It's Not "If" an Economy Is Religious, But "How?"

Once I began to see that “economics as religion” was more than being clever, I searched for all it could reveal. Finally, I exclaimed, “Oh my god! Economic religion is essential to understanding the devotion of people and their systems to Multi Earth ways. I never knew so many people are writing about it.”

I no longer wonder “if” an economy is religious, but “how.” Does its theology produce healthy ecology, people, and societies, or unhealthy ones? Does it call forth the best in us, or appeal to our dysfunctional tendencies? Is it true or false? Does it value and imitate the structures of Creation, or does it innovate structures to “improve nature”?

My quest to be released from Multi Earth living has become simultaneously economic and religious.

Have you recently connected an economic choice you make with your spiritual practice? I’d like to read your comment if you have such.

David Loy: "The Market Is ... the First Truly World Religion"

My relationship with Barry Shelley has brought so many good things my way. Partly it’s because he’s a political economist with whom I’ve checked out many economic ideas. Even more it’s his desire to share with me anything he has or knows that can help me do better what he knows I love doing: working on a jubilee, One Earth economy and having it work on all of us. He’s colleagial and appreciative. He’s a good fit with his new job with Oxfam America and their work on the interface of agriculture and economies worldwide.

In addition to the article by Harvey Cox I quoted in the previous blog, Barry copied me an article by David Loy,“The Religion of the Market,” in which Loy says that it is “apparent that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as ‘secular.’” (Note: Scholars may be interested to know that Loy’s essay appears also in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, but it is available in totality only to subscribers.)

This article, and others Loy has written, add valuable perspective for me because he writes as a practicing Zen Buddhist interested in showing the social implications of Buddhist teachings. He perceives Market Religion to have surpassed, not only Buddhism, but all the world religions in its religious impact on the world.

Now that you’ve heard from both Harvey Cox and David Loy on The Market as religion, and I’ve acknowledged how much they help me see how the grip in which the Multi Earth worldview holds us is religious, what are your thoughts? Or perhaps you’ve thought of our daily economic choices as religious ones for a long time.

Harvey Cox: The Religion of the Market

My dive into jubilee economics took me into many other important waters of change. In 2004, I heard Barry Shelley, a political economist with theological training, give a presentation to the Sabbath Economics Collaborative on economics as religion. Barry explained that approaching economics as religion was not just a quaint idea, but was being used by other economists, academics, and writers in their critiques of capitalism, markets, and consumer behavior. They use religion as a frame in which to view economics in order to better understand the powerful grip economic assumptions and practices have on people, governments, and business models. 

Then in 2009, Barry and I were invited to co-lead a session on “Economics and Spirituality” at the Solidarity Economy Network Forum in Amherst, MA. As we prepared for the session, Barry shared with me several articles on economic religion that fueled my interest. One, entitled “The Market as God,” written by Harvey Cox, who at the time was part of the Harvard Divinity School, had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1999). Cox describes his own discovery of “business theology,” and how “current thinking assigns to The Market a wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” Cox’s surprise at how economics and theology tracked with one another was matched by his conviction that he had uncovered a huge, damaging religion. He wrote: 

Discovering the theology of The Market made me begin to think in a different way about the conflict among religions. Violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster or Hindus and Muslims in India may dominate the headlines. But I have come to wonder whether the real clash of religions (or even of civilizations) may be going on unnoticed. I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion.