Kingdom Economics October 24, 2007
Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , trackbackI’m reading Brian McLaren’s new book Everything Must Change—and oh it’s just so fascinating how history works.
- Christians invent socialism.
- Then socialists turn their backs on Christianity.
- Then the idea of socialism is thrown into the dust bin of history, and centuries-worth of socialist critical thinking about capitalism is lost.
- And now Christians are the first mainstream thinkers to begin a fundamental critique of capitalism again.
Christians like Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne and so many others are questioning the legitimacy of economics run for the sake of profit rather than for people. They are in the mainstream of their culture, with best selling books and huge audiences at conferences and churches all over the world.
I can not think of any mainstream secular progressive who flat out questions the legitimacy of capitalism. Am I right about this? We have a lot of writers who call out the injustices of capitalism as it’s practiced today, but they don’t suggest that the system itself is evil and should be replaced by something else? Do they? Instead, they suggest that more education, better personal choices and some smart regulation is all that’s called for—all that’s possible anyways.
If I’m right about that (and I’m not sure that I am—please weigh in), then Christians are leading the way in reviving a fundamental critique of capitalism.
But they’re doing it with almost no connection to a centuries-old tradition of scholarly and practical thinking about capitalism—a tradition that they started. The first modern socialist/communists were Christians in England. The Early Church was communist. Through the 1700’s to the early 1900’s, the world and especially North America was dotted with Christian communist intentional communities. Even the Communist League, which commissioned Marx and Engels to write the Communist Manifesto, began as a Christian organization whose goal was: “the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, based on the ideals of love of one’s neighbor, equality and justice.”
It’s possible that folks like McLaren and Claiborne are writing with a lot more knowledge of those traditions than they’re letting on. Maybe they feel there needs to be a clean break from the socialist tradition—that they’ll have better luck rebuilding a new movement without any infection from the past. And I would agree with them.
But maybe it’s possible that the socialist tradition is just so dead—and died for all practical purposes so long ago—that they really have had next to no contact with it.
For example: McLaren arrives (through a friend) at his book’s central concept, that our global economic system is a “suicide machine.” He arrives at this concept as though it’s a totally new way of thinking about our economy. But for 500 years, Christians and the secular socialist movement they gave birth to developed an incredibly deep understanding of Capitalism as a suicidal system.
It may sound like I’m criticizing. But I’m really not. If he’s feigning ignorance of the socialist tradition for strategic reasons, more power to him. If he’s really that detached from it, then, like I said before, I just want to marvel at the beauty and mystery of history.
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