Thanks Steve,
You asked "I wonder why the anti-religion "ruling classes of America"
still choose to force children to profess a belief in religion (via the
pledge) or
feel the need to print proclamations of religious belief on every
dollar."
While I can't speak for other churches, it should be noted that the
Catholic Church is on record that the secular nature of government is
"legitimate".
I suspect part of the reason people print proclamations of religious
believe on every dollar, is that secularity is not in opposition to the
Christian message but is rather indebted to it. The book review from the
Chronicle about "How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science" is
just part of the proud history of the Church. All I can say is that this
probably didn't go unnoticed by those who were developing those early
symbols.
By the way, despite all the attachment to religious sentiment from
existing leaders, actions speak louder than words. You are free to
consider them "religious" but I wouldn't.
Mike
How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science
By RODNEY STARK
When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise
was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their
own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were
the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European
intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India,
and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century
Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many
civilizations had pursued alchemy, the study led to chemistry only in
Europe? Why was it that, for centuries, Europeans were the only ones
possessed of eyeglasses, chimneys, reliable clocks, heavy cavalry, or a
system of music notation? How had the nations that had arisen from the
rubble of Rome so greatly surpassed the rest of the world?
Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in
geography. But that same geography long also sustained European cultures
that were well behind those of Asia. Other commentators have traced the
rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still
others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that
those answers are part of what needs to be explained: Why did Europeans
excel at metallurgy, shipbuilding, or farming?
The most convincing answer to those questions attributes Western
dominance to the rise of capitalism, which took place only in Europe.
Even the most militant enemies of capitalism credit it with creating
previously undreamed of productivity and progress. In The Communist
Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that before the rise
of capitalism, humans engaged "in the most slothful indolence"; the
capitalist system was "the first to show what man's activity can bring
about." Capitalism achieved that miracle through regular reinvestment to
increase productivity, either to create greater capacity or improve
technology, and by motivating both management and labor through
ever-rising payoffs.
Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe's own "great leap forward,"
it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe. Some
writers have found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant
Reformation; others have traced it back to various political
circumstances. But, if one digs deeper, it becomes clear that the truly
fundamental basis not only for capitalism, but for the rise of the West,
was an extraordinary faith in reason.
A series of developments, in which reason won the day, gave unique shape
to Western culture and institutions. And the most important of those
victories occurred within Christianity. While the other world religions
emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and
logic as the primary guides to religious truth. Christian faith in
reason was influenced by Greek philosophy. But the more important fact
is that Greek philosophy had little impact on Greek religions. Those
remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical
contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar
assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and
the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all of the other
major world religions.
But, from early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the
supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase
understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently Christianity was
oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the
superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact,
Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress, as
demonstrated by reason. Encouraged by the scholastics and embodied in
the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the
power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of
science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of
capitalism also was a victory for church-inspired reason, since
capi-talism is, in essence, the systematic and sustained application of
reason to com-merce - something that first took place within the great
monastic estates.
During the past century Western intellectuals have been more than
willing to trace European imperialism to Christian origins, but they
have been entirely un-willing to recognize that Christianity made any
contribution (other than intolerance) to the Western capacity to
dominate other societies. Rather, the West is said to have surged ahead
precisely as it overcame re-ligious barriers to progress, especially
those impeding science. Nonsense. The success of the West, including the
rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the
people who brought it about were devout Christians. Unfortunately, even
many of those historians willing to grant Christianity a role in shaping
Western progress have tended to limit themselves to tracing beneficial
religious effects of the Protestant Reformation. It is as if the
previous 1,500 years of Christianity either were of little matter, or
were harmful.
Such academic anti-Roman Catholicism inspired the most famous book ever
written on the origins of capitalism. At the start of the 20th century,
the German sociologist Max Weber published what soon became an immensely
influential study: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In
it Weber proposed that capitalism originated only in Europe because, of
all the world's religions, only Protestantism provided a moral vision
that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously
seeking wealth. Weber argued that, before the Reformation, restraint on
consumption was invariably linked to asceticism and, hence, to
condemnations of commerce. Conversely, the pursuit of wealth was linked
to profligate consumption. Either cultural pattern was inimical to
capitalism. According to Weber, the Protestant ethic shattered those
traditional linkages, creating a culture of frugal entrepreneurs content
to systematically reinvest profits in order to pursue ever greater
wealth, and therein lies the key to capitalism and the ascendancy of the
West.
