Even Christian conservatives are critiquing capitalism

There's been a resurgence of critiques of capitalism since the financial crisis of 2008.

Or, to phrase it as a Guardian headline writer did, "Karl Marx is going mainstream." Last Summer, the British paper reported:

Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse.

The resurrected interest isn't just British, either. It's here in Germany and can even be found in the US, where "socialist" is a popular political slur. The slur, though, isn't quite as much of a slur as it once was.  During the last midterm election cycle, a Pew poll found that the 29 percent of Americans said they had positive feelings about the word "socialism." That number was much higher when only younger Americans were considered. Nearly half of those under 30 respond positively to the idea of socialism, the poll found.

Bhaskar Sunkara -- who is one of those younger Americans, and is also the editor of one of the newest leading left-of-liberal journals, Jacobin -- thinks this new interest can be attributed to the financial crisis, the time that's passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union ("The cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway," he writes), and with capitalism's failure to deliver the promised future.

The resurgent critiques of capitalism aren't just coming from the left, though, either.

There's also an apparent new willingness to raise questions about capitalism from the right. Even in quarters where there's little tolerance for Marx's thinking, little sympathy for socialism, one can find what appears to be a new openness to critical questions about capitalism. The resurgent, post-2008 critique of capitalism goes beyond the Marx revival.

First Things
At First Things, for example, a journal that can't credibly be construed as leftist, it has recently been argued that "out political challenges mostly flow from the triumph of capitalism. And American conservatism is in trouble because it can’t acknowledge much less respond to this fact."

The editor, Catholic theologian R.R. Reno, clarifies that such criticism is not an attack on capitalism, per se, any more than warnings about the dangers of sunburn on the beach are attacks on sunshine. Nevertheless, it is a critique, an argument for fetters on the "free" market.

Reno writes,

The triumph of economic freedom is a good thing. It’s made possible a global economy that has lifted and promises to continue lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But that’s only part of the story. If American conservatism is unwilling to face the fact that economic freedom creates social and therefore political problems -- political problems that will require in one way or another limiting economic freedom -- it will be irrelevant to our age.

There is, of course, a Catholic tradition here that Reno is continuing. To a certain extent this is not new, and doesn't date from the financial crisis. Catholic theologians have long argued and the church has regularly taught that the logic of markets leads to certain immoralities, injustices and oppressions, while at the same time reaffirming the rightness of many of the basic conditions and functions of capitalism. The argument is an argument against excesses. It's not a novel argument that Reno is re-raising.

It's my impression, though, that this argument hasn't been made in public very much, and Reno's article is a change in that regard. It's a critique that has been easy enough to find in theological circles, but it's been confined in those circles to some extent. In the US, Catholic concerns about capitalism have been marginalized, while concerns about abortion, the family, the death penalty, and even questions about the justice of a war like the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been much more prominent.

When Reno raises the issue of capitalism, then, and says capitalism is a problem, it's not a new argument, but may be considered a sign of new openness to critiques of capitalism on the right. It's a conservative instance of this cultural moment where the claims of a "free" market are being called into question.

It could also be just a quirk of the editorial policy of First Things. That magazine is not averse to trolling it's core audience. And yet, there are other conservative religious journals which one wouldn't associate with leftists or Marxists where there also seems to be a new openness to these sorts of questions.

Front Porch Republic
One relatively new journal -- Front Porch Republic -- is more or less dedicated to this kind of critique. It has been a platform for various arguments about right-of-center alternatives to capitalism, especially distributism, and also versions of localism. The journal hasn't invented these alternatives and the associated critiques, but it has done a good bit to promote them. The journal has worked to popularize anti-capitalist thinkers, such as Hilaire Belloc, who haven't been very popular in the past, as well as to call attention to traditional conservative arguments for restraints on the "free" market.

Front Porch Republic, notably, started in 2009, right after the financial crisis, at the very same moment Marx was "going mainstream." The editors note the historical moment's import in the journal's founding:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation .... We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend.

This isn't Marx, and it's a long way from Sunkara's Jacobins, but it is a critique of capitalism.

Cardus
This can also be seen in other religious conservative journals. The most recent online edition of Comment, for example, the journal of a  Neo-Calvinist think tank Cardus, which is "dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture," includes an article arguing for a "biblical" alternative to capitalism. (Full disclosure: I wrote for Comment under a previous editor). In that article, Paul Williams writes:

In the biblical tradition, economic activity is depicted as something that is intended to bring together and sustain a relationship between God, humanity, and creation. In Genesis, for example, the work of humanity in cultivating the earth, making it fruitful, guarding, keeping, and caring for it is described in exactly the same language as that used later of the priestly tasks in the temple. Economic life is inherently religious because it is a form of worship taking place in the temple of God's creation. The fall of humanity into sin is a failure to guard, keep, and care for this place of intimate relationship safe from the evil of pride and autonomy -- sin fractures all the relationships that work and economic activity cultivate: those with God, with one another, and with creation itself. Redemption thus involves restoring these fractured relationships, and the primary biblical motif for redemption in the economic realm is 'Jubilee.'

The idea of "Jubilee," according to Williams, conflicts with what he calls "capitalism-as-ideology." He calls for a critique of capitalism -- or at least the ideology associated with it -- that challenges the idea that the mechanisms of the capitalist markets are morally neutral, and challenges the "sense that there is no alternative to our current system" (emphasis original).

