Abstract
Affluent Christians are confronted with the challenge of reconciling their wealth with a faith that warns of the spiritual dangers of excessive wealth, and issues strong injunctions against economic injustice. Both Kevin Hargaden and David Cloutier seek to close that gap, offering critiques of our attachment to wealth along with theological counsel about how to overcome that attachment. Hargaden’s approach is more explicitly scriptural, drawing on the parables of Jesus as a tool for rethinking the economic order. Cloutier, by contrast, works through a complex philosophical, theological and economic analysis of the vice of luxury, arguing that we need a sacramental vision in order to come into the right relationship with wealth that is a precondition for securing economic justice.
In Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age, Kevin Hargaden takes up the ‘ethical difficulties that wealth poses to followers of Jesus’ (p. xv). His book is written in response to the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the Irish economy, an event that crystallized the manifest ethical shortcomings of a civilization oriented towards amassing wealth rather than growing in holiness. The economic devastation imposed on ordinary folk by the arcane and frequently outright corrupt dealings of global financiers of various stripes was an invitation for moral critique of ‘neo-liberalism’ (as Hargaden dubs the modern economic system), a challenge that was taken up by many. Hargaden’s own contribution lies in a call to Christians to respond not by revolution or even calls for reform, nor by mere acquiescence, but rather through allowing our own actions to be informed by the fundamental Christian practice of worship. Christians need to give witness to the reality of the in-breaking Kingdom of God that Jesus presents to us in the parables. Such witness is necessary in a culture formed around the worship of Mammon.
Hargaden offers a promising structure for thinking through the dilemma. In the first chapter, he identifies neoliberalism as a totalizing worldview that functions as a false religion. Chapter 2 then works through Karl Barth’s readings of the parables of the Ten Virgins, the Talents, and the Sheep and the Goats, suggesting that they serve as a resource for seeing through neoliberal hegemony. The parables disrupt our ordinary patterns of thought, inviting a metanoia, a re-seeing of the world in the light of the Kingdom of God. In the third chapter, Hargaden offers three modern-day parables centered in the Irish experience of neoliberalism aimed at revealing what is concealed by the neoliberal account of the Irish financial collapse. As he writes, ‘the totalized aspirations of neoliberalism are challenged by Jesus’ parables of the kingdom and this plays out in unexpected ways as we look again at stories that we too easily think are settled, straightforward, and amenable to singular interpretations’ (p. 127). Hargaden’s parables center on specific features of the Irish financial crisis: the collapse of the German-owned bank Depfa; the financial shenanigans of the Anglo-Irish bank, and the odd protests in support of corrupt Irish billionaire Sean Quinn. By dealing with particulars, Hargaden allows us to see the concrete human features of the crisis that are concealed by the more usual analysis that centers on economic and financial statistics. Finally, the fourth chapter urges a return to worship as a ‘counter-practice by which Christians can address the deep problems of wealth’ in a way that ‘does not involve forging an entirely new path’ (p. 142). In structuring his book this way, Hargaden correctly places the accent of theological engagement with economics on the need for conversion, the need to challenge the implicit theology that underlies neoliberalism.
Hargaden’s book as a whole, however, does not deliver on this promising agenda. The difficulty emerges in the first chapter, wherein Hargaden identifies what is indeed a totalizing alternative ‘theology’ too closely with what he terms ‘neoliberalism’. The first chapter rehearses a standard critique of the modern economy relying heavily on Karl Polanyi. The frustration of such narratives is that the important truth they do convey, namely that something has gone wrong in a world in which economic values are too frequently mistaken for ultimate values, is woven in with an account of the modern economic order that, to an economist, too often reads as distorted. For example, he identifies neoliberalism with greedy individualism, a ‘truth’ that the current response to the pandemic renders questionable, as the economy has been readily sacrificed for the sake of public health. Those tempted to read Hargaden’s description of neoliberalism as a caricature might therefore too readily dismiss the important critiques of our economic order that he makes. In addition, the identification of the modern false religion with our economic system might blind us to the way that false religion similarly distorts other spheres of modern life, such as science and health care. Pope Francis’s analysis of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ in his encyclical Laudato Si’ seems a more promising (because more general) starting point for identifying the faulty theological premises on which much of modern culture rests.
As a result of identifying the distortions in economic life as the source of our problems rather than as a primary symptom, Hargaden’s ability to deploy fully the power of Jesus’ parables is limited. As Hargaden argues, the parables themselves aim at reorienting us to the kingdom of God, preparing us to receive Jesus Himself as our end, asking us ultimately to rest in Him. Calling us into that relationship requires divesting us of the myriad ways we seek self-righteousness, some alternative rock on which we can stand (whether that be money, social status, or a sense of our own moral superiority). The emphasis, then, is on opening our horizons, teaching us to look beyond merely temporal goods. But as we turn to Hargaden’s parables in chapter 3, we find that the gist of all of them is rooted in purely temporal terms. Their aim is to counter a neoliberal narrative of what went wrong with narratives that remind us that local control matters, that we should be ‘hospitable’ towards others, and that an excessive complacence among those most damaged by the crisis needs to be greeted with preaching. The parables respond, respectively, to our having allowed anonymous international forces to generate concrete human harms, to these forces having given an opportunity for corrupt businesses and politicians to take advantage of the situation (with few judicial consequences), and to the public not having a narrative that would ground protest against all of this. These points are all well-taken. But they do nothing to suggest that our problem is a widespread sense of self-reliance that keeps us from the call to turn to God for our deepest fulfillment. The focus on the institutional flaws of neoliberalism seems to have deflected attention away from the underlying spiritual ailments, and as a result the critiques voiced simply echo ones already delivered by secular writers.
