What Does Neoliberalism Mean for Christian Ethics?

Introduction

Can the same concept denote a set of economic policies, widespread characteristics of a particular culture, and a shared social vice? And if it can, does a term so broad have any predictive or descriptive power to help people of good will deal with the problems of their age? This article reflects on the many meanings given to neoliberalism, a term created to describe economic policy that has expanded, at extremes, to nearly approximate a universal pejorative. I begin with a comparative review of three recent books addressing neoliberalism by experts in religious thought and practice. Catholic theologians Matthew Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz, in their book Send Lazarus; Anthony Annett, an economist whose book Cathonomics reflects on papal social teaching; and Mathew Guest, a sociologist of religion, deploy definitions of neoliberalism that vary as broadly as the variously descriptive and normative goals of each book. ¹ For me, all three books shed important light when they focused on neoliberalism as a political and economic phenomenon, and lost some clarifying power when applying it to other spheres of human life (though these sections contained some intriguing insights). The article will discuss each book's definition of neoliberalism and how the author(s) engage with it, evaluate each book's degree of success, and argue that broader definitions of neoliberalism ill-serve normative goals of economic justice. It will conclude by proposing the best way for Christians to understand and respond to neoliberalism.

Cathonomics: Economic Neoliberalism

Anthony Annett is an economist and longtime speechwriter at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) whose former belief in ‘the nostrums of neoliberalism’ was undermined by the global financial crisis. Encountering Catholic social teaching (CST), which offered ‘a superior ethical basis from which to guide the global economy’, completed his apostasy. ² Perhaps unsurprisingly, Annett's definition of neoliberalism hews clearly to economic lines. Beginning in the 1970s, US and UK political leaders abandoned the postwar social-democratic consensus in favor of libertarian economic views promoted by, among others, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman:

[The neoliberal] creed was simple: faith in free markets to achieve general prosperity. So governments implemented policies such as deregulation of industry, relaxed constraints on the financial sector, encouraged wide-ranging privatization, lowered taxes on capital and high-income earners, and curbed the power of unions. All these measures were supposed to promote efficiency, innovation and competitiveness. ³

Annett finds now that by slowing growth in productivity and the incomes of the poorest, ‘neoliberalism has failed on its own terms … and while not delivering on its own promises, the neoliberal movement gave rise to enormous dysfunctions: a widening chasm between rich and poor; rising corporate control, concentration and corruption; and an ever more urgent environmental crisis’. ⁵ So far, each author in this study agrees with Annett's critiques.

Cathonomics is not framed around neoliberalism, like the other two books in this review. It describes the historical development of CST and the tradition's consensus positions before drawing on them to elucidate practical, normative conclusions in the areas of global economy, responsibility for society, inequality, and environmental care. However, though neoliberalism does not frame the book, its deep discrepancies with CST's economic vision means it recurs as an antagonist throughout. In a chapter entitled ‘Who's Right and Who's Wrong’, Annett marshals neuroscience, positive psychology and evolutionary biology in favor of CST's vision of altruistic, relational human nature as contrasted with the competitive, self-maximizing human of neoliberal economics. ⁶ Catholic social thought, generally dated to 1891 with Pope Leo XIII's first encyclical on economic matters, predates neoliberalism, but the tradition's preference for a strong state role in regulating economic life would always have put it at odds with what would become the neoliberal view. Cathonomics represents this relationship faithfully.

