. At a minimum, it signaled a change in the way Harvard thinks about tradition and money. Fred Hess, director of education-policy studies at the market-friendly American Enterprise Institute, told the Crimson, “I think this makes it clear that Harvard weighed the value of tradition against an enormous contribution and decided the contribution was worth it.” He also thought the transaction would set a precedent for other Harvard graduate schools as they met with potential donors, all of them now “aware that Harvard is open to selling naming rights.” University administrators did not blink at the significance of the precedent. Treasurer Paul J. Finnegan said the university should be ready to enter into similar negotiations. “If anyone is considering a gift at this level or higher, and is proposing naming rights, the Corporation should give it full consideration.”
Whatever else the renaming of the School of Public Health means, it suggests that The Market’s reach is becoming more and more extensive, indeed “omnipresent”—a divine attribute we will return to in a moment. Further, its reach moves in all directions. Like the biblical God, whether one climbs to the highest heaven or descends into the lowest depths, The Market is impossible to escape. As Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, informed the Harvard reporters, one now sees names of donors on seats in classroom theaters, “and some schools have gone to the extreme of putting names on bathrooms and bathroom fixtures.”
It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. But this is not quite true. Some years ago a nasty controversy erupted in Great Britain when a railway pension fund that owned the small jeweled casket in which the remains of Saint Thomas à Becket are said to have rested decided to auction it off through Sotheby’s. The casket dates from the twelfth century and is revered as both a sacred relic and a national treasure. The British Museum made an effort to buy it but lacked the funds, so the casket was sold to a private Canadian citizen. Only last-minute measures by the British government prevented removal of the casket from the United Kingdom. In principle, however, in the theology of The Market, there is no reason why any relic, coffin, body, or national monument—say, the Statue of Liberty or Westminster Abbey—should not be listed. Does anyone doubt that if the True Cross were ever really discovered, it would eventually find its way to Sotheby’s? The Market is neither omnipotent nor omnipresent—yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum.
Omniscience is a little harder to gauge. Maybe The Market has already achieved it but is unable—temporarily—to apply its gnosis until its kingdom and power come in their fullness. Nonetheless, current thinking already assigns to The Market a comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known. The Market, we are taught, is able to determine what human needs are, what copper and capital should cost, how much barbers and CEOs should be paid, and how much jet planes, running shoes, and hysterectomies should sell for. But how do we know The Market’s will?
I was happy to discover one day that, at least according to one prominent economist, votaries of the Market God run into exactly this problem. As the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman writes:
In the Middle Ages, the call for a crusade to conquer the Holy Land was met with cries of “Deus vult!”—God wills it. But did the crusaders really know what God wanted? Given how the venture turned out, apparently not.
Now, that was a long time ago, and, in the areas I write about, invocations of God’s presumed will are rare. You do, however, see a lot of policy crusades, and these are often justified with implicit cries of “Mercatus vult!”—the market wills it. But do those invoking the will of the market really know what the markets want?6
In days of old, seers entered a trance state and then informed anxious seekers what kind of mood the gods were in, and whether this was an auspicious time to begin a journey, get married, or start a war. The prophets of Israel repaired to the desert and then returned to announce whether Yahweh was feeling benevolent or wrathful. Today, The Market’s fickle will is clarified by daily reports from Wall Street and other sensory organs of finance. Thus we can learn on a day-to-day basis that The Market is “apprehensive,” “relieved,” “nervous,” or even at times “jubilant.” On the basis of this revelation, awed devotees make critical decisions about whether to buy or sell. Like one of the devouring gods of old, The Market—aptly embodied in a bull or a bear—must be fed and kept happy under all circumstances. True, at times its appetite may seem excessive—the mammoth banks that constitute its store often seem to need votive offerings of, say, a $350 billion bailout now, another $500 billion later—but the alternative to assuaging its hunger is too terrible to contemplate.
The diviners and seers of The Market’s moods are the financial consultants and CEOs of major investment houses. They are the high priests of its mysteries. To act against their admonitions is to risk excommunication and possibly damnation. If, for example, any government’s policy vexes The Market, those responsible for the irreverence will be made to suffer. That the Market is not at all displeased by downsizing or by a growing income gap, but can be gleeful about the expansion of cigarette sales to Asian young people, should not cause anyone to question its ultimate omniscience. Like Calvin’s inscrutable deity, The Market may work in mysterious ways, “hid from our eyes,” but ultimately it knows best.
Omniscience can sometimes seem intrusive. The traditional God of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is invoked as one “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” Like Him, The Market already knows the deepest secrets and darkest desires of our hearts—or at least would like to know them. But one suspects that divine motivation differs in these two cases. Clearly The Market wants this kind of x-ray wisdom because by probing our inmost fears and desires and then dispensing across-the-counter solutions, it can further extend its reach. Like the gods of the past, whose priests offered up the fervent prayers and petitions of the people, The Market relies on its own intermediaries: motivational researchers. Trained in the advanced art of psychology, which has long since replaced theology as the true “science of the soul,” the modern heirs of the medieval confessors delve into the hidden fantasies, insecurities, and hopes of the populace. The “secrets of the heart” they uncover provide the raw material for sales campaigns, the evangelistic missions of the Market faith—which despite its rhetoric really does not want people to make rational decisions. Like all successful evangelists, its appeal is to the heart, and to the unconscious.
One sometimes wonders, in this era of Market religion, where the skeptics and freethinkers have gone. What has happened to the Voltaires who once exposed bogus miracles, and the H. L. Menckens who blew shrill whistles on pious humbuggery? Such is the grip of current orthodoxy that to question the omniscience of The Market is to question the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. The metaphysical principle is obvious: If you say it’s the real thing (think Coca-Cola), then it must be the real thing. As the early Christian theologian Tertullian once remarked, “Credo quia absurdum est” (“I believe because it is absurd”).