Hargaden’s final chapter does, however, lift our attention back to God, arguing that the Christian vocation as resident aliens must center on the practice of worship. Hargaden deftly argues that simply to oppose neoliberalism is to stay as embedded in its totalizing embrace as it is to acquiesce passively to it. The act of worship opens up space for the genuine sort of transformation that is only possible through the Spirit. Hargaden ends by noting that the resulting resistance would take the form of myriad local changes and initiatives that give witness to an economic order more reflective of that Spirit.
The instinct to leave our response open to direction by the Spirit strikes me as correct. But as David Cloutier demonstrates in his book, The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age, our own enmeshment with wealth is itself an obstacle to spiritual openness. Cloutier looks past institutional forms to inquire about the spirit of an age that cannot even name our desire for luxury as a vice, much less formulate ideas about how to resist it.
It is difficult to do justice to the scope of Cloutier’s achievement. In the first part of his book, Cloutier surveys the philosophical, theological and economic contours of the problem of luxury. Luxury’s universally acknowledged status as a vice in the ancient world gave way to challenges from both philosophers and theologians. The transition from ancient ideas of economic life as ordered to the good life (a vision founded on an aristocratic ordering of society) to the modern understanding of economic life as a free-standing good in itself (a vision associated with a more democratic ordering of society) generated an array of arguments about the relative merits of leisure and work, and the question of whether subjective desires are subject to objective/external critique. At the same time, theological debates about Pelagianism, and the question of whether all are called to holiness, inadvertently marginalized luxury from theological critique. The economic and theological sensibilities that accommodated the rise of the modern world also blinded us to the vicious character of luxury. But acquiescence to luxury, as Cloutier argues, plays a crucial role in generating the dismaying economic injustice and environmental degradation that Hargaden attributes to ‘neoliberalism’. And because luxury is closely connected to the vice of pleonexia, it arguably forms the spiritual backbone of what Pope Francis calls the technocratic paradigm. In short, if we are deeply formed by the habit of thinking that more is always better, it should not be surprising that injustice and instability result insofar as we live in a finite world and are ourselves finite.
Cloutier’s insightful and nuanced analysis thus moves firmly to a spiritual diagnosis of what ails us. Luxury is a species of idolatry. As Cloutier argues, it teaches us that particular material goods are essential for happiness; it tempts us to fall in love with the process of acquisition (much like falling in love with being in love); and it ultimately issues in a worship of the self. We can see how this false spirit plays a role in resisting the breakthrough message of the parables that Hargaden discusses in his book. Cloutier’s book thus gives us yet more reason to embrace Hargaden’s argument about the importance of worship, insofar as worship redirects us to the God who truly is the object of our hearts’ deepest desires.
Cloutier is aware that modern markets have their virtues, and is sensitive to the principal economic argument that would be directed against his critique of luxury. If we all were able to identify ‘how much is enough’ would that not stop the engine of economic growth, with potentially disastrous consequences for employment and the project of economic development? Cloutier offers the compelling reply that his argument is not that we simply stop spending so much, but that we learn to spend better.
Accordingly, Cloutier devotes the second part of his book to the question of how, on a practical basis, we can learn to identify how much is enough, and perhaps more importantly, how to think better about the power we exercise as consumers. He offers a particularly powerful chapter on reflecting sacramentally on our spending patterns. He proposes that we think about the material goods in our lives as opportunities to give witness to community (through promotion of shared goods like libraries), as occasions for festivals (true festivals of conviviality as opposed to the monstrosity that is X-mas), and as goods that can promote our true vocations and enrichment as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. Then we can attain a better pattern of living which simultaneously serves the community, thereby ameliorating the pressures that lead to economic injustice and environmental destruction. But truly stepping into such a transformed way of thinking about our relationship to wealth almost certainly requires the sort of worship and preaching Hargaden recommends to us in his book. I would add that it also requires a commitment to prayer.
In addition to benefiting from the supplements on offer from Hargaden, Cloutier’s work could benefit from a more complex engagement with the diverse spiritual ailments that cluster around the vice of luxury. As he acknowledges, the pure desire for accumulation (greed) matters. So too does the role of luxury in securing/broadcasting social status. The latter is particularly in need of more reflection. Our democratic ideals notwithstanding, humans seem compelled to build hierarchies of one sort or another. Are there ways of reconceiving that need in sacramental terms that parallel Cloutier’s treatment of sacramental patterns of spending?
These two books reflect a hopeful impulse in theological economics. Part of our plight in the modern world is the widespread notion that economic (and technological and medical) realities are ‘real’ and ‘important’. Theology and religion are relegated to the private sphere. But insofar as the increasing instability of the modern world results from its development of a faulty theology, the path forward must call us back to right relationship with God. As both Hargaden and Cloutier argue in the conclusions of their respective books, we are a hopeful people, depending in faith on the superabundant goodness of God. We live in His story, not our own. Learning to reclaim that truth is the urgent task of our times.
This review was edited by the outgoing Book Reviews Editor, Nicholas Townsend.