Though the comparison would likely horrify both parties, Williams arguments are in some senses similar to those made by the French philosopher Alain Baidou. Baidou argues that "the existing world is not necessary," that it is only because "we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy" that we "cannot see the other possibilities that are inherent in the situation in which we find ourselves" (emphases original). Baidou calls this claim, that things can be other than they are, that a politics of emancipation is possible, "the communist hypothesis." Williams clearly isn't talking about communism when he speaks of an alternative, yet he, like Baidou, starts his critique with an attack on the idea that capitalism is inevitable, alternatives impossible. The common starting point is that things could be different, and that those possibilities should be thought.

The alternative being entertained in the pages of Comment is not a Marxist one, and not something that could be described as "left of liberal." Williams holds a chair for Marketplace Theology and Leadership at a Christian graduate school in Vancouver, Canada, and he's previously worked as an economic advisor for major global corporations. The publisher of Comment, Ray Pennings, recently wrote that "growing sense of class identification" in Canada is a "reason for concern," and suggests economics shouldn't be a major, central political issue. No one would confusing Pennington for a mainstreamer of Marx. Nevertheless, there is a critique of capitalism happening at Comment.

There's a tradition here, too, that's being continued. This also is not exactly new. North American Neo-Calvinists have long critiqued capitalism, making arguments for the necessity of the values of stewardship and vocation. The market is good, according to Neo-Calvnists, not to the extent that it's totally unfettered, but to extent it is shaped and limited -- in a real sense, disciplined -- by Christian morality.

In many cases, though, this argument has not been articulated as a negative, a warning about capitalism, but as a statement about potential, and possibility. It has been a critique only in the softest, gentlest version of that term. Neo-Calvinists have generally made their arguments via statements about the good that Christians can do in business.

For example, the previous editor of Comment, Gideon Strauss, wrote,

The whole world of making products, providing services, buying and selling, building companies, establishing relationships of trade -- marketplaces filled with businesses and their customers -- can be a vibrant expression of what it means to be human in God's wonderful creation .... the original promise of business activity and market relationships is being redeemed, and we can work with courage, lead with love, and expect our efforts to bear fruit of very long-lasting value.

One can also find authors in Comment praising the important work of sales, calling for Christians to recognize the sacred in their office cubicles, calling for reconsideration of cubicles, and listing "50 things I love about business."

The critique, such as it was, was more like a call for a value supplement to capitalism. That's quite different than talk about jubilee.

The argument that Williams is making can be detected in each of these pieces, and one can connect what Williams says about the need for an alternative that arises from "jubilee" with these other articles. But the tenor is different. The negative point is much sharper. The shift may only be a shift in tone, a shift of emphasis, but such shifts are still important. What seems to be happening is a new willingness, a new need to critique capitalism.

That openness seems to date from 2008. Whether or not this is all a matter of passing grumblings or something more significant remains to be seen, but there is, right now, a broad and diverse range of sharp critiques on capitalism. It's broader, even, that has generally been noted. There's a lot of public interest from a lot of different quarters. Such arguments have seemed more palatable, more possible, and certainly more popular in the last few years than they have been for a long time.

It does seem that Sunkara's right about the historical causes of this, too. The financial crisis and the broad consensus among the political class about how to respond to the financial crisis ("too big to fail") opened up the possibility of serious critical questions. The counter argument for the necessity of capitalism, the boogie man of Stalinism, isn't as powerful as it once was. And, for a not insignificant number of people, the promises that capitalism makes about the future now kind of all sound like the same sort of fantastical sales job one heard from the hucksters of the housing bubble, the huskers of the dot com bubble, and from all the masters of the universe who stood to profit from the financial crises they helped create.

It's even more true, it seems, than Sunkara suspects. The resurgent critiques capitalism aren't just happening among the left-of-liberals: there are even a number of North American Christian conservatives of various stripes raising protests against the existing economic order.

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'Slap a bonnet on the cover'

Almost any popular discussion of Amish romance novels -- the very successful evangelical-produced fiction with Old Order Amish settings and characters -- includes mention of the iconic covers. These are the "novels with covers adorned with beautiful, bonneted women and buggies," as one reporter put it. Or, as another observer wrote more elaborately, these are fictions with

covers each backlit with the golden glow of God’s everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet

Famously, a marketing expert at a Christian publishing house told Newsweek "You slap a bonnet on the cover and double the sales."

It's probably the apparently ironic contrast between the crass commercialism of such covers and the alternative to commercialism represented by the covers that attracts such interest from those who don't read Amish romance. The incongruity can be jarring.

The incongruity can also be really interesting.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher's excellent new book on Amish romance fiction (a book which also features a stock photo of an Amish woman on the cover) notes that these novels are both products of "hypercapitalism" and serve to create a space for those who want an alternative to that hypercaptialism. Part of what readers do with these novels is imagine what it would be like to live at a different, calmer, pace. But to do that, of course, also means buying and consuming the novels, commercial practices that entail participation in the whirring, speeding system of commodity production.

Weaver-Zercher writes that the pace at which these books are produced and consumed has a very direct effect on some of the iconic covers. One model, dressed to look Amish, can appear on as many as 10 different covers.

She writes, "Given their highly visual distinctives, such as dress and transportation, the Amish are particularly ripe for commodification. The emblems of Amish life -- coverings, capes, beards, hats, quilts, buggies -- render them useful in a consumer culture." These covers -- "young models with plucked eyebrows," Weaver-Zercher writes, who "sport Amish garb and gaze into the near distance" -- become free-floating cultural signifiers, signifying a respite from and alternative to consumer culture, which can itself be consumed.

There's only very little information readily available about the actual production of these covers, but the little that's out there is fascinating.

The model on the cover of a re-release of a Beverly Lewis novel, for example, recently talked about how she got into the business:

In 2009, a modeling agent approached [Claire DeBerg] at a wedding and asked her, 'What's your ethnicity?' DeBerg, who is Cherokee, says she is asked this question a lot. 

The agent was looking for 'ethnically vague models' and thought DeBerg fit the bill. 
DeBerg could not find a reason not to try modeling, so she agreed to get some headshots taken and have the agency represent her. 



DeBerg, who happens to be Mennonite and taught English for a while at the University of Northern Iowa, has modeled for Target, Walgreens, and H&R Block. She told The Mennonite magazine that the photographer who shot her picture specializes in Amish book covers, and the woman who did her hair and make-up was an expert in Amish makeup and hairstyles.

The strangeness of all this is obviously worth a laugh. But it's also worth thinking about: this is an example of the production of an imagined alternative to the culture created by that production. The internal contradiction in that results, in some contexts, in a jarring aesthetic experience, but it also, in other contexts, makes a potentially powerful cultural practice possible.

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Could charity replace welfare?

Here's something you can learn in the line at the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga.: People generally don't ask for help until they really need help. Until the heat is shut off, or the rent is very late, or there's no more food. Until there are no more ketchup packets and saltine crackers in the cupboard. Until their children are very hungry.

And by then it's too late.

As a reporter for several years on the south side of metro Atlanta, I spent some time exploring the area's social services, and the public responses to the problem of poverty. One of the things I found was this specific bureaucratic problem of lag time between the application for and approval of government assistance. The approval process takes time. Time that those who ask for help don't have.

No one applies for help they need in 30 days.

What happens is this: They meet the case worker. They fill out the paperwork. They provide information and sign at the x, and they tell the caseworker what their situation is. Then, at some point, awkwardly, normally, they clear their throat and say, "so ...."

"So ... how soon could this ...?"

And then the government worker says, "When is the last time you ate?" Or, "Do you have food to feed your kids tonight?"

And they don't. They never do: that's why they're asking for help.

Then the case workers lead the people down the hall to what was a break room, but is now a food bank. The get out boxes and bags and they fill them with good things to eat. They send them home with soup and bread, potatoes and canned vegetables and mac & cheese. There is no application process for this. You only have to go and wait in line, meet with the case worker, say that you're hungry and don't know how you'll feed your kids, and you will get food. While you wait for the government to do something, you will be fed. And it's privately funded food.

The food bank in the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga. is actually a private charity. The food isn't paid for by government of any level, but actually is put there by a dozen businesses and services organizations, each of which commit to stocking the food bank for one month a year. It's given away by the social workers who work for the government, but provided by private charity.

This is the kind of charity that many conservatives, particularly Christians, believe is better than welfare programs and should replace welfare programs.

There are very strong teachings in the New Testament about charity and caring for the poor, and those Christians who object to public assistance programs that help the poor don't just ignore those teaching, despite what some critics say. They believe it's very important to assist those who need assistance, but also that how that's done is critical. They argue, on both practical and theoretical grounds, that the state should not be the entity doing this work that needs to be done. Charity in itself is good, but the government ruins that, and makes things worse.

I wonder, though, practically speaking, if charity could replace welfare.

Purely as a pragmatic issue, would it be possible? Could private charities move beyond assistance, beyond helping at the points where the system of government assistance is breaking down, replacing government with benevolent associations as religious conservatives say would be preferable. If given the chance, could and would people of good will take care of the poor voluntarily, giving enough money to private organizations to functionally replace the social safety nets now in place?

I'm not sure they could.

Currently, in Georgia, to take the example I know best, private charities don't seem robust enough to replace welfare programs. They are, for the most part, themselves in perpetual financial crisis, struggling to raise enough funds to do what they currently do, which is is only substitutionary, filling in when government-funded social programs fail to meet immediate needs. Where welfare systems are being dismantled, and assistance has been drastically cut or made dramatically harder to get, charities are not prepared -- not funded or staffed or supported in a way that they could be prepared -- to do more. They're already doing everything they can, and it's an ongoing struggle.

Welfare programs such as TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have been gutted in Georgia, in recent years, and the needs of needy families have not just been simply or easily met by charitable organizations.

As Slate recently reported:

Even as unemployment has soared to 9 percent and 300,000 Georgia families now live below the poverty line—50 percent higher than in 2000, for a poverty rate that now ranks sixth in the nation—the number receiving cash benefits has all but evaporated: Only a little over 19,000 families receiving TANF remain, all but 3,400 of which were cases involving children only. That's less than 7 percent, making Georgia one of the toughest places in the nation to get welfare assistance.  

