Is Capitalism a religion?

This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another ask Prof Wolff question from our Patreon community. This question comes from Paul. And Paul asks basically a very simple question, which when you think about it, turns out not to be so simple at all. Is capitalism a religion? Has it become the established religion of the United States?

I want to give a short answer because I hope that the brevity of it will help drive the idea home. So, my basic answer to Paul’s question is yes, capitalism is a religion now, as well as an economic system. And capitalism has become the secular religion of the United States. What do I mean? Well, a very great British historian wrote a magnificent book in the 20th century. His name R.H. Tawny called Religion and the rise of capitalism. If you’ve never read this book, it’s not a very long book I urge you. He is a brilliant stylist, one of the great writers in the historical tradition in Britain and dead on when it comes to understanding how capitalism confronted religion.

Capitalism begins in England in the 18^th century and spreads across Europe. And as it spreads, it encounters the remnants of both Roman Catholicism, the religion of the medieval period across Europe, and the break within Roman Catholicism that created a protest movement that became the Protestant movement or Protestantism. As the split in Christianity worked itself out and he is brilliant in showing that capitalism knew it had a problem with Christianity. It clearly had a problem with what the Roman Catholic church had early on said, which was charging interest is a sin, it’s a sin against Jesus Christ, charging as much money as the market would allow you to get away with was equally a sin against God. You can’t have a capitalism in which you can’t lend money at interest, and you can’t set a price as high as the market will bear the people who understood capitalism.

Therefore, understood that they had a problem with these kinds of ideas that came out of the relationship between feudalism in Europe and the Roman Catholic inheritance from the time of Rome, and the slave system of Rome. So, the result was capitalism looked with a jaundiced eye on Catholicism and much preferred Protestantism because it did not say the kind of things that Roman Catholicism did. And as Tawny pointed out: the Protestants enabled their own growth by working out deals with the capitalists, to give them more freedom to hire people, fire people, led that interest make as much profit as they could get away with. They made a deal. To do that more readily sooner and quicker than the Roman Catholic part of Europe did.

But eventually two things happen as capitalism succeeded over through feudalism in the American and French revolutions and established itself as the new dominant system they better they said to the remaining religious traditions Roman Catholic, Protestant but also Jewish, Eastern Orthodox and eventually Islam too, you need to work out a relationship with us that supports capitalism or we will become your enemy and that won’t be good for you. A period, you might call it 18th 19^th century, in which there was a real Touch and Go, the biggest intellectual movement of the 19th and 20th Century in Europe and arguably here in the United States too was a struggle between capitalism and all that it represented and the leftover of religion.

That struggle resulted in the victory of capitalism and the defeat of existing religion and by defeat I mean the acceptance of traditional religion that the capitalists are going to rule the world and that all the religions can do is enact a kind of moderating force to make capitalism a little less harsh than it would otherwise have been, and that capitalism showed itself in its harshness for those of you who have the moment go back and find a novel by Charles Dickens about England, or by Emile Zola about France or by Maxim Gorky about Russia and I could go on. And you will see how bitterly capitalism treated the mass of the people as it arrived at dominating the church’s ability to hold that back next to nothing the church’s ability to moderate some and that’s what the church became.

We will talk about inequality in the church on Sunday, we will talk about how you should turn the other cheek, how you should give away your fortune, how it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye …of it we’ll talk like that but we won’t do anything. Occasionally, if we have someone who takes what we say seriously we like to communicate them we’ll throw them out, we’ll call them pariah, we’ll call them Liberation Theologists we have a lot of nasty names for the people who want to take seriously the old ideas of the Abrahamic religions and the others. So, religion has become the secular.

You go to church to prove that you’re a good person because what you do in your daily work life isn’t all that good, so it’s a rationale, it’s an excuse. It’s a religion not in the inspiring terms that the leaders of religion always hope for, but rather in the rationalization after the fact which is the behavior of a bad conscience and that’s what religion mostly does.