Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelical Political Economy
March 9, 2011 § 2 Comments
How evangelicalism shaped 19th century Quaker economics – Part 1
In 1825, Great Britain entered an economic depression comparable in severity to the crash of 1929 in America. Hundreds of firms went bankrupt and the Bank of England itself came close. The collapse came out of the blue. Thomas Robert Malthus, of ‘Malthusian theory’ fame, an evangelical cleric and pioneer economist, had predicted cyclical collapses, but no one had seen this one coming. Theories about its causes and ideas for its cure buzzed in the parlors of the business and intellectual elites and occupied the journalists and pamphleteers.
In his journal, Joseph John Gurney recorded “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during that time. (Descended from Hugh de Gournay, one of the Norman nobleman who came to England with William the Conqueror, his family had started with huge land grants from William in Norwich and Suffolk. They founded the Bank of Norwich in 1770, which was for a time the second largest bank in England after the Bank of England. Around 1809, the family bought a large billbrokering business, a firm that either lends money or finds lenders for borrowers; for forty years, Overend, Gurney and Company was the largest broker of loans in the world. In 1896, Gurney’s Bank merged with Backhouse’s Bank and Barclays Bank of London and several other Quaker provincial banks to form what is now Barclays Bank.)
The two schools of political economy current at the time—classical and evangelical—approached these cyclical downturns differently, in terms of how they analyzed their causes, how they would manage the system in times of crisis, and how they treated those who suffered from their fallout. In 1825, evangelical thinkers dominated this economic discourse.
Gurney himself believed, along with his evangelical peers, in a providential God who watched human events and sometimes intervened according to a divine plan. Like them, mindful of judgment, he watched out for temptation and hoped for atonement. The financial crisis of 1825-26 was surely a moral test; but mostly it was seen as a judgment against those who had already surrendered to avarice and ambition. Gurney no doubt experienced God’s nearness as, first, the searing heat of financial losses, which naturally turned him inward to reflect on his own moral character; and then, when his fortune ultimately survived, as the cool refreshing draught of escape from ruin and at least partial reassurance of his moral uprightness. His fortune was saved; he was saved. Many of his fellow capitalists were not.
For moderate evangelicals like Gurney, God’s providence was systemic: both nature and markets ran according to God’s plan for the world’s government and for human judgment, but not every little event was an act of specific divine intervention. Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand”—the natural tendency of markets to efficiently set prices on their own, without government interference—this was actually the invisible hand of God at work. The fact that the actions of individuals powered the mechanisms of the market and gave it direction made the system an inherently moral one. Market policy therefore required a moral philosophy and this evangelical philosophy required not only that you leave God’s mechanisms alone but also that you leave individuals to choose their actions and suffer their judgment.
Such a moral philosophy naturally encouraged moral speculation, especially when bad things happened: cholera epidemics and market downturns pointed toward sins as causes, so the evangelical economists would search for the culprit sins behind these events. As the system tended to be general in its chastising effects, hurting lots of people and society in general, so the more moderate evangelical political economists tended to be somewhat general in their attributions of moral cause and they tended to differ when they got down to specifics.
More radical evangelicals believed, however, that God micro-managed the system, intervening directly and with specific purpose in virtually all events. Thus, they saw every outbreak of cholera or market downturn as a deliberate visitation for some specific sin(s) and this emboldened them to get serious and specific with their condemnations and exhortations.
All evangelical political economists agreed, though, that, squirming under God’s plan, and always defying its purposes, lurked human sin. Every human problem had its ultimate root in sin. Social ills, like poverty and economic recessions, personal problems, like poverty and bankruptcy—you could trace them all back to sin, not just sinfulness in general, but often a particular act, trait or policy. Sin and its consequences for the immortal soul gave evangelical political economists a sense of emotional urgency that heated the discourse up far more than the rational theories of the classical economists.