Annett's former insider position at the highest levels of global finance leads to particular attention to that industry. For example, where Catholic social teaching traditionally reflects on the roles of the state, business and labor in pursuing the common good, he adds a section on the role of finance, a socially necessary service that nonetheless today is ‘out for itself, not to serve others’. ⁷ In line with CST's vision, Annett calls for ‘much tighter regulation of all aspects of the financial sector … getting past the neoliberal insistence that no amount of finance is bad for the economy, that financial markets are efficient, and that cross-border flows of capital are always beneficial’. ⁸ Global trade is not the enemy of worker well-being, but ‘to really benefit from free trade, countries need strong systems of social and labor protection’. ⁹ While neoclassical or neoliberal economists insist on seeing markets as independent entities that must be protected from other aspects of human life, Catholic social thought notes that markets can form human morality for better or worse, and urges governments, as they intervene in markets, to pay attention to this virtue-forming role of economic life. ¹⁰ While Annett's precisely targeted definition of neoliberalism is one neoclassical economists could agree with, he does not thereby adopt their normative or descriptive projects. Instead, he argues with precision, clarity and persuasive power for robust intervention in markets, by government and other actors, to harness economic growth at the service of human flourishing. ¹¹

Neoliberal Religion: Cultural Neoliberalism

In contrast with Annett, sociologist of religion Mathew Guest explicitly moves his definition of neoliberalism beyond the economic realm as he explores its influence on the practice and study of religion in the twenty-first century. For Guest, ‘neoliberal’ describes

a set of cultural conditions indebted to the principles of neoliberal economics … a heightened individualism that prioritizes the freedom of the consumer over shared identities, a taken for granted assumption that market competition is the best measure of value and a tendency to treat cultural objects as commodities. ¹²

Guest's book considers this cultural neoliberalism as it applies to ‘cultural forces’ at the nexus of ‘neoliberal influence’ and the study of religion: populism, ‘post-truth’, securitization, the ‘entrepreneurial self’, religious difference and secularism. ¹³ Although Guest grants neoliberalism a broad ambit, describing cultural trends such as post-truth and individualism along with economic policies on trade, borders and regulation, his application of the term to these cultural trends displays convincingly predictive power.

While not all cultural applications of the label ‘neoliberalism’ strike me as persuasive, Guest's analysis of the post-truth era certainly did. Religious movements are not immune to the phenomenon of the ‘great sorting’, sociologists’ term for ‘maximizing exposure to ideas, influences and people likely to reinforce one's pre-existing beliefs … a confluence of social forces that enable the easy exclusion of dissenting voices’ and which is ‘part of migration of neoliberal ideas about competition into non-economic spheres of life’. ¹⁴ In today's media and social media landscape, ‘we have an unprecedented opportunity to be informed, while the means to achieve this undermines any possibility of a settled or universally shared version of the truth’. ¹⁵ From my US vantage point, it is easy to see how neoliberalism's insistence on deregulation leads to social media companies disclaiming responsibility for the information they provide, even refusing to enforce shared norms of decency and verifiability, contributing to the increasingly post-truth environment Guest describes. Further evidence of this cultural neoliberalism is a ‘strategic’ orientation to legal authority which ‘treats the conventions of public politics as negotiable and their transgression acceptable if this is more likely to result in the desired outcome. Mirroring practices in free market economics, to be adversarial, combative and ruthless is justified as it grants a competitive edge’. ¹⁶

Equally convincing is Guest's treatment of individualism in the neoliberal era. As he claims, ‘One of the most powerful alignments between religion and broader neoliberal culture finds expression in individualism’. ¹⁷ In the US (whose unusually individualistic culture Guest studies from an outsider perspective), longstanding cultural prioritization of the individual resonates with evangelical Christian views of faith as personal and voluntary. The ensuing worldview struggles to accept relational anthropologies or their ethical implications, including the idea that social structures exist and can generate harm; that persons may share complicity or responsibility in social harms which they have not directly willed; and calls for strong government safety nets as a form of social responsibility to one another. ¹⁸