What's Georgia's secret? According to government documents, interviews with poor Georgians, and those who work with them, it's a simple one: Combine an all-Republican state government out to make a name for itself as tough on freeloaders; a state welfare commissioner so zealous about slashing the rolls that workers say she handed out Zero candy bars to emphasize her goal of zero welfare; and federal rules that, regardless of who's in the White House, give states the leeway to use the 1996 law's requirement for "work activities"—the same provision that Republicans have charged President Obama wants to unfairly water down—to slam the door in the face of the state's neediest. 

What this has created is a land that welfare forgot, where a collection of private charities struggle to fill the resulting holes. 

There are plenty of people who would argue that -- though it might be hard at the moment -- this should happen, though. Public welfare ought to be replaced by charity. Fill the safety net with holes and let private organizations take over.

Joel J. Miller recently argued at Patheos, for example, that though there might be practical reasons to commit tax monies to care for the poor, doing so is "to remedy one evil with another." He writes:

compulsion is almost always assumed in the public discussions around the topic of social justice. We jump from the moral imperative to give to the political expediency of a forced transfer, to the legal tactic of a compulsory program. That is not only a stretch, but betrays a misunderstanding of virtue.

This is also the fundamental argument made by the Acton Institute, which promotes religious arguments for the free market and argues that religious organizations, rather than the government, should provide for the poor. As the institute's founder, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, has argued:

What is [morally] required of us as individuals may or may not translate into a civic policy priority. In the case of the welfare state, it is possible to argue that it does great good (though I would dispute that). Whether it does or does not, however, a government program effects nothing toward fulfilling the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor.

[....] I cannot see how this method of redistributing wealth has anything to do with the Gospel. Jesus never called on public authority to enact welfare programs. He never demanded that his followers form a political movement to tax and spend. Nor did he say that the property of the rich must always be forcibly expropriated. He called for a change in the human heart, not a change in legislation. There is a massive difference.

Both Miller and Sirico hold that, on principle, government programs to help the poor are wrong, even immoral. But they would not argue that the only moral option is for the poor to remain poor, to be destitute and go hungry. Rather, they advocate that charity replace welfare. They want a program like the privately funded food bank in Clayton County that's currently housed in and administered by the government officials to replace the government systems of assistance, rather than merely serving to supplement the government programs.

Whether or not one agrees with arguments about the morality of public assistance, the practical aspects of private charity seem like they should be matters of fact. Many, I suspect, would be happy to disregard the ideological questions of preferred public policy if it could be demonstrated that the poor would be adequately cared for by private charities. A solution is a solution, after all.

Georgians themselves are quite generous, too. They're good people and willing to give. If charity could work to replace welfare, it should work in Georgia, which ranks eighth in the nation in terms of giving. In 2011, Georgians give about $4.8 billion to charity. This is a combination of private giving, corporate giving, foundations, and bequests. Typical households gave about 6.2 percent of their income, even as the economy was still struggling, unemployment rates remained high and all the rest.

Is that enough, though, to take care of the state's poor?

According to Slate, there are about 300,000 Georgian families living below the poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of less than $23,000 per year.

For that family of four, groceries would cost about $520 a month, according to the estimates of the USDA. That's the "thrifty plan,"  not an excess of groceries. Keeping to that minimum, the cost of groceries would add up to an annual cost of about $6,240, nearly a quarter of family's income if they were exactly at poverty level.

If the family lives in the Atlanta area, a crowded one bedroom apartment should cost them about $757 per month, according to HUD estimates of fair market rent. If they live in the cheapest place in the state, Jenkins County, where 22 percent of families live below the poverty line and there are fewer jobs, monthly rent on a one bedroom apartment will cost them a little more than $400 per month. If the family of four that lives exactly at the poverty line is in Jenkins County, then rent will eat up a fifth of their income. If the family is in Atlanta, where there are more economic opportunities, housing will take more than half of their annual income.

Georgians -- including these very poor Georgians -- are very generous, though. There's more than $4 billion being given to charity every year. So could it be possible to help those living below the poverty line with private charity?

Some back-of-the-envelope math: To give each of the 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line the money they need for groceries -- just covering the cost of food to help them out -- assuming poor families average out to families of four who need $520 per month for groceries, this would cost about $156 million per month.

That's $1.87 billion per year.

Perhaps it could be done for less than that, but this is not counting administration costs or distribution costs, buildings to house food banks or anything like that. This is imagining a scenario where poor families are just given credit to buy food for themselves, and the process of doing that is completely cost free: $1.87 billion.

Do the math on housing, and it works out pretty much the same. To pay the rent for 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line, or even just offset the cost of housing, would be very expensive. If you figure an average stipend of $500 per month for housing, that's a monthly bill of $150 million. Annually, helping the poor pay their rents in this way would cost about $1.8 billion.

Which is still significantly less than the government currently spends on welfare in a given year.

In 2012, state and local governments spent $5.2 billion on welfare in Georgia, more than all private giving combined. If every existing penny of charity in the state were to go to fund existing programs -- with donors just replacing tax payers as the source of funding -- there'd be a $400 million shortfall.

Disregarding the current welfare programs, though, and just focusing on the possibility of private charity for basic, practical expenses to help the state's poor, covering grocery costs, supplementing rent on cheap apartments, and you're still talking about $1.8, $1.87 billon.

This be a major, major undertaking for those who wanted to fulfill "the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor," as Siricio put it. Either of these charitable efforts to replace welfare would require about a third of what Georgians currently give.