Perhaps because it was such an elegant thesis, it was widely embraced,
despite the fact that it was so obviously wrong. Even today The
Protestant Ethic enjoys an almost sacred status among sociologists,
although economic historians quickly dismissed Weber's surprisingly
undocumented monograph on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of
capitalism in Europe preceded the Reformation by centuries. Only a
decade after Weber published, the celebrated Belgian scholar Henri
Pirenne noted a large literature that "established the fact that all of
the essential features of capitalism - individual enterprise, advances
in credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc. - are to be found from
the 12th century on, in the city republics of Italy - Venice, Genoa, or
Florence." A generation later, the equally celebrated French historian
Fernand Braudel complained, "All historians have opposed this tenuous
theory, although they have not managed to be rid of it once and for all.
Yet it is clearly false. The northern countries took over the place that
earlier had so long and brilliantly been occupied by the old capitalist
centers of the Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either in
technology or business management." Braudel might have added that,
during their critical period of economic development, those northern
centers of capitalism were Catholic, not Protestant - the Reformation
still lay well into the future. Further, as the Canadian historian John
Gilchrist, an authority on the economic activity of the medieval church,
pointed out, the first examples of capitalism appeared in the great
Christian monasteries.
Though Weber was wrong, however, he was correct to suppose that
religious ideas played a vital role in the rise of capitalism in Europe.
The material conditions needed for capitalism existed in many
civilizations in various eras, including China, the Islamic world,
India, Byzantium, and probably ancient Rome and Greece as well. But none
of those societies broke through and developed capitalism, as none
evolved ethical visions compatible with that dynamic economic system.
Instead, leading religions outside the West called for asceticism and
denounced profits, while wealth was exacted from peasants and merchants
by rapacious elites dedicated to display and consumption. Why did things
turn out differently in Europe? Because of the Christian commitment to
rational theology, something that may have played a major role in
causing the Reformation, but that surely predated Protestantism by far
more than a millennium.
Even so, capitalism developed in only some locales. Why not in all?
Because in some European societies, as in most of the rest of the world,
it was prevented from happening by greedy despots. Freedom also was
essential for the development of capitalism. That raises another matter:
Why has freedom so seldom existed in most of the world, and how was it
nurtured in some medieval European states? That, too, was a victory of
reason. Before any medieval European state actually attempted rule by an
elected council, Christian theologians had long been theorizing about
the nature of equality and individual rights - indeed, the later work of
such secular 18th-century political theorists as John Locke explicitly
rested on egalitarian axioms derived by church scholars.
All of this stemmed from the fact that from earliest days, the major
theologians taught that faith in reason was intrinsic to faith in God.
As Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century, "Reason is a
thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all
has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason - nothing which He has
not willed should be handled and understood by reason." Consequently it
was assumed that reason held the key to progress in understanding
scripture, and that knowledge of God and the secrets of his creation
would increase over time. St. Augustine (c. 354-430) flatly asserted
that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more
accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there are
"certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot
yet grasp ... one day we shall be able to do so."
Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine
went on at length about the "wonderful - one might say stupefying -
advances human industry has made." All were attributed to the
"unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon his creation, a "rational
nature." Those views were repeated again and again through the
centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano,
in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never
see an end of finding them."
Christian faith in reason and in progress was the foundation on which
Western success was achieved. As the distinguished philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead put it during one of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard in
1925, science arose only in Europe because only there did people think
that science could be done and should be done, a faith "derivative from
medieval theology."
Moreover the medieval Christian faith in reason and progress was
constantly reinforced by actual progress, by technical and
organizational innovations, many of them fostered by Christianity. For
the past several centuries, far too many of us have been misled by the
incredible fiction that, from the fall of Rome until about the 15th
century, Europe was submerged in the Dark Ages - centuries of ignorance,
superstition, and misery - from which it was suddenly, almost
miraculously, rescued; first by the Ren-aissance and then by the
Enlightenment. But, as even dictionaries and encyclopedias recently have
begun to acknowledge, it was all a lie!
It was during the so-called Dark Ages that European technology and
science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world. Some of that
involved original inventions and discoveries; some of it came from Asia.
But what was so remarkable was the way that the full capacities of new
technologies were recognized and widely adopted. By the 10th century
Europe already was far ahead in terms of farm-ing equipment and
techniques, had unmatched capacities in the use of water and wind power,
and possessed superior military equipment and tactics. Not to be
overlooked in all that medieval progress was the invention of a whole
new way to organize and operate commerce and industry: capitalism.
