What Will This Do for the Poor? Rebecca Blank’s Economic Theology

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241292394
• Author: Matthew Desmond
• Date: 01 January 2024
• Subject Matter: Policy Translation

264 ANNALS, AAPSS, 711, January 2024

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241292394

What Will This

Do for the

Poor? Rebecca

Blank’s

Economic

Theology

By

MATTHEW DESMOND

1292394ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYWHAT WILL THIS DO FOR THE POOR?

research-article2024

Keywords: theology; economics; poverty; ethics

To twist a saying by Karl Barth, Rebecca

Blank approached the great problems of the

world with a Bible in one hand and a spread-

sheet in the other. “I am an economist and a

Christian,” Blank plainly stated in the opening

essay of Is the Market Moral? (Blank and

McGurn 2004, 11), a back-and-forth debate with

William McGurn, then chief editorial writer of

The Wall Street Journal. Then she doubled

down: “I am not just a member of a Protestant

church; I am culturally Protestant in habits

of mind and heart that are deeply embedded

in my behaviors and thoughts” (Blank and

McGurn 2004, 14). Blank believed in God and

markets, in Scripture and data, in the incom-

prehensible and the quantifiable, embracing

not only the Smith ([1776] 2007) of The

Wealth of Nations but also the Smith ([1759]

2010) of The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

which, as Sen (1992) has taken pains to point

out, are not (and should not be viewed as) dis-

tinct traditions.

Blank belonged to a long line of thought

leaders whose commitment to the poor was an

act of Christian obedience. The towering labor

organizer Eugene Debs liked to tell striking

workers that if Christ walked the earth in their

time, he’d be walking the picket line. Frances

Perkins, the first female U.S. secretary of labor,

pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cre-

ate a federal minimum wage based on her

interpretations of the Social Gospel. Martin

Luther King Jr.’s political activism against

Correspondence: matthew.desmond@princeton.edu

Matthew Desmond is Maurice P. During Professor of

Sociology at Princeton University.