Abstract
The central argument of this book is that economics has adopted the functions of religion in advanced capitalist society. It is the global economy that Gustafson sees as fulfilling Martin Luther’s definition of God as ‘that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need’. The chapters are then set out to build this argument. The early chapters explore the rituals and myths of the economy, its prophets and priests, and the corporation as a religious community. Money is then considered as a sacrament and globalization as a religious mission. Underpinning all this is the theme developed at the end of the book of the creditor–debtor relationship as a primal religious metaphor that informs all the world’s modern religions.
The book is tightly argued and key points are pleasingly summarized in helpful text boxes. Gustafson engages with a range of sources and ideas from the classical economic thinkers like Adam Smith, Marx and Keynes to recent research such as David Graeber’s challenging of the theory that money emerged to replace barter, a ‘demythologization’ that plays a central role in his own argument.
Where I find this book disappointing is in its straightforward presumption that the global economy is simply replacing the world faiths as the religious framework of our culture. It would seem more likely that we are in fact seeing a complicated evolution of traditional religion into hyper-capitalist forms. Gustafson proceeds from the assumption set out in the introduction and drawn from Peter Berger’s 1967 work, that ‘It is a fact that secularism is always the byproduct of an expanding industrial economy’ (p. 8). Among today’s sociologists, however, this is a highly contested fact. Recent data from the Pew Research Center suggests that secularization is now actually going into reverse. The proportion of non-religious people in the world will drop from 16 per cent to 13 per cent between now and 2050. While this is in part attributable to demographic growth in the developing world, we are also seeing sustained or even increasing religiosity in the growing economies such as India, China and Brazil.
It would be fruitful, therefore, to pay close attention to how advanced capitalism is not so much replacing the world religions as shaping them into new forms. The prosperity gospel is an obvious example that is curiously absent from this book. Consideration might also be given to the way in which technological change under global capitalism may be fostering allegiance to seemingly pre-modern religious groups such as ISIS.
Another consequence of this ‘replacement thesis’ is that it allows little imagining of how religions might evolve differently in this climate to develop the capacities necessary to carry out the ‘demythologization’ of economic thinking that Gustafson rightly sees as urgent. He clearly views the modern religions as themselves too wedded to the economics-inspired myth of primal debt. And yet his final sentence appears to find hope in the idea that their founders’ intentions were to move us beyond these transactional understandings of God. He certainly sets the scene for exciting future theological projects.