{"id":1458,"date":"2009-02-01T16:10:29","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T00:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1458"},"modified":"2009-02-01T16:10:29","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T00:10:29","slug":"faith-and-finance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/faith-and-finance\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith and finance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The argument that the current financial crisis was at least partly caused by the retreat of religion <\/a>from the public square and by rising secularism <\/a>will undoubtedly recur regularly over the next few years.\u00a0 These are complex matters, and those propounding the godlessness thesis are far wiser and more knowledgeable than I.\u00a0 I would like to offer just a few pieces of possibly countervailing evidence, with no presumption that they are correct.\u00a0<\/p>\n

— Maybe thirty years ago, American culture could have been characterized as increasingly secular, but after the emergence of the Religious Right and the Bush Administration, I\u2019m not so sure.\u00a0 In 1978, sociologist John Murray Cuddihy noticed what he called the \u201c\u2019invisibilization\u2019\u201d of religion in America\u2019s civic realm.\u00a0 \u201cReligious identities as such must not be pushy, elbowing themselves into contexts where they do not belong,\u201d he wrote in No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste<\/strong>.\u00a0 \u201cIf they do, they encounter an equivalent of the polite bureaucratic put-down, \u2018You don\u2019t belong here; I must refer you to . . . window 73B.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cuddihy\u2019s observations remain valid within a centuries-long perspective;\u00a0 even the most devoted acolyte of Jerry Falwell practices a religion that has been defanged and domesticated compared to the power-hungry, truth-monopolizing manifestations of religion throughout most of Western history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But compared to the 1960s and 1970s, religion today plays a far more assertive role in public life.\u00a0 The Religious Right has weighed in on everything from the NEA to tax cuts.\u00a0 Political religious rhetoric and influence increased during the Bush years, whether in state legislatures or in Washington.\u00a0 Bush\u2019s executive branch contained a number of publicly-professing Christians who made no secret of the role of faith in their public life.\u00a0 Federal policies on embryonic stem cell research, foreign aid for contraception and abortion abroad, and other \u201clife\u201d issues mirrored the platform of the Religious Right.\u00a0 I would not be surprised if President Bush\u2019s evangelical speech writer Michael Gerson pushed for the greater liberalization of mortgage lending to minorities, on the ground that \u201ccompassionate conservatism\u201d (read: his Christian beliefs) required it.\u00a0 It was during this political religious reawakening that the credit markets evolved ever more arcane forms of risk-dispersion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

–Christian culture is thriving.\u00a0 A whole publishing industry pumps out titles like God Is My CEO<\/strong> and God Is My Success<\/strong>.\u00a0 The proportion of Mexicans, who tend to be highly devout, has been rising nationally,\u00a0 to the delight of establishment Catholics who welcome their numbers and their enthusiasm for saints and miracles, and to the delight of Pentecostals, who are also seeing an influx of Hispanics in their churches.\u00a0 Many subprime borrowers who put almost no money down on their mortgage were Hispanics, probably many of them church-going.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps they were more punctilious in their financial statements than non-church-going borrowers; perhaps not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

–Speculative manias have occurred during periods of nearly universal church-going.\u00a0 Calvinist Holland staged the most famous bubble of all time, the seventeenth-century tulip mania, when 12 acres of prime real estate bought a single bulb.\u00a0 Pious eighteenth-century Anglicans poured irrational sums into the slave-trading South Sea Co., leading to a financial bust in 1720.\u00a0<\/p>\n

–As for outright financial fraud, this, too, has thrived during periods when atheists are even more closeted than today.\u00a0 Nineteenth-century America contained an army of fraudsters, charlatans, and mountebanks; business dealings were cutthroat.\u00a0 Today\u2019s financial crooks operated within synagogues and churches<\/a>, sometimes even professing themselves to be men of God<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

–I know of no evidence that more secular societies are less ethical in business matters.\u00a0 As I have argued,\u00a0a contract to build a highway is far more likely to be fulfilled without bribes in Sweden than in Mexico; the Swedish cement company CEO is more likely to pay his taxes than his Mexican counterpart.\u00a0 (He is also less likely to be kidnapped at gunpoint for ransom, though that is not a business matter.)\u00a0 Church-indifferent Denmark has suffered less dislocation from the subprime problem than church-attending America.\u00a0 As for sub-Saharan Africa, with its frenzy of ancestor worship, voodoo, and ecstatic Christianity, contracts are not necessarily any more secure there than in non-zealous Norway.\u00a0 Seattle has the least number of churches per capita of any American city.\u00a0 It remains a hub of entrepreneurship and business innovation, all of which depend upon trust.\u00a0<\/p>\n

–In sum, it looks to me like the financial instruments and lending practices that played so prominent a role in the financial crisis evolved during a period when American religion was more muscular and assertive than it has been in decades.\u00a0 But I may well be missing more important evidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The argument that the current financial crisis was at least partly caused by the retreat of religion from the public square and by rising secularism will undoubtedly recur regularly over the next few years.\u00a0 These are complex matters, and those … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[57,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}