The Market’s Place
God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Our Capitalist Culture
by Charles McDaniel
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007
(337 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Gillis J. Harp
When the heir to the Coors beer fortune ran for the US Senate as a conservative Republican in 2004, he declared that “our company’s values are our family’s values.” NBC’s Tim Russert pressed Peter Coors on whether the brewery’s sponsorship of the homosexualist “Black and Blue Festival” in Montreal was consistent with family values. Coors declared that there was no contradiction.
Americans, notes Charles McDaniel in God and Money, “have achieved the ability to dissociate their economic activities from their moral consciences.” Such dissociation endangers their ethical reasoning, since capitalist societies are not “morally self-sustaining” but contain within themselves “corrosive elements.”
McDaniel, visiting professor of church-state relations at Baylor University, offers, in contrast to what he believes some Christians’ uncritical acceptance of the market, the critical perspectives of G. K. Chesterton, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pope John Paul II, whose personalism respects both human individuality and the common good, and “provides the foundation for a consistently prophetic Christian voice on economic issues.”
Non-Prophets
But McDaniel is not following the religious left. By “prophetic,” he does not mean a secular collectivism. Indeed, he notes how the thinking of many social gospel advocates was profoundly shaped by secular ideology.
Such advocates tried “to assimilate the economic ethos of the time and dissolve tensions between secular and religious institutions.” At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, for example, “the illuminati of European socialism provided what leaders of the Social Gospel movement believed was the key to the Kingdom of God on earth.”
Such ideological accommodation did not occur only on the left. By the 1970s and 1980s, some conservative Christians embraced a radically anti-statist individualism. Though he argued for a theocratic political order, the Evangelical Gary North made extensive use of libertarian economic theory and jettisoned state functions traditionally accepted by conservatives, insisting, for example, “that the only way to avoid destruction is by deregulating the banking industry and developing a system of ‘private coinage.’”
McDaniel argues that other, more popular, conservative leaders such as Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel adopted Friedrich von Hayek’s unqualified celebration of liberty. His “radical elevation of individual freedom,” McDaniel warns, “has the commensurate effect of denigrating collective contributions to the social good. . . . Hayek and other Austrian philosophers make a ‘foundational claim’ for ‘methodological individualism that devalues all social claims and ideals.’”
Some Evangelicals, such as George Gilder, even expressed exasperation with Hayek and neo-classical economists like Milton Friedman for not going far enough. “Freedom is good in itself and also makes us rich,” concluded Gilder.
Gillis J. Harp is Professor of History at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and the author of Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks & the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). He and his family worship at Grace Anglican Church in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on culture from the online archives
18.2—March 2005
On Conservatism as Vexation, Vanity & Near Impossibility by Graeme Hunter
29.3—May/June 2016
Our Choice Is Obedience or Jesus as Anti-Christ by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Life & Love Are Real Despite Theatrical Illusions by Anthony Esolen
28.2—March/April 2015
Neo-Pagan Family Policies Doom Any Recovery by Allan C. Carlson
33.1—January/February 2020
Do You Know Your Child’s Doctor?
The Politicization of Pediatrics in America by Alexander F. C. Webster
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