Guest's sociological descriptions imply concerning conclusions for Christians whose normative ethics require opposing neoliberalism. For example, the phenomena of post-truth and the ‘great sorting’ make it more difficult, though no less urgent, to envision how Christians might overcome the tendency to individualism among their coreligionists. Can a clear, authoritative work on Catholic views of economic justice, like Annett's, find the hearing it deserves among splintered and bunkered Christians today? Closer yet to home, Guest observes that neoliberal views of individual dignity ultimately render the entire concept of religious belonging suspect: ‘Neoliberal cultural conditions privilege individual subjectivity in a way that generates ethical controversies out of religious contexts characterized by hierarchy or strict codes of behavior. Conformity to group norms appears anomalous—even suspect—in a context in which individual freedoms are paramount’. ¹⁹ Cultural neoliberalism is the water in which Christian ethicists swim as we write our books, instruct our students, and present normative arguments to the public. Some of our hearers may reject economic teachings inspired by Christian ethics as belonging to the wrong political ‘side’, while for others any viewpoint associated with an authoritative religious hierarchy, like Catholic social thought, is self-evidently suspect. The work is cut out for Christian ethicists advocating alternatives to economic neoliberalism in this culturally neoliberal age.

Send Lazarus: Economic, Cultural and ‘Everything Ever’ Neoliberalism

Catholic theologians Matthew Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz expand beyond Annett's economic and Guest's cultural definitions, describing neoliberalism as a ‘utopian (even a theological) project, a new form of political common sense, and … an ethos of mercilessness inhabited by numerous people across the globe … it is a new form of economism aimed at producing a new reality whose sole aim is to serve markets’. ²⁰ Neoliberals serve markets not, in fact, by ‘freeing’, them, but actually seek ‘to “encase” them’, protecting markets from popular ‘demands for “social justice and redistributive equality”’. ²¹

According to Send Lazarus, so effectively has neoliberalism become the dominant ideology among today's political leaders that across parties, ‘economic growth has become the end and legitimation of government’. ²² Geographer David Harvey observes how neoliberalism, as it ‘attacks any structures that limit the power of capital’, accumulates wealth to the most wealthy while stripping it from the poorest, through practices such as privatizing public utilities and institutions; deregulating financial markets; manipulating debt crises; and revising tax codes to redistribute wealth from the poorest to the richest via the state. ²³ Send Lazarus wields prophetic power and precision analysis in the chapter illustrating how governments ‘sacrifice’ environment, the poor, those racialized as nonwhite, and undocumented migrants in the name of economic neoliberalism. ²⁴

Moving beyond economic framings, our authors rely on economist-philosopher Phillip Mirowski and political theorist Wendy Brown, who identifies neoliberalism as a ‘political rationality’ whose impacts on ways of thinking spread far beyond what are traditionally regarded as economic matters. As Eggemeier and Fritz summarize Brown's view, ‘Neoliberalism produces a reality wholly economized, including human subjects who are economic actors in virtually every respect’. ²⁵ The definitions of neoliberalism used in Send Lazarus thus range from the economic, similar to Annett's, to a cultural definition broader than Guest's. Brown and Mirowski envision cultural neoliberalism as so pervasive that it almost wholly shapes and determines selves—something Guest does not claim. For the remainder of this article, I will call this broadest cultural definition ‘everything ever’ neoliberalism.

Eggemeier and Guest's multiple definitions of neoliberalism lead to an equally sprawling set of conclusions and recommendations. Neoliberalism as ‘ethos of mercilessness’ and ‘culture of indifference’ is met by a theology of mercy well-rooted in the Catholic tradition. ‘The neoliberal account of reality must be resisted as much as the facts of neoliberalization’, ²⁶ and our authors’ response to neoliberal mercilessness, competition and divinization of the quantifiable is to present the Trinitarian God of mercy, relationality and mystery.

Send Lazarus's final chapter proposes a politics of mercy befitting the theology of mercy which responds to neoliberalism. It was here that I felt the sprawling, ‘everything ever’ definition of neoliberalism most underserved Send Lazarus's readers, as the authors strove to fit different ethical solutions to neoliberalism's harms, from environmental destruction to mass incarceration. I found myself wondering, if neoliberalism seeks to encase the market, isn’t the solution simply to ‘expose’ the market to intervention by virtuous, just government actors? So Annett's account of Catholic social thought and my own understanding of the tradition would suggest. In Send Lazarus, the solutions multiply.

