U.S.

Republicans and the Fallacy of Biblical Capitalism

In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Republican Christian influencers—leading
politicians, pundits, and preachers—are eagerly promoting the idea that the Bible is a charter
for free market capitalism. What are the tenets and presuppositions of this claim? Does it hold
up to the standards of critical biblical scholarship?

See Also: Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels (Oakland, CA: The
University of California Press, 2020).

By Tony Keddie
Assistant Professor of Early Christian History and Literature
Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies
University of British Columbia
August 2020


“Free Market Capitalism is God’s blueprint for growing a nation’s economy.”

“Throughout the Bible, the Almighty affirms private wealth creation.”

“The Bible’s teaching on the role of government gives support to the idea of a free
market rather than socialism or communism.”


All three of the above quotes are by white male conservative Evangelical influencers who
have been enthusiastic supporters of the Trump administration.

One of these men, Wayne Grudem, holds a PhD in New Testament from Cambridge, was
once president of the Evangelical Theology Society, is a professor of Biblical Studies at
Phoenix Seminary, and has written textbooks that are widely read in conservative
seminaries (Wehner 2020; Du Mez 2020, 144, 167–69, 239–40, 261, 264). Another, Ralph
Drollinger, is the lobbyist and pastor who runs regular Bible studies for elected officials in
the White House and Congress (Stewart 2020, 34–53). And the third, Phil Robertson, is the
wealthy hunter-businessman who was the star of the wildly popular “redneck reality”
show Duck Dynasty (Du Mez 2020, 244–46, 269–71).

Can you match the quote with its author?

It is difficult to differentiate these quotes because they all appropriate the Bible as support
for the same U.S. Republican agenda: Small Government. With some more context, you
might find it easier to distinguish the president of the Duck Commander Company from the
two seminarians, but on the whole Drollinger’s Bible studies (the first quote), Robertson’s
brand new (Aug. 2020) mass-market book Jesus Politics (the second quote), and Grudem’s
2010 seminary textbook Politics according to the Bible (the third quote) are remarkably
consistent in their approaches to the Bible and the partisan lens they use to interpret it. In
what follows, I investigate the interpretive strategies that these men and other Republican
influencers have used in recent years to render the Bible as a blueprint for “free market
capitalism.” Then I proceed to expose biblical capitalism as a politically expedient right-
wing fantasy.

Republican Biblical Interpretation
In her critical essay on the conservative Evangelical agenda of the Museum of the Bible in
Washington, DC (which Drollinger has been involved with), New Testament scholar
Margaret Mitchell identifies a dangerous assumption of both the museum’s exhibits and
right-wing inerrantist interpretations: “the Bible’s own meaning is perspicuous, not
requiring interpretation.” Mitchell explains that “this is an evasion of responsibility or
agency for interpretation and use of the biblical text.” She notes, however, that recognition
of the process of interpretation does serve the end of drawing boundaries between what
are considered right and wrong understandings of the Bible: “Where ‘the Bible’ has done
good things, it did them on its own through its clear and unambiguous message; where it
has appeared to side with racism or political domination or resistance to scientific
discovery, that has involved ‘interpretations’ that can be questioned” (Mitchell 2019).

By concealing their own agency in the subjective processes of translation and
interpretation, right-wing interpreters engage in what the religious studies scholar Stephen
Young has described as “protective strategies” (Young 2015). They claim authority as
disinterested transmitters of biblical teaching in a way that protects both the Bible itself
and their own insider claims to biblical truth while demeaning conflicting views as biased
“interpretations.” Grudem employs such strategies in the three pages of his 600-page
textbook devoted to method. First, he rejects the idea that there is any “significant
disagreement” among “interpreters who take the whole Bible to be the trustworthy Word
of God.” He implies that this “widespread consensus” among “mainstream evangelical
interpreters” and “many conservative Roman Catholic interpreters” exists because the
Bible, viewed as a singular and uniformly “good” book, is clear and consistent on the
principles conservatives uphold.