Assuming that that the money currently being given is going to good things -- a fair assumption, I think -- then private giving would have to increase from $4.8 billion to, say, $6.66 billion.

On the one hand, that's not impossible to imagine. Many churches ask their members to give 10 percent of what they earn to charity, and if Georgians all did that, giving would increase by nearly 4 percent.  If individuals, corporations, foundations, bequests all increased giving by three or four percent, it would be possible to pay for the groceries of all of Georgia's poor, or give them a significant offset in the cost of a one bedroom apartment.

Not both, though. And, seriously, $1.8 billion is a lot of money.

That's roughly the amount the Salvation Army was given in 2010 -- nation wide. The Salvation Army has a massive fund raising operation, established institution and a long history of experience at this sort of thing. It's difficult to imagine how that success on a national scale could be equalled in increased giving in a single state. A state, remember, that already gives more than normal.

This increase in giving is even more difficult to imagine when one factors in the problem of inflation. Nationally, giving actually has gone up by about 4 percent or so a year for the last few years. That meant an increase of nearly $70 billion given away. Once you adjust for inflation, though, this increase basically disappears. When adjust for inflation, giving in 2011 is actually equal to giving in 2000, despite the fact that in the last decade the number of American families with children in poverty increased from 5 million to more than 7 million, and the number with children in deep poverty went from 2 million to more than 3 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

So where would this money come from? Would it be possible to increase giving by nearly $2 billion, inflation adjusted, in the state of Georgia?

Could the private funds be found -- practically speaking -- to take care of the state's poor?

Those at the Acton Institute will argue that charity will increase if taxes are cut. If government spending goes away, as it is in Georgia, and if people get to take home more of their income, as they do in Georgia right now, then the amount given to charity will correspondingly increase. Because, as one of Acton's research fellows put it, with this withering away of the state,

Capital is ... freed up for private charity. When people keep more of their disposable income, they can be more generous instead of abdicating their responsibilities for their neighbor-in-need to politicians and bureaucrats.

The president of Acton has argued that "Private charity tends to be inversely related to growth of government welfare" and that when "budget cuts go into effect, people will reach deeper into their pockets to help those genuinely in need."

That doesn't seem to be true, though. Giving doesn't correspond to tax rates, but to economic growth. When recessions hit, giving declines, and when the economy improves, giving does too. In recent history, giving increased a good bit during the late '90s, corresponding pretty directly to the boom years of the dot-com bubble. The Bush tax cuts, by comparison, which went into effect in 2001, by comparison, saw no corresponding increase in giving. According to Giving USA, rates of charity pretty consistently correspond to the Gross Domestic Product, more than any other economic indicator, fluctuating between 1.6 and 2.3 percent of the GDP between 1971 and 2011. This means that, generally speaking, charity doesn't increase when there's increased need, in the way that government spending might, but rather seems to be another kind of luxury spending that people, in aggregate, spend when they have.

Given the reality of actual giving, it's hard to see how charity could replace welfare, practically speaking. Even if it the case that charity is morally superior and vastly preferable to welfare programs, it doesn't seem that the money could be raised, even in generous Georgia, to replace government in taking care of the poor and establishing some kind of social safety net.

This is not in anyway a criticism of the existing charities. Those that exist do real and important work, and help the poor in many places where existing government programs fail. Throughout my time as a reporter in metro Atlanta, I was impressed by the commitment and by the successes of private charities. I was moved by their charity when I saw sick people given medical care, the homeless given shoes, and hungry children fed. That doesn't change the fact, though, that all of this was supplementary to the welfare system, and could not have replaced it. 

There are those who would like to see religion radically transform people, and change the way the poor in America are cared for. Tim Keller, for example, recently said that Christianity ought to have a direct impact on cities, giving rise to a really redemptive philanthropic spirit. He said:

Christ changes the way we use wealth and power. Our understanding of work must reflect what Robert Bellah (from his book, Habits of the Heart) describes as a contribution to the common good. Along this line, I'd express a desire to populate the city with people who embody this vision. I'd want to see an explosion of philanthropy, in which we don't spend money on ourselves, but instead cooperate with others who want to make the city a desirable place to live. Much like Wilberforce did in the early part of 19th-century England, we would pursue healing and redemption.

It seems an admirable goal. As it stands, though, Georgia has some of the most generous cities in America, and the private charity there is not even close to replacing welfare.

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The religious shape of capitalism

A new study published in Management Science is making a very Max Weber-like claim about the essential differences of religions affecting engagements with capitalism & shaping capitalism.

According to the University of Georgia and Southern Methodist University study, mutual funds are done differently in areas dominated by Catholics than they are in areas dominated by Protestants. The study says that difference is best explained by the respective natures of the different versions of Christianity.

From the abstract:

"Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. [...] Risk-taking associated with local religious beliefs manifests in higher portfolio concentrations, higher portfolio turnover, more aggressive interim trading, and more "tournament" risk-shifting behaviors, but not over-weighting risky individual stocks. Overall, our results suggest that local religious beliefs have significant influences on mutual fund behaviors."

One of the study's authors told CNN that Baptists in particular make a difference.

The theory, here, is that Baptists are more suspicious of promises of "great solutions" and "great returns," and that, in certain concentrations, that suspicion is adopted by the whole culture.