Capitalism was developed by the great monastic estates. Throughout the
medieval era, the church was by far the largest landowner in Europe, and
its liquid assets and annual income probably exceeded that of all of
Europe's nobility added together. Much of that wealth poured into the
coffers of the religious orders, not only because they were the largest
landowners, but also in payment for liturgical services - Henry VII of
England paid a huge sum to have 10,000 masses said for his soul. As
rapid innovation in agricultural technology began to yield large
surpluses to the religious orders, the church not only began to reinvest
profits to increase production, but diversified. Having substantial
amounts of cash on hand, the religious orders began to lend money at
interest. They soon evolved the mortgage (literally, "dead pledge") to
lend money with land for security, collecting all income from the land
during the term of the loan, none of which was deducted from the amount
owed. That practice often added to the monastery's lands because the
monks were not hesitant to foreclose. In addition, many monasteries
began to rely on a hired labor force and to display an uncanny ability
to adopt the latest technological advances. Capitalism had arrived.
Still, like all of the world's other major religions, for centuries
Christianity took a dim view of commerce. As the many great Christian
monastic orders maximized profits and lent money at whatever rate of
interest the market would bear, they were increasingly subject to
condemnations from more traditional members of the clergy who accused
them of avarice.
Given the fundamental commitment of Christian theologians to reason and
progress, what they did was rethink the traditional teachings. What is a
just price for one's goods, they asked? According to the immensely
influential St. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), the just price is simply
what "goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the
time of sale." That is, a just price is not a function of the amount of
profit, but is whatever uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Adam Smith
would have agreed - St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) did. As for usury, a
host of leading theologians of the day remained opposed to it, but
quickly defined it out of practical existence. For example, no usury was
involved if the interest was paid to compensate the lender for the costs
of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities,
which was almost always easily demonstrated.
That was a remarkable shift. Most of these theologians were, after all,
men who had separated themselves from the world, and most of them had
taken vows of poverty. Had asceticism truly prevailed in the
monasteries, it seems very unlikely that the traditional disdain for and
opposition to commerce would have mellowed. That it did, and to such a
revolutionary extent, was a result of direct experience with worldly
imperatives. For all their genuine acts of charity, monastic
administrators were not about to give all their wealth to the poor, sell
their products at cost, or give kings interest-free loans. It was the
active participation of the great orders in free markets that caused
monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce.
The religious orders could pursue their economic goals because they were
sufficiently powerful to withstand any attempts at seizure by an
avaricious nobility. But for fully developed secular capitalism to
unfold, there needed to be broader freedom from regulation and
expropriation. Hence secular capitalism appeared first in the relatively
democratic city-states of north-ern Italy, whose political institutions
rested squarely on church doctrines of free will and moral equality.
Augustine, Aquinas, and other major theologians taught that the state
must respect private property and not intrude on the freedom of its
citizens to pursue virtue. In addition, there was the central Christian
doctrine that, regardless of worldly inequalities, inequality in the
most important sense does not exist: in the eyes of God and in the world
to come. As Paul explained: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither bond nor fee, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all
one in Christ Jesus."
And church theologians and leaders meant it. Through all prior recorded
history, slavery was universal - Christianity began in a world where as
much as half the population was in bondage. But by the seventh century,
Christianity had become the only major world religion to formulate
specific theological opposition to slavery, and, by no later than the
11th century, the church had expelled the dreadful institution from
Europe. That it later reappeared in the New World is another matter,
although there, too, slavery was vigorously condemned by popes and all
of the eventual abolition movements were of religious origins.
Free labor was an essential ingredient for the rise of capitalism, for
free workers can maximize their rewards by working harder or more
effectively than before. In contrast, coerced workers gain nothing from
doing more. Put another way, tyranny makes a few people richer;
capitalism can make everyone richer. Therefore, as the northern Italian
city-states developed capitalist economies, visitors marveled at their
standards of living; many were equally confounded by how hard everyone
worked.
The common denominator in all these great historical developments was
the Christian commitment to reason.
That was why the West won.
Rodney Stark is university professor of the social sciences at Baylor
University. This essay is adapted from The Victory of Reason: How
Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, to be
published in December by Random House. Copyright (c) by Rodney Stark.