Economic Religion and the Worship of Progress

• Date: 01 March 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12270
• Author: Robert H. Nelson
• Published date: 01 March 2019

Economic Religion and the

Worship of Progress

By RobeRt H. NelsoN*

AbstRAct. In contemporary thought, the terms “secular” and “religious”

are polar opposites. They are held to occupy separate domains. But

that view is mistaken. Religious belief organizes society around

fundamental ideas about ethics and existence. This article examines

the way economic belief systems function as religions. Economic

thought in various forms (Marxist, Keynesian, neoclassical) is brimming

with implicit religious meaning. Instead of belief in an afterlife and

heaven, modern economics promises heaven on earth in the form of

continuous material progress. Adherents of competing economic

ideologies often promote them with the energy of religious zealots.

Thus, modern societies are still organized around religious principles,

but they are now hidden from sight. This article shows how the

religious dimension of the modern worship of economic progress is

rooted in Christian theology: Calvinism in the United States and

Lutheranism in the Nordic countries, which are famous for their own

brand of social democracy. In recent decades, secular faith in the

religion of economic progress has begun to falter. The failures of

mainstream economics to warn of impending crisis has reduced its

credibility, even among economists. More importantly, the rise of

environmentalism as a religion has vastly increased the number of

citizens who question the goal of material progress. The attack on

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 2 (March , 2019).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 70

© 2019 American Journa l of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Until his death on December 15, 2018, Robert Nelson was professor of environmen-

tal policy in theUniversity of Maryland School of Public Policy and a senior fellow of

the Independent Institute. He was highly regarded for books and articles he wrote in

natural resource management, but his most distinctive contributions were on the rela-

tionship of religion and economics. His four most important books on the latter topic

are: 1) Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics(Rowman

& Littlefield, 1991), 2) Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and

Beyond(Penn State University Press, 2001), 3) The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion

Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America(Penn State University Press,

2010), and 4)  Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy: A Different

Protestant Ethic (Aarhus University Press, 2018).

320 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

economic religion may have also undermined the credibility of

mainstream political parties, partially explaining Brexit in England and

the election of Donald Trump in the United States.

Introduct ion

An important intellectual trend of the second half of the 20th century,

and now continuing with even greater impact into the 21st century,

is the recognition that the range of important religious phenomena

in the world extends well beyond the traditional religions such as

Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, and others. Paul Tillich,

one of the foremost theologians of the 20th century, defined religion

broadly as a belief system dealing with matters of “ultimate concern”

(Brown 1965). Similarly, Max Stackhouse (2007: 7–8), another leading

American theologian and a student of Tillich’s, wrote:

[Religion is] a comprehensive worldview or “metaphysical moral vision”

that is accepted as binding because it is held to be, in it self, basically true

and just, even if all dimension s of it cannot be either final ly confirmed or

refuted …. By this definition, worldviews such as a phi losophical-ethical

Confucianism, a n atheistic spiritualit y such as Buddhism, or a secular-hu-

manistic ideology such as Mar xism … can properly be seen as fait hs.

[Besides the ethical content of such belief systems, t hey also] function as

“religions,” shaping an ethos, even if they are opposed to theistic tradi-

tions or do not recognize themselves as religious. T hey are also subject

to theological analysis, for they inevitably contai n a “metaphysical-moral

vision”—an ontology, a theory of history and eth ic—that involves some

view of transcend ence.

Stackhouse (2001) thus sees a need to extend the use of traditional

theological methods of analysis to secular belief systems such as

economics.

William Grassie, the founder of the Metanexus Institute on Religion

and Science, has similarly explained that some genuine religions go

so far as to deny their own religious character. Grassie (2008: 130)

describes a common worship in modern times of a “God-by-whatever

name.” Ironically, it is possible to have a “religion of no religion.” In

the end, for Grassie a religion can be identified as such by the fact that

it is “making universal truth claims about the fundamental character

321Economic Religion

of the universe as a whole.” The full scope of religion thus includes

many “secular” systems of belief—“secular religions,” as they have

frequently been called, which often make just such claims.

Although not a theologian, the distinguished American legal philos-

opher Ronald Dworkin has also advanced this view. Dworkin (2013:

5) considers that “expanding the territory of religion improves clarity

by making plain the importance of what is shared across that terri-

tory” of religion in all its full modern diversity of expression. We can

thus speak of “religious atheism” as a genuine form of contemporary

religion. Such secular religions share with traditional religion the ob-

jective to inquire “more fundamentally about the meaning of human

life and what living well means.” Dworkin (2013: 9) declares that “the

new religious wars are now really culture wars,” frequently involving

differing secular understandings of the fundamental human condition

and its prospects.

The English Anglican vicar Edward Bailey (1998, 2010, 2012) pre-

ferred the term “implicit religion” to “secular religion” (which he

thought was an oxymoron). He founded the Center for the Study

of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality in 1995, which in

1998 began publishing the scholarly journal Implicit Religion entirely

devoted to the study of such forms of nontraditional religion. Bailey

(2012: 196) proposes that attaining a deeper understanding of our

own times requires that we recognize the frequent presence of large

implicit elements that in the past we would “usually call ‘religion,’

even when [they now seem] to be ‘secular.’”

Many current economists and sociologists are unaware of such de-

velopments in contemporary religion and the implications for their

professional status and roles in society (Nelson 2001a; Oslington

2000). This article seeks to fill in some of the gaps in such secular

religious knowledge.

Marxis t Religion

In a recent book about Marx and Marxism, t he opening sentence

states that “Karl Marx was the Jesus Ch rist of the 20th century” (Claeys

2018: 1). This characterization of Mar x will probably come as a sur-

prise for many economists and sociologists today. Alasdair MacIntyre