It will be interesting to see if this holds up & how far the study goes in attempting to explain the data. There's a real statistical difference, apparently, but the more useful/interesting part of the study for religion will be if there's any good argument as to why. Weber's own version of this idea that religion shapes economics, which was an inversion of Marx's claim, has the tendency to seem really persuasive on a certain level, but to not withstand a lot of detailed historical analysis.

A bit of Weber, from the classic The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in 1904 and '05:

"[I]t is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations."

"[...] one might be tempted to express the difference by saying that the greater other-worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the 'Catholic way of life,' while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism."

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The odd non-relation of the economy & religious construction

Despite signs of an economic recovery in other sectors of construction, religious construction has not picked up again. 

The stats from the US Department of Commerce show that the economic recovery -- sluggish though it may be -- isn't notable at all in spending on construction of houses of worship. The rate of decline with this construction spending isn't steep as it has been at some points since the economic crisis, but things are still moving in the downward direction. 

In the Spring, there was no hint of a reversal to the downward trend. Now, with two more month's worth of data, there's still no sign that spending on religious construction in America will do anything other than continue to decrease. The Summer just hasn't seen a significant uptick in construction spending by religious organizations. 

Given that construction typically increases in Summer months, and that religious construction has not increased this Summer, it doesn't seem likely that there religious construction will increase anytime soon. 

In January 2012, religious organizations spent a bit over $4 billion on construction. That dipped to $3.8 billion in April, $3.9 in May, and came in at $3.8 in June and $3.9 in July, according to the Department of Commerce numbers.

This means the market for religious construction is not responding to the economy in the same way the markets for residential and non-residential construction are responding. One can see the recovery in the statistics for private, non-government spending on other sorts of construction. But not with religious construction. 

Perhaps the era of construction of houses of worship is over in America. Certainly it now seems it was an era, rather than just being normalcy. 

It's difficult to imagine the near future will witness construction spending of the volume seen even during the recession. It's seems less likely still to see how these numbers might again reach the heights they did a decade ago, when nearly $9 billion per month was spent on religious construction in the United States.

The most recent numbers continue to support the point I made in July that there doesn't seem to be any clear relationship between economic conditions and religious construction. The decline in religious construction spending doesn't neatly correlate to the economic crisis, and the economic recovery doesn't   appear to have any bearing on religious construction either. 

It's just not clear what material conditions are conducive to religious construction. There's a kind of strange disconnect between the economy and this sector of the construction market. 

Comparisons to other sectors of construction make this clear. The signs of a recovery are apparent when one looks at the data for private spending on residential construction and non-residential construction. With residential construction, there's a bottom to the collapse of the market, and things turn around in mid 2011:

With non-residential construction -- only taking into account that construction funded by private sources, so as not to muddle things with government spending -- the same patter is visible. Spending drops from nearly $420 billion in 2008 to about $220 billion in January 2011. From that point on, spending as trended upwards:

Comparing all three data sets, the relationship between residential and non-residential construction spending is apparent. These look like they're responding to the same economic reality, the same economic conditions. Religious spending, by comparison, seems totally detached from the reality affecting the other sectors of construction:

It's still not at all clear to me why this is so. The economics of religious construction are ambiguous.

There's a temptation, I think, to see the change in idealist rather than materialist terms, but that doesn't particularly work either. One could argue and might want to argue that what's happened to spending on houses of worship in America isn't most basically economic, but theological. One could argue, for example that sometime around 2002, when the decline in spending seems to start, something shifted in the terms religious leaders and people used to conceive of and conceptualize spending, so that perhaps, for example, there was a shift from language about "sowing" and "expectations" and "enlarg[ing] the place of your tent," to language about "stewardship."

There's some evidence to support the idea that this has happened among evangelicals. The tide may have turned against megachurches, or at least the under girding theory of megachurches. 

Famously, for example, Willow Creek, the very influential megachurch that had served as a model for many, announced that their model was flawed and wasn't working as they'd predicted it would. Pastor Bill Hybels announced, pretty bluntly, "We made a mistake."

That's only evangelicals, though. Evangelicals count for roughly a third of Americans, so theological changes in that tradition that directly relate to church's construction spending are not irrelevant, but there's still the other two-thirds to consider. Surely it's not the case that most religious construction is done by just one-third of religious people? The Department of Commerce doesn't break down the religious construction number, but the statistics include Catholic construction, other Protestant construction, and non-Christian construction, too. 

If one posits a theological change as the condition for the change in religious construction spending, one either has to argue that 1) the change in one theological tradition was significant enough to cause the bulk of the affect of decline in religious spending; 2) that the theological change happened across traditions and across religions; or 3) that there were multiple, basically simultaneous theological changes in a variety of religious groups.

Those are difficult arguments to make. None of them seem, on the face of things, plausible. Perhaps with more data, an idealist argument for the root cause of the collapse of religious construction spending would have some support. 

I'm personally still inclined to look for a materialist answer, though I don't know of a decent one right now. It seems to me that it must be the case that, however decisions are made on a micro, case-by-case, congregation-by-congregation level, there must be some marco explanation that shows that certain social conditions relate to and result in increased spending on the construction of houses of worship, and that other social conditions are strongly connected to the decrease of spending seen over the last decade. 

What are those conditions, though? At least for now, there does not seem to be an answer. 