In recent years we have witnessed a series of books by alleged atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins skewering religions and exposing the damage they are said to cause. But one wonders why these self-styled dogma slayers are so cautious, and some even reverential, when it comes to the most powerful religion of our era, the one with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street.
Finally, as mentioned above, there is the divinity’s will to be omnipresent. Virtually every religion teaches this idea in one way or another and the religion of The Market is no exception. The latest trend in economic theory is the attempt to apply market calculations to areas that once appeared to be exempt, such as dating, family life, marital relations, and child-rearing. Saint Paul reminded the Athenians that their own poets sang of a God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” The Market likewise is not only around us but inside us, informing our senses and our feelings. There seems to be nowhere left to flee from its untiring quest. Like the Hound of Heaven, it pursues us home from the mall and into the nursery and the bedroom.
It used to be thought—mistakenly, as it turns out—that at least the innermost, or “spiritual,” dimension of life was resistant to The Market. It seemed unlikely that Saint Teresa’s interior castle would ever be listed by Century 21. But as the markets for material goods become increasingly glutted, such previously unmarketable states of grace as serenity and tranquility are now appearing in the catalogs. Your personal vision quest can take place in unspoiled wildernesses that are pictured as virtually unreachable—except, presumably, by the other people who consult the same catalog. Furthermore, ecstasy and spirituality, often accompanied by massages, crystals, and psychic readings, are now offered in convenient generic forms. Thus The Market makes available the religious benefits that once required prayer and fasting, without the awkwardness of extended commitment or the tedious ascetic discipline that once limited their accessibility. All can now handily be bought without an unrealistic demand on one’s time, in a weekend workshop at a Caribbean resort with a sensitive psychological consultant replacing the crotchety retreat master.
Discovering the theology of The Market made me begin to think in a different way about the conflict among religions. Not long ago violence flared between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster, and between Hindus and Muslims in India. Now the strife seems most heated within Islam, with radical jihadists harassing and murdering each other and the unfortunate religious minorities that fall within their power. But I have come to wonder whether the real clash of religions (or even of civilizations) may be going unnoticed. I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival. The traditional religions and the religion of The Market, for example, hold radically different views of nature. In Christianity and Judaism, “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein.” The Creator appoints human beings as stewards and gardeners but, as it were, retains title to the earth. Other faiths have similar ideas.
In the religion of The Market, however, human beings, more particularly those with the wherewithal, own anything they buy and—within certain limits—can dispose of whatever they own in any way they choose. Other contradictions can be seen in ideas about the human body, the nature of human community, and the purpose of life. The older religions encourage archaic attachments to particular places. But in The Market’s eyes all places are interchangeable. The Market prefers a homogenized world culture with as few inconvenient particularities as possible. It longs to “make the rough places smooth.”
Disagreements among the traditional religions sometimes seem picayune in comparison to the fundamental differences they all have with the religion of The Market. Will this lead to a new jihad or crusade? Before Pope Francis began to speak out, it seemed highly unlikely that traditional religions would rise to the occasion and challenge the doctrines of the new dispensation. Most of them seemed content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its pantheon, much as the old Nordic deities, after putting up a game fight, eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as Christian saints.
But is that now changing? Again, I believe that Pope Francis is serious, and not merely engaging in a flight of rhetorical fancy. The market economy, with its consumer culture, does in fact bear all the marks of a religion. No religion, new or old, is subject to empirical proof, so what we see is a contest between faiths. Much is at stake and The Market, once aroused, is like the Yahweh of the Old Testament conquest narratives, willing to go to war if necessary. During the recent row over the emission standards, for example, the New York Times editorialized that a “war on coal” was being waged, but not by government regulators. Rather, “the real war has been waged by the market and technology.”7 The Market God has understandable reasons to go to war. It has its own causa belli. It strongly prefers radical individualism and instant mobility. Since it needs to shift people to wherever production requires them, it becomes wrathful when they cluster or cling to local traditions and locations. Will these vestiges of older dispensations—like the “high places” of the Baalim—simply be plowed under? Maybe not. Like previous religions, the new one has ingenious ways of incorporating preexisting ones. Hindu temples, Buddhist festivals, and Catholic saints’ shrines can look forward to new incarnations. Along with native costumes and spicy food, they will be allowed to provide local color and authenticity in what could otherwise turn out to be an extremely bland Beulah Land.
There is, however, one contradiction between the religion of The Market and the traditional religions that seems to be insurmountable. All of the traditional religions teach that human beings are finite creatures and that there are limits to any earthly enterprise. A Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, “I have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough.” He would find no niche in the chapel of The Market, for whom the First Commandment is “There is never enough.” Like the proverbial shark that stops moving, The Market that stops expanding dies. At the moment this seems most unlikely, but it could happen. Faced with intractable natural limits, the endless growth of the economy might end. And if it does, then Nietzsche’s announcement about the death of God will have been right after all. He will just have had the wrong God in mind.
Pope Francis has launched a crucial conversation, one that is bound to continue for some time to come. The question is whether our civilization can draw on the obvious strengths of the market but avoid its self-divinizing excesses. It is important to note that nowhere in his “Joy of the Gospel” or his subsequent speeches and writings does the pope call for the abolition of The Market. He wants it to recover its appropriate role as the servant of society rather than its master. To invent a word derived from the religious realm, he wants to “de-deify” The Market, so it can once again become the market. But is this reverse apotheosis possible?
I believe it just may be. Indeed, there are indications that the process might already be under way. But it can proceed only if we understand the extent to which The Market has really become a functioning, if usually unrecognized, pseudo religion. That understanding is what—with some help from both religious and business history—I hope to provide in the pages that follow.