Free Universe, Free Society, Free Minds

By Sally Morem

Note to Readers: I wrote this essay for “Pique,” the newsletter of the
Secular Humanist Society of New York, April of 2000.

Andrew Bernstein has written a provocative essay in which he depicts

the establishment and spread of capitalist economies around the world
as fundamentally anti-religious developments. He criticizes Christian
thought for opposing the profit motive, for claiming all goods of this
earth must be held in common (religious socialism), and for insisting on
the subordination of the individual’s mind and interests to the dictates
of a higher authority. The following is my response to that essay.

Religious thought, specifically Christian theology, includes two peculiar

political stands with which I disagree: (1) pacifism and (2) a
presumption that wealth is inherently evil. I’ll leave discussions on
pacifism for another time.

As for its anti-wealth aspect (inherited largely from Judaism), I believe

this to be an artifact of Biblical times and societies. Those Middle
Eastern societies were pre-industrial, agricultural societies with very
few ways of generating new wealth. Therefore, any truly wealthy man
(such as the man who asked Jesus how to get to heaven) was assumed to
have gotten his wealth by personally taking it from others or by
inheriting it from an ancestor who stole from others. Economics was a
zero-sum game. By the standards of those times such judgments were
almost certainly accurate.

But technology marched on and generated industrial societies—the first

societies ever known to produce prodigious amounts of new wealth.
Our post-industrial, information society (Third Wave, in Toffler’s
terminology) is even more fecund.
Consider some of the many ways you could get rich in America 2000:
You could hit home runs for the Minnesota Twins. You could write a
best-selling novel. You could build a better mousetrap and watch the
world beat a path to your door. You could win a Nobel Prize for you
groundbreaking research in the human genome. I could go on, but you
get the idea. Today, most rich people did not steal what they have from
others. Nor (surprisingly) did they inherit it. They created their wealth
anew.

Christian theology has failed miserably in keeping up with technological

developments in various professional disciplines and areas of life.
Theologians also failed to note their profoundly revolutionary effects on
everyday life and the continuing fundamental reshaping of societal
institutions—for example, the resulting growth of democratic capitalism
in the West and in the Far East.

The growth of capitalism went on to stimulate the further growth of

technology, which went on to stimulate the further growth of capitalism
—and so on. All those inventors. All those marketers. All those
consumers. Capitalism and technology continue to grow in a mutual
catalyzing upward spiral of development to which Christian thought is
blind. Christian anti-wealth rhetoric can be seen as one aspect of
today’s theological intellectual failure and malaise.

Freedom and religion have traditionally been at odds, nowhere more so

than in economics. Religion calls for top-down, hierarchical decision-
making processes in all aspects of life, especially in how goods and
services are made and distributed, as opposed to the freely established,
self-organizing networks of exchange characteristic of capitalist
societies. Combine that fact with the anti-wealth statements found in
the Bible and you will find an irresistible theological call to the religious-
minded for the establishment of socialist societies and economies—never
mind that none have ever been found to work. The best that can be said
about them is they’ve made members of socialist societies equal—
equally poor.

Free universe, free society, free minds. Free political and economic
thought links naturally with non-religious thought. I agree with
Bernstein’s essay. My only criticism is the lack of historic context in it.