To respond to the economic inequality that neoliberalism fosters, our authors approvingly cite Catholic social thought's vision of a ‘global political authority’ with the power to regulate the global economy at the service of meeting human needs. ²⁷ The alignment of problem and solution—if neoliberalism encases the market and causes human misery, expose the market to intervention by a global regulatory body aimed at protecting human dignity—was credibly handled in just a few pages.

In other places, where the analysis of neoliberalism's harms and the ameliorative recommendations were more novel or more intricate, I wished for more depth. For example, the authors propose abolitionism as a structural solution to racial neoliberalism, racialized incarceration and mass deportation. ²⁸ The abolitionist movement strives to expose carceral structures in society and replace them with structures that genuinely provide safety and flourishing. I would gladly read a book by Eggemeier and Fritz applying abolitionist thought, which boasts numerous treatments by some of the best contemporary thinkers inside and outside theology, to the problem of racialized carceral inequality under neoliberalism. The attempt to fit solution to problem in a few brief pages did not do their good intentions justice.

I found myself in deep sympathy with Eggemeier and Fritz's concrete humanitarian proposals as well as their book's prophetic, by turns denunciatory and hortatory, tone. I am sorry to say that I ultimately felt that the neoliberalism described in Send Lazarus has the character of a straw opponent, failing to attach to phenomena encountered in real life. It strains credulity that the same term could carry equal predictive validity about aspects of human life ranging from global trade to domestic labor policies to trends in cultural entertainment. As the authors correctly diagnose, neoliberalism as an economic and political dogma has gained enough widespread credence to have the air of accepted fact. To successfully strike at such accepted certainties, theologians, and other thinkers with humanitarian aims, need to use tools of precision and accuracy in describing the real world, because it is to such precision, accuracy and aptness to reality that neoliberalism, as an economic dogma, pretends.

Nothing ‘Neo’ under the Sun: Neoliberalism and Personal Agency

Send Lazarus and Neoliberal Religion define neoliberalism at least in part as a cultural phenomenon broad enough to influence personal decisions and social structures. Many of these applications are less than wholly convincing if the claim made by calling something ‘neoliberal’ is that something about it is new, rather than a manifestation of human sin and pride as old as history.

The ‘everything ever’ neoliberalism of Brown and Mirowski, used in Send Lazarus, describes practices and areas of life so disparate it becomes difficult to hold in view as one consistent idea. Along with market-encasing economic manifestations, ‘the phenomenon of the personal brand’; the admittedly Orwellian business-school neologism ‘human capital’; and reality TV's presentation of competition for amusement are all presented as emblematic of neoliberalism. ²⁹

Eggemeier and Fritz are surely right that Catholic thought opposes these phenomena for the way they treat human beings as objects rather than subjects. This observation doesn’t require the improbable claim that these harmful shared behaviors came along at some point during the twentieth-century career of Milton Friedman. If this is the claim implied with the label ‘neoliberal’, P.T. Barnum, the brilliant self-promoter of the nineteenth-century US; Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations callously observed labor costs going up when workers can’t afford to nourish children to adulthood; and the Roman Christians who won martyrs’ crowns in the context of competition for amusement might like a word with Brown and Mirowski. ³⁰ If Christian ethicists want to make normative statements about prideful self-promotion, harmful competition and objectification of human workers, they might do better to stay away from the rhetoric of ‘neoliberalism’ and stick to the good old category of sin.