Grudem describes liberals’ approaches to the Bible, however, as “distortions” that are
“designed” to misrepresent the Bible in order to lead people away from “obeying” it. He
says that liberal objections to the clear biblical teachings of conservatives “can all be
answered, one at a time, by saying, ‘You are interpreting the Bible incorrectly at this point,
and here are the reasons why’” (Grudem 2010, 56–57; my emphasis). According to
Grudem, interpretation only imposes bias when the interpreter is a liberal.

But, as many readers of this blog will appreciate, texts only take on meaning through
interpretation. And every interpretation is shaped by the language, culture, identities,
experiences, and political inclinations of the interpreter (see, for example, Segovia and
Tolbert 1995). Many of the interpretations in Grudem’s book, as a result, are not so
perspicuous to those outside of the U.S. Republican Christian echo-chamber—or even, for
that matter, to interpreters outside of the modern U.S. I am often struck, in fact, by how
often Evangelical students in classes at my Canadian university appear mystified by the
economic conservatism of right-wing American Evangelical influencers (see Bean 2014). In
my forthcoming book, Republican Jesus, I argue that Republican influencers’ interpretations
of the New Testament on hot-button political issues are products of the distinctive cultural
history of the U.S. Christian Right over the last century. They were cultivated, in large part,
by corporate-backed Christian conservative leaders in reaction to the “Big Government”
policies of FDR’s New Deal, in opposition to the menace of “communism” constructed to
encompass liberal Christianity, and in defense of a conservative “biblical worldview” that
indicts movements for women’s rights, civil rights, and, in more recent history, the rights of
LGBTQ+ people.

Republicans’ Gospel of Small Government
A central assumption of many Republican interpretations is that the Bible is a divine
mandate for “free market capitalism.” I refer to interpretations that take this perspective as
the Republican Gospel of Small Government, because these self-serving interpretations
often promote limited government—for example, limited taxes and regulations. These
interpretations are built upon what Grudem highlights as two clear points of consensus
among the Bible-obedient: that “God established civil government for our benefit” and that
“there should be a distinction between those things that are governed by the church and
those that are under the authority of civil government” (Grudem 2010, 56). The
government’s power, according to Grudem’s interpretation, should be checked so as not to
interfere in the affairs of Christian individuals and organizations.

The elaborations of these principles in Grudem’s book express a political ideology known
as “neoliberalism,” a term that often causes confusion. Neoliberalism does not refer to a
form of left-wing progressive (that is, “liberal”) politics, as the name might appear to
suggest, but instead to a form of “classical liberalism” (laissez-faire economics) that was
developed by twentieth-century conservatives and famously undergirded the politics of
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. According to the political theorist
David Harvey’s definition, “Neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices
proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of
entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private
property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007,
25; see also Harvey 2005; Lofton 2015).

Neoliberalism’s policy hallmarks are tax cuts, the privatization of public institutions (e.g.,
schools, prisons, and the military), austerity measures, and anti-unionism. It is signaled in
political rhetoric by language that casts “freedom” and “individualism” as remedies to the
alleged evils of Big Government, socialism, and communism. And one of its most common
symbols is the bootstrapper—a man who gains wealth by working hard to take advantage
of the opportunities for economic success offered to him by the free market. Since
neoliberalism is not limited to a single political party, but is a widespread ideology that
greases the wheels of consumer capitalism, bootstrappers often appear in mainstream New
Testament scholarship as upwardly mobile fishermen, carpenters, tentmakers, and so on
(Crossley 2014; Boer and Petterson 2017; Myles 2018).

Still, Republicans tend to be the most overt proponents of neoliberalism in the U.S.
According to a 2017 poll, for example, Republicans were 4.3 times more likely to attribute
poverty to laziness. White Evangelicals were 3.2 times more likely than someone
unaffiliated with a religion (Zauzmer 2017; see also Werline 2016). The attribution of
poverty to laziness is a direct correlate of the bootstrapper ideal: if a person does not
succeed on the free market, they must not have pulled up their bootstraps and worked
hard enough.

