Economic Systems in Context

Despite the problems with [Max] Weber’s thesis [in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], it has proved somewhat attractive to American Christians keen to see a close relationship between their theology and a central tenet of the American way—the capitalist free market. The connection is useful: if there is a link between Christian truth and capitalist prosperity, then capitalism itself becomes the God-given way in which society should be organized; and it presumably accounts for the fact that, in the USA, a term such as socialism is so often seen as antithetical to Christianity, in a way that would have been historically unthinkable in a place such as Great Britain, where Christians played a key role in the early history of both the Labour Party and the trade-union movement.

Indeed, while writing this book I had the privilege of spending a day addressing evangelical pastors in Wales, men who labor in poor, former mining areas. They were incredulous that any evangelical Christian would ever vote for a right-of-center capitalist party; such is the contextual nature of the relationship of theology and politics. Yet in the American context, given the connection between capitalism and the American way, the relationship routinely drawn between Christianity and capitalism would also seem to argue for seeing America’s social organization as superior to that of other countries and as specifically blessed by God.

-- Carl Trueman, Republocrat (p. 65)