The same implausible claim of novelty is afoot when Guest explores how religion is used in conscious shaping of the ‘entrepreneurial self’, positioned as a twenty-first-century and neoliberal phenomenon: ³¹

The entrepreneurial self is oriented towards personal growth through public engagement, actively pursuing and promoting resources bound up in the ongoing negotiation of religious identity. It is restless and ardent, preoccupied with religious identity as an unfinished entity but confident that the project is being well-fed by an abundance of resources… ³²

The framing of neoliberalism adds little to the observations that human beings compete against one another, consciously burnish their images, treat their employees as objects, and sometimes mix religion up in all of it. This is not just historical carping: insofar as these authors have normative goals, collapsing calls for more justice in the political-economic sphere with jabs at self-promotion and reality TV undermines the prophetic power of these normative visions. ³⁴

Broad, cultural, ‘everything ever’ definitions of neoliberalism work at cross purposes with the normative economic observations of Annett and Send Lazarus. ‘Personal branding’ and reality TV competitions are faintly embarrassing endeavors at best; no one really wants to defend them. But each author surveyed here agrees that governments persuaded by the ethos of neoliberalism are willing to impoverish their working classes, incarcerate and surveil their citizens, despoil their natural resources and send their militaries to war to defend the gospel of encased markets. The phenomena represented in ‘everything ever’ neoliberalism have few defenders, but as each author rightly points out in varying ways, economic neoliberalism has become common sense for many global decision-makers, and almost exclusively so for those in the wealthiest countries. ³⁵ For those who wish to interrupt that status quo, ‘everything ever’ definitions of neoliberalism dangerously muddy discourse about economic neoliberalism by undermining the latter's descriptive power.

While I found aspects of the definitions of neoliberalism used by Guest, Eggemeier and Fritz less than helpful in meeting the challenges of the current moment, each book creditably establishes its definition of neoliberalism in terms that invite, rather than foreclose, engagement and interrogation, defining the phenomenon and distinguishing it from others with concrete examples. It is unfortunately not rare to find academic works that use the category of neoliberalism without such clarity of terms. Mentioning neoliberalism in the introduction but not in the index, such works assume that its meaning is self-evident and uncontested. At times, the reader is tempted to conclude that these authors regard neoliberalism as synonymous with capitalism or even a general sense of evil. Of course, as the books reviewed in this article demonstrate, neoliberalism's meaning is neither simple nor uncontested. ³⁶ Assuming its meaning is clear and that all interlocutors understand it as obviously harmful, as too many academic authors do, ill-serves a moment when so much suffering is caused by a political consensus that economic neoliberalism is good and necessary.

Toward a Christian Response to Neoliberalism

What does neoliberalism, in its many meanings, mean for Christian ethics? I suggest two strategies for Christians concerned with human flourishing as they think about and respond to neoliberalism. Christians should focus on economic neoliberalism and its impacts on the most vulnerable, and pay attention to the co-optation of governments by economic neoliberal ‘nostrums’ (Annett). The manifestations of economic neoliberalism fly in the face of Christian desires for a more just, stable world enabling widespread human flourishing. Encasing markets from government intervention and societal accountability aggregates more societal wealth to the richest; depresses real wages for workers; and limits societies’ power to impose safe workplace standards, among other detrimental effects Christians rightly deplore. ³⁷ Yet it remains rare to see Christian ethical action aimed at understanding or responding to neoliberalism as such, rather than its isolated effects. Christians have mobilized against many recent economic phenomena that harm workers and destabilize communities and families. From globalization, to international debt, to border enforcement laws that keep migrant workers vulnerable and exploitable, to deunionization, to the contemporary rise of the gig economy and concerns about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, Christian communities have worked to understand these phenomena, recognize how their own communities are affected, and advocate for a more humane way forward. But despite the admirable efforts of the authors reviewed here to propose frameworks for understanding and critiquing neoliberalism through religious lenses, it remains rare to see it engaged as an ethical problem in Anglophone Christian communities. ³⁸ Pope Francis does occasionally use the term, which helps his hearers to understand that behind visible changes in the economy is an intentionally deployed, overarching strategy. ³⁹ What we see in the economy today is the result of an ideology, not inevitable, quasi-gravitational forces. Christian communities need to understand neoliberalism as a specifically economic phenomenon to effectively respond to its impact on the world.