Here is where it becomes clear that neoliberalism is an ideology tied to white supremacy
(Soss et al. 2011). Republicans are reluctant to acknowledge that institutionalized forms of
discrimination (in hiring, wages, housing, education, healthcare, and the list goes on) create
tremendous barriers to economic prosperity. These barriers disproportionately affect
People of Color, and actively so. Recent Republican efforts to advance “religious freedom”
ironically seek government intervention to guarantee the ability of Christian businesses
and organizations to discriminate as they see fit (Posner 2020; Whitehead and Perry 2020).
A familiar metaphor that reveals the racial prejudice of neoliberal discourse is the “welfare
queen,” who is usually depicted as an overweight Black woman driving a flashy Cadillac to
pick up her welfare check. Despite the fact that the majority of welfare recipients are white,
conservatives often imply that People of Color desire government dependence because
they do not want to work (again, assuming free choice instead of recognizing structural
constraints) (Lomax 2018).

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the racial prejudices of neoliberalism are in
plain sight: the Trump administration and Republican pundits cast the Black Lives Matter
movement as thieves, thugs, cultural Marxists, socialists, and communists. Christian
Republican influencers like Grudem, Drollinger, and Robertson have provided the biblical
interpretations that support these views.

Do their interpretations stand up to critical scrutiny?

The Fallacy of Biblical Capitalism
The idea that the Bible is a mandate for capitalism because it affirms private property
rights and the creation of wealth is widespread in modern U.S. conservativism. It is not,
however, limited to contemporary U.S. Republicans; it has its roots in the philosophies of
early-modern shapers of classical liberalism like Hugo Grotius and John Locke (Boer and
Petterson 2014). I will focus on Grudem’s textbook here because it is the fullest and most
systematic recent American treatment of the topic and because Drollinger and others cite it
as an influence on their views.

Grudem’s enormous conservative screed covers nearly every hot-button political issue. Its
case against affirmative action and its colonialist argument that Native Americans should
stop “clinging” to their ancestral traditions are particularly disgraceful. Like the rest of the
book, these arguments stem from Grudem’s neoliberal interpretation of property rights
(e.g., Native Americans should be moved “from a system of tribal ownership of land to a
system of private ownership,” in which they can then sell their land to non-Native
Americans) (Grudem 2010, 548).

Considering that it is the foundation for most of his politics, Grudem’s biblical argument for
private property rights is quite flimsy. His main point is that the commandments not to
steal or covet (Exod 20:15, 17), as well as the more specific laws about theft in the
Pentateuch, indicate that “The Bible regularly assumes and reinforces a system in which
property belongs to individuals, not to the government or to society as a whole.” He
concedes that landed property in ancient Israel cannot be sold “in perpetuity” because God
is considered its ultimate sovereign (Lev 25:23). Grudem’s work-around is that God made
humans in his image (Gen 1:27) and they are thus supposed to imitate him (Eph 5:1) by
partaking in their own sovereignty over private property (Grudem 2010, 262–64).

There are important historical and biblical reasons why Grudem’s case for biblical
capitalism founded on private property rights fails.

First, the historical: the modern democratic ideal of private property rights does not jibe
with ancient notions of property. In premodern agrarian societies like ancient Israel or the
Roman Empire, the king or emperor could seize property in their domain at any time, even
if this was viewed as legally and morally dubious (e.g., Ahab’s expropriation of Naboth’s
vineyard) (Boer 2015).

Even more importantly, it is impossible for private property to be the cornerstone of a “free
market” when a substantial proportion of the population is enslaved. If humans can be
reduced to property, how can every human have the opportunity to succeed?

From a historical perspective, the conditions for capitalism did not exist in antiquity. Yes,
individuals could be considered the owners of possessions, could accumulate surplus
wealth through the sale of certain types of goods, and could convey their possessions as
inheritances. But rulers had absolute ownership of the land, many humans were not “free”
to own property, much commerce took the form of barter, economies were not fully
monetized, local markets were only loosely integrated with one another, industrial
technologies were relatively limited, and there was no market for credit investment. By
most definitions of capitalism, the ancient Mediterranean does not fit the bill (Monson and
Scheidel 2015).