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The ambiguous economics of religious construction

Among the many economic indicators of America's lingering economic troubles, one of particular religious interest is TLRELCONS. That is: total religious construction, as measured in spending by the Department of Commerce. The latest numbers, crunched by the economic research team at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, show spending on religious construction fell off a cliff with the recession of 2008.

Just crashed.

And not by a little: Spending now is less than half what it was in 2006.

It's a "Bear Market in God."

 

But why? It's not at all clear what's causing this or driving this, or what's behind it. What are the conditions favorable or unfavorable to church, synagogue, temple or mosque construction?

Looking into the numbers, it becomes even less clear what's going on.

There are several curious things -- some unanswered and kind of perplexing questions -- about this sharp decline in religious construction spending.

First, religious construction was already in decline at the time of the economic crisis.

In April 2002, for example, religious institutions in the US spent a total of $8.75 billion on construction. Throughout the summer of 2003, spending on houses of worship continued to regularly pushed close to $9 billion. In June 2003: $8.73 billion. July: $8.79 billion. August: $8.8 billion.

By the beginning of 2006, this was down to $8 billion.

That's still a lot of funds poured into construction projects, of course, but the point is that before the recession, religious construction funding was in decline.

By comparison, 2006 was a peak year for residential construction spending, and for total US construction spending, which also includes public construction, institutional construction, etc. That was the height of the building boom -- and the housing bubble -- but religious construction spending was already on the wane.

As Joe Weisenthal writes at Business Insider, it doesn't seem to be a matter of economic downturn: "It's just a long, secular trend."

This fact counters the dominant narrative that churches were doing fine, building and growing and building again, until they suffered a sudden, surprising setback because donations disappeared in the financial crisis. The news story so popular in the last few years has been that churches are getting foreclosed on because of the crisis. It was a great story. Nice and dramatic. It illustrated the crisis without any detour into subprime mortgages or any of the institutional practices that caused the financial collapse, and generally managed to make the victims of foreclosure seem sympathetic. The thing packaged perfectly for headlines: Banks foreclose even on God!

A good story, but a bit of a farce. In one particularly bad year, according to Reuters, 138 church buildings were sold after defaulting on loans. But there are something like 344,894 congregations in the United States, meaning the repossessed, re-sold buildings accounted for roughly one for every 2,500 religious religious structures.

Perhaps more critically, the story missed the way that the economic crisis was serving as an easy explanation, a ready-made narrative, but was not necessarily the whole story. Just because real estate agents, bankers, pastors, church accountants and everyone else was saying "financial crisis" like it was an explanation, didn't mean it actually was. The numbers show that something had changed in the way money was spent on religious buildings well before the economic crisis.

But what?

Second, spending on religious construction hasn't recovered in the slightest.

There's no hint of a reversal or even a weak, tenative recovery. Other types of construction spending have come back at least a little. Private construction spending dropped from a high of $6.7 billion in March 2006 to a low of $2.2 billion in June 2009, a huge dive, but that was the floor, and it didn't keep declining. The spring of 2012 has seen a slight increase, actually. It's coming back, maybe a little. Not so with religious construction.

At the official end of the recession, spending on religious construction was at about $6 billion. In March 2012, spending dipped to about $4 billion. In April, it down to $3.8. In May, $3.5.

Where's the bottom? At what point will spending on religious construction turn around -- or even just level out?

Presumably that depends on a change in the conditions favorable to building religious buildings, but what conditions are those?

Third, spending on construction by religious institutions actually spiked during the recession.

Not by a lot, relatively speaking, but still, it's a spike. The numbers show that by mid 2008, spending had dropped to about $6.9 billion, but then increased that fall by about $500 million. Spending in September, October and November was at a rate of about $7.4 billion per month, just slightly below 2007 levels.

It's possible there're really easy explanations for this. What they might be, though, I don't know.

Perhaps mosques, meeting houses, etc., spent the extra money to finish up projects they'd delayed because of the crisis. But then why hasn't that repeated itself, and why is no similar late-recession spending spike seen in private or commercial construction? Perhaps something happened towards the end of 2008 that made those responsible for deciding on such spending think things had changed, but again, what sign, and why weren't similar indicators seen by other sectors of construction spending?

The only similar movement I can find, actually, is in public construction spending, which is spending meant to affect the market in accordance with the economics of John Maynard Keynes, not spending that responds to the market. I don't see how the rational for that public spending might be related to religious institution's rational.

On the other hand, maybe it is, in a specifically religious form: A lot of churches, for example, when undertaking big building projects, use the language of "sowing" and "expecting," and a kind of build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy. Maybe, in the middle of the recession, some groups decided to act on faith, and spend and build their way to the recovery, though a specifically religious sort of recovery.

I'm not entirely sure I buy that, nor can I think of any readily available evidence that might show that to be the case. But the odd blip is there still to be explained: Who spent an extra $500 million on a religious building in the middle of the greatest financial disaster in however long, and why?

Fourth, the decline in religious construction spending doesn't correlate to "secularization."

The one explanaiton proffered for this chart has been secularization, or the idea, basically, that religious institutions have stopped spending money on building because they've stopped receiving money in donations and they've stopped receiving money because fewer people are attending religious organizations.

There's not much interpretation of these TLRELCONS numbers -- perhaps because they seem so disconnected with anything else economists or economic reporters might be trying to explain. There's nothing like a real consensus of an account that I can find, or even, actually, much in the way of accounts at all. There are a couple of references to secularization, though.

