By Harvey Cox
The Atlantic (spring 1999)
A few years ago a friend advised me that if
I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the
business pages. 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. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts
I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognito, I found myself instead in the land of déjÃ
vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of
Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis,
the epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind
descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of
the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the
inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put
them right . Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall,
and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only
thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive
temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and,
ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small
dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East
Asian economies.
The East Asians' troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical
deviation from free-market orthodoxy-they were practitioners of
"crony capitalism," of "ethnocapitalism," of "statist
capitalism," not of the one true faith. The East Asian financial
panics, the Russian debt repudiations, the Brazilian economic turmoil, and
the U.S. stock market's $1.5 trillion "correction" momentarily
shook belief in the new dispensation. But faith is strengthened by
adversity, and the Market God is emerging renewed from its trial by
financial "contagion." Since the argument from design no longer
proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity-believed in
despite the evidence. Alan Greenspan vindicated this tempered faith in
testimony before Congress last October. 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 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.
Soon I began to marvel at just how comprehensive the business theology is.
There were even sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a
calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and what theologians call an
"eschatology"-a teaching about the "end of history."
My curiosity was piqued. I began cataloging these strangely familiar
doctrines, and I saw that in fact there lies embedded in the business
pages 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 place.
At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God.
In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market,
which I capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the
reverence it inspires in business folk. Different faiths have, of course,
different views of the 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 human 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 mortals but must be trusted and affirmed by faith.
"Further along," as another old gospel song says, "We'll
understand why."