FINANCE-DOMINATED capitalism uses a variety of institutional means to single out individuals and render them accountable for their own fortunes, the bearers of either praise or blame. Economic success or failure becomes one’s individual responsibility, revelatory of who one is as a person. Moralized evaluation of individual success or failure figured prominently in the old Protestant work ethic and now reappears in exaggerated form within a finance-dominated work ethic.
Economic success or failure in that old religious ethic was deemed indicative of one’s fundamental individual character—reflective, that is, of the particular standing before God that defined one in religious terms, success being a mark of election to salvation, failure a sign of exclusion. Hoping to confirm one’s salvation by the character of one’s economic activity, one worked hard as capitalism demanded—to gain economic success and in that way distinguish oneself from others, not just economically but religiously.
This way of relating to oneself and one’s economic fortunes has now been shorn of the religious support it required in capitalism’s early days. Trying to distinguish oneself economically from the vast majority of those less fortunate within finance-dominated capitalism has become highly motivating in its own right, given simply the economic stakes involved. The economically elite—the economic elect, one might say—are very few, and the difference between the economic top and bottom can be extreme, amounting to a kind of economic heaven in one case (more money than any one individual could possibly spend apart from an interest in space travel) and damnation in the other (drudgery in exchange for low pay at best, along with a life of constant worry).
Within finance-dominated capitalism, an individualizing moralism with respect to oneself presupposes and implies specific ways of relating to others. For example, relating to oneself in a moralizing fashion is fomented by the way finance-dominated capitalism structures relations with others in competitive, winner-take-all markets. And in so relating to oneself, one shores up or reinforces that very same competitive structuring of human relationships.
Because it forms not just individual persons but their relationships, this aspect of the new spirit of capitalism works to set up a whole social world. This is the world, I hope to show, Christians have reason to oppose. How Christianity brings together relations to oneself with relations to others establishes an entirely different, other world that fundamentally calls this one into question.
From Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, by Kathryn Tanner, published by Yale University Press (January 2019). Reproduced by permission.
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