Economic neoliberalism is especially insidious in the way it has co-opted the political imagination. As each book in this study observes, even politicians identified with ‘the Left’ struggle to conceive of solutions that involve government taking action, rather than using government to hand over funds to private enterprise to address problems. Certainly there are times when this approach can be appropriate: lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines were developed by private companies with government funds. The issue is not that government sometimes turns to private enterprise, but rather that government officials, even on the Left, do not seem to see it as their duty to make a case for government's goodness and effectiveness, or to pass policies that would help do so by improving voters’ lives. Even on the Left, elected officials have effectively bought into the nostrum that market-based solutions are always and everywhere more effective, and thus ceded immense amounts of ideological territory to those who would like to see government's power dwindle. ⁴⁰

Despite the clear witness of Catholic and other faith traditions’ teaching against economic neoliberalism, unfortunately, even some leaders of Catholic communities have bought into the nostrums. Daniel DiLeo, a theologian teaching at Creighton University in Nebraska, USA, recently exposed how his university accepts significant funds from the Charles Koch foundation despite fundamental mission incompatibility. Creighton, a Catholic, Jesuit university, has a mission to promote the economic vision of Catholic social thought, while the Koch Foundation has been quite open about its goal of promoting libertarian economic ideas among university students, ‘us[ing] universities … for the implementation of policy change’, as a former director of the foundation put it. ⁴¹ Nor is ideological buy-in always necessary. As Guest observes, transnational corporations and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank enforce economic neoliberalism throughout the global markets where they operate, ensuring its adoption even in contexts where the local culture rejects the individualistic, competitive anthropology which makes neoliberalism seem such ‘common sense’ in the US and UK. ⁴²

Not only does neoliberalism erode public perception of the state's legitimacy by constraining its ability to shield persons from harm when markets do not provide for them, but the impact of neoliberal policies also effectively constrains states from shielding their citizens even if the political will to do so existed, by allowing international corporations to become more powerful than nation-states. As a Vatican document warned,

Capital may opt to avoid accountability to the people in the countries where its profits are made. It is as if economic power has an extraterritorial status … The familiar nation-state's political-economic instruments are tied to a well-defined territory, whereas multinational companies can produce goods in one country, pay taxes in another, and claim assistance and state contributions in yet a third. ⁴³

By positioning the market as our all-important savior and doing everything possible to ‘encase’ the market from government intervention, neoliberals openly challenge the legitimacy of government as a whole. As Annett characterizes the neoliberal view, ‘the boot of the state treads on individual liberty and suffocates the natural potential of the private sector to unleash innovation and growth’. ⁴⁴ Annett does not exaggerate when he ascribes such colorful, inflammatory language to neoliberals, at least in the US. Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist aspired to ‘reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub’, and libertarian Peter Thiel more recently commented, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible … The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms’. ⁴⁵

Contrasting Catholic social thought with neoliberalism, we observe a mirror image not only in the view of government's proper sphere, but in the more basic view of government's legitimacy. While neoliberalism rejects government's role in regulating the economy, and promotes global economic policies that diminish nation-states’ power, CST defends a significant activist role for government in intervening in and regulating the economy, and by doing so, legitimates the enterprise of government itself. When it addresses government directly, the Catholic social tradition has spoken clearly in favor of participatory democracy. But a strong argument for government's legitimacy is tacitly woven throughout the documents more focused on economic life, as well. By envisioning a government capable and desirous of exercising its power to provide for the support of unemployed workers and needy families, regulating enterprise to keep workers safe and healthy, and levying taxes to fund these important projects, CST provides a positive vision of government and legitimates it as a shared human project.

The Catholic tradition suggests that political authority derives its legitimacy from ordering people and institutions to protect human rights and pursue the common good. ⁴⁶ To the extent that ordinary people today are aware their government prioritizes protecting the market from intervention over pursuing the integral growth of human persons, permitting externalities that harm human beings—such as inequality, poverty, pollution and destabilization of societies—at the service of protecting the free flow of capital, it comes as no surprise that governments and their officials are regarded as illegitimate and even harmful to ordinary working people and their families. For some Christian traditions, such as Anabaptists, skepticism of the state and its projects are integral to Christian belief and practice. However, for those Christians in traditions with positive views of government and its potential to promote human flourishing, including Catholics and some Protestants, the way neoliberalism undermines trust in government is a reason to oppose it and a place where advocacy on Christian ethical grounds can promote a positive, hope-filled alternative vision.

The widespread, uncritical acceptance of economic neoliberalism among political leaders on both the Left and Right narrows the ‘Overton window’, a phrase named after US political scientist Joseph Overton to describe widespread understanding of what is politically sensible, feasible and ultimately possible. Christians wishing to advocate a more merciful, human rights-focused politics can see it as an important calling to expand that window. In an effective move at the service of their call for a politics of mercy, Eggemeier and Fritz suggest concrete, realizable economic and political proposals which ‘mark the positive reality pointed to by Catholic theology in order to reveal how deficient our neoliberal world is by contrast’. ⁴⁷ In my judgment, one of the recent policy proposals that best concretizes Catholic social thought's vision of human flourishing is universal basic income (UBI), which would give a tax-funded cash subsistence grant to every member of society without means testing. UBI's movement from a fringe to a seriously discussed proposal is one of the more successful attempts to expand the window of political thought beyond economic neoliberalism in the last ten years. ⁴⁸ Philosopher Philippe van Parijs has long advocated such universal aid policies within academia and public discourse. ⁴⁹ In the US, they more recently gained attention from the 2020 presidential candidacy of proponent Andrew Yang, and a number of popular books from secular authors have expanded the understanding of the proposal. ⁵⁰ One of the best presentations of a specifically Christian case for the universal basic income was published in the UK by the Reverend Doctor Malcolm Torry. ⁵¹ Pope Francis himself has repeatedly called for basic income to be considered as a way of guaranteeing lifestyles worthy of human dignity amid the reality that many crucial forms of work do not always result in a living wage. ⁵²

In political discourse, universal basic income plays a role similar to Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16): it invites us to envision a world where human needs are met beyond the metric of economic productivity, ranked on a competitive scale—that is, beyond neoliberalism's framework of deservingness. The parable's suggestion that every member of society should be able to meet basic needs, even if some members of society do not work for wages to the same extent others do, is an anti-neoliberal vision. It expands our imaginations beyond the nostrums of sacrificing the most needy to the market and consigning the state to encasing the market and propping up business. It makes Christian teaching concrete by suggesting a material enactment of the anthropological idea that everyone has equal value. Promoting UBI and policies with similar logic—for example, international debt jubilee—is an effective way for Christians to fight back against the ‘common sense’ widespread acceptance of neoliberal nostrums.

Sociologist Matthew Desmond recently reflected on US Covid relief legislation, which so successfully staved off the economic shock of the pandemic that it lifted many US families out of their pre-Covid poverty. ⁵³ Desmond ends on a note of despair, because at this writing the measures that reduced child poverty by nearly 60 percent, among other humanitarian achievements, have all been allowed to expire. But for those who care to see it, there is also a note of hope in the Covid-era achievements of the US and other governments. Faced with an unprecedented economic shock, governments threw their neoliberal nostrums to the wind; protecting human well-being was more important than encasing markets. For a brief period of time, it was possible to see economic neoliberalism as something other than ‘common sense’. Christians who support government's potential to act for the common good can point to this recent success as they call for economic policies that place the market at the service of widespread human flourishing.