But, despite being very reasonable sounding, neither aspect of the secularization thesis is supported by facts.

While it's true, for example, that charitable giving dropped off in the recession, it hasn't continued to decline. There was actually an increase in giving in 2011. And then another increase in 2012. According to one widely-accepted group's studies, giving declined by nearly 13 percent in 2008, but has ticked upwards since then. In 2010, Americans gave about $6 billion more than had than the year before. In 2011, they gave $12 billion more than they had in 2010.

That's not nothing.

In fact, on a "relative historical basis," according to the Atlantic, it's a pretty high level of philanthropic giving, and actually "slightly exceeds the inflation-adjusted value in 2000, making it more than in any year prior to 2004." This reportedly corresponds to a long-term pattern, where American's charitable giving increases by about 2.6 percent in the two-year period following a recession.

Not all of that is religious giving, obviously, and religious giving hasn't rebounded in the way that giving more generally has rebounded. Giving to religious institutions decreased by 0.8 percent in 2010, according to the same study. It decreased again by 1.7 percent in 2011. In both years, though, religious giving accounted for the largest portion of charitable giving, so that roughly one out of every three dollars given away was givien to a religious institution.

That's more than $100 billion given to religious institutions in a very bad year.

That amount and the rate of change, critically, bear little to no resemblance to the decline in religious construction spending.

And even if the post-recession decline in charitable giving exactly correlated to the decline in religious construction spending, we still wouldn't know what was going on. Charitable giving increased from 2002 to 2006, and yet religious construction spending declined. There could perhaps be an argument that this kind of giving and that kind of spending are related to each other in some way if only the period after the recession is considered, but what about before?

The same problems persist in attempts to correlate religious attendance and religious construction spending: They just don't relate in any clear way.

There's a very well-known story, now, about the rapid rise of a group sociologist call "nones." That increase in religiously disaffiliated people in America does increase at the same historical moment that this spending on construction by religious affiliations decreases. Disregard first appearances, though. The increase in the "nones" is not going to work to explain the bear market in synagogue and temple, etc., construction.

Why? Because, 1), the change doesn't exactly line up right. And 2), the change is change in identification, not necessarily attendance. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of people who say they don't attend religious services of any sort has increased by 8 or 9 percent, according to Robert E. Putnam and David E. Campbell. That's significant, but it's a matter of self report, and not an unambiguous indicator of religious behavior. What we know, from that statistic, is only that the way people describe themselves to strangers on the telephone changed in this particular way by this particular amount during this particular time frame. It may be the case that these 8 or 9 percent of people used to, before the 90s, regularly attend religious services, but we don't know that. It's at least as plausible that they didn't, but felt they needed to say they did because that's what was socially acceptable to say when someone you didn't know asked you this kind of private, kind of loaded question.

To what extent that change in self-identification has meant an actual change in the numbers of people in churches, synagogues, etc., is pretty hard to pin down.

Besides that, the rate of the increase in the number of self-described "nones" seems to have leveled out since the recession, which isn't true at all for the dramatic decrease in TLRELCONS in that same period. Where spending on construction plummets after the recession, attendance at religious services doesn't. If you ask people how often they attend religious services, as Gallup did in 2008, 2009 and 2010, they say more or less exactly the same thing all three years.

This counters the oft-repeated truism that people flock to church during recessions -- if it was once true, it isn't now -- but doesn't explain the decline in construction spending.

Self-reports about religion are not exactly reliable, so one could disregard these self-reported rates of attendance. It would be possible, perhaps, to speculate that a decreasing number of people are attending religious services but a correspondingly increasing number of people are lying to pollsters about religious attendance, the numbers not matching the reality. Except there are a few studies that report actual head counts at actual religious services, and they don't don't show a huge rate of dis-affiliation either. From 2000 to 2007, according to one report that actually errs on the side of thinking churches and Christianity are about to go extinct, church attendance specifically declined by 1.7 percent.

That's not much. That's not really likely enough to be noted in most churches, much less cause the kind of panic that would result in a serious adjustment to spending and long-term plans.


The secularization explanation doesn't really work, then.

Fifth, a good explanation of this decline also has to explain why there's still more than $3 billion per month spent on religious building.

Daniel Shutlz (aka "Pastor Dan"), for instance, suggests that the decline is no surprise, since,

"Church buildings are almost optional by definition to begin with: as long as it was built properly in the first place and hasn't burned to the ground, you can generally make do with what you have rather than add on or tear down and start over."

While this seems right, it still doesn't really help. The core question is not yet answered, the core question being what are the conditions connected to the decisions to build or not build houses of worship? Besides not accounting for the fact this isn't simply connected to the economic crisis of 2008, Shutlz's point that, obviously, it's not necessary to build religious buildings doesn't explain why, then, people still do.

And they do. In May of this year, in America, they did it in fact to the tune of $3.5 billion. Way back in the summer of 2003, they did nearly $9 billion's worth of this by-definition optional construction. Whatever changed between the middle of the year nine years ago and this spring, it wasn't the optional nature of new religious building construction.

As it stands, at the moment, there just doesn't seem to be a good working theory. There's not a good answer, and the question still hangs there: what are the economic conditions of religious construction? When are houses of worship built? And why are they built when they are built? What dictates more religious construction? Or less?

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