Grudem’s argument may also be invalidated on biblical grounds. Grudem is quick to assert
individuals’ property rights as guaranteed by God’s sovereignty over the land. But the
Holiness Legislation’s notion of Israelites as tenants on God’s land (Lev 25:23: “The land
shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and
tenants”) underpins a political-economic system in which legal regulations exist to limit the
ways that an Israelite can economically exploit another Israelite. Leviticus 25 outlines legal
regulations on prices and interest, among other things. Additionally, it instructs that every
fiftieth year should be a jubilee, in which “you shall return, every one of you, to your
property and every one of you to your family” (25:10). Grudem emphasizes that the
instruction to return to one’s own “property” affirms individual property ownership. Yet,
this conclusion conveniently downplays a key idea in this chapter that also appears
elsewhere in the Bible: no individual owns land; they just possess plots allotted to them by
God (see also Deut 3:20; 19:14). Slaves, too, should be freed during the jubilee according to
Lev 25:40, or during each sabbatical (seventh) year according to Exod 21:2 and Deut 15:12
(though this only applies to Israelite slaves). Deuteronomy 15:1–11 adds that debts owed
by other Israelites should be released every sabbatical year (tellingly, Grudem does not
mention Deut 15 once in his book). The Bible, therefore, prescribes some very explicit legal
regulations to prevent certain types of economic exploitation.

The sundry texts in the New Testament are also by no means uniform in their economic
ethics. There are, for instance, some passages that only condemn greed and the love of
money rather than wealth accumulation per se (e.g., 1 Tim 6:10: “For the love of money is
the root of all kinds of evil”). Republican interpreters tend to cite these passages as though
they are the most significant warnings about economic exploitation in the New Testament
and as though they are merely indictments of the attitudes of corrupt individuals rather
than criticisms of free market capitalism itself.

But there is a wide range of other perspectives on economic ethics in the New Testament
(see Friesen 2008). There are some texts that endorse giving a portion of one’s wealth to
the poor (e.g., Jesus commends the chief tax collector Zacchaeus for giving half of his
possessions to the poor in Luke 19:8), other texts that call for the rich to divest themselves
entirely (e.g., in Mark 10:21, Jesus tells a rich man that he must do the following to attain
eternal life: “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor”; see also Matt 19:21; Luke
18:22), and other texts that portray the communal redistribution of wealth (e.g., Acts 2:44–
45: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their
possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”). These diverse
perspectives do not neatly congeal into a theological foundation for privatized wealth
accumulation. The tradition of hostility toward wealth in some parts of the gospels may, in
fact, be a response to the expansion of private property rights that facilitated the
accumulation of wealth by elites in Jesus’s day (Keddie 2019, 71–110).

Luke’s description of the beginning of Jesus’s ministry is particularly noteworthy, for it
portrays Jesus declaring a jubilee. He preached in the synagogue at Nazareth from Isaiah,
saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news
to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the
blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19).
Invoking the ancient Israelite jubilee, Luke’s Jesus proclaimed his mission as messiah as an
intervention against unjust social structures that oppress people who are poor, disabled,
and held in captivity.

~~~
Grudem, Drollinger, and Robertson—three very different Republican Evangelical
influencers—all pose the same question, Does the Bible support capitalism or communism?,
as a “protective strategy" to appear as disinterested messengers of biblical truth.
Unsurprisingly, they all arrive at the same predetermined answer: “that God is a capitalist,
not a communist” (Drollinger, “Government”).

The Republican influencers who disseminate the fallacy of biblical capitalism obscure the
preindustrial agrarian contexts in which biblical texts were produced, ignore or downplay
biblical texts that promote social justice through economic regulations, and fail to reflect on
their own agency as interpreters. When these right-wing interpreters identify “free market
capitalism” in texts that often condone slavery, and then proceed to disregard those biblical
texts that call for the emancipation of (certain) slaves, they reveal their investment in a
neoliberal ideology primed to perpetuate the very unjust social structures of which they
are the beneficiaries.


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