The sins behind economic downturns were clear: greed, primarily, ambition, and pride. Bull markets encouraged borrowing and speculation. Encouraged by their winnings, investors got overextended. Then, when everyone realizes that they are sitting on a bubble, panic ensues, people start calling in their notes, and the system collapses. Chastised for a time, businessmen (sic) recommit themselves to prudence. But then they forget the pain, greed plants its seeds again, and the cycle starts over.
The sins behind poverty were also clear: improvidence and licentious habits—laziness, gambling, drinking, wantonness of all kinds—and, of course, sex. Sex led to overpopulation among the working classes, which led to poverty.
The cure for both poverty and what we now call the business cycle was moral tuition. The cure for economic depressions was collective repentance and a nation that hewed more closely to God’s law. The cure for poverty was personal repentance and strengthened moral character. The evangelical worldview rejected most practical approaches to poverty relief and turned instead to moral paternalism. Poor relief was actually cruel in its consequences because it encouraged idleness, and suffering was actually salutary, because it led to repentance. Far better to suppress vice and encourage industry, economy and discipline. Their material charity thus tended toward things like good clothing that could support self-respect, rather than grants of money. And, of course, Bibles, plus enough education to enable the poor to read their Bibles. One thinks immediately of Elizabeth Fry, Gurney’s sister, ministering to the inmates of Newgate Prison.
In the next post, we’ll return to Gurney and his friendship with the greatest evangelical political economist of the age, Thomas Chalmers, as a window into the distinctive evangelical mutation in the Quaker double culture of religious withdrawal and economic engagement—how it drew Friends back into the world of social and political action in crucial ways without seriously threatening the distinctives of Quaker culture.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Evangelical Transition
March 3, 2011 § 7 Comments
In this series of posts and in my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods defined by the ways that Friends engaged with the world around them. These major historical periods were separated by major periods of transition, in which external forces and internal forces collided to produce a new Quaker alignment. In the first transition period, brought on by the persecutions in England in the last decades of the 17th century, the external pressures of persecution and the internal imposition of gospel order closed a period of intense apocalyptic engagement with the world and opened a period of cultural dualism, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously, but channeled incredible energy outward into the world of business, commerce and finance.
Over the course of the 18th century, Friends played key roles in creating modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and they continued to build the new economy throughout the 19th century. The turn of the 20th century brought a second major transition, in which the rise of corporate capitalism, liberal thought and new persecutions during the First World War collided with a liberalizing movement within Quakerism. The result was a decisive turn outward, away from quietist withdrawal and into much more vigorous and creative engagement with the world and its problems, including the social fallout and political responses to capitalism’s darkside.
Right in the middle of the double-culture period, however, around 1800, Friends went through a minor period of transition brought on by the rise into cultural prominence of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism opened a door in the wall that Friends had built around themselves and allowed them to reengage with the world in certain ways without giving up their distinctive and even insular culture. More importantly with respect to a study of Quakers and capitalism, the new evangelicalism emerged and co-evolved with the new ‘science’ of economics, though the term ‘economics’ only came into use a hundred years later. Then it was called ‘political economy,’ and focused on the ways that production and consumption were organized in nation states. The first political economists, including its putative ‘father,’ Adam Smith, held chairs in moral philosophy. The first professor of political economy in England was Thomas Malthus (1805).
Malthus was an evangelical minister. Like other evangelical political economists of the time, Malthus’s moral theology shaped his economic theory and this combination gave rise to a second major school of economic thinking that stood in some opposition to the ‘classical’ school first defined by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). Together, these two schools shaped the issues and discourse that defined early modern economic thinking and this dynamic dialog found embodiment in two extraordinary men: Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus and Ricardo were friends but friendly rivals intellectually, and their publishing duel helped define the field of political economy as it matured.
Ricardo was the second great classical economist, after Adam Smith. He was born Jewish and had emigrated to England with his family from Holland. But then he eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, and his family disowned him. He made a fortune in the stock market and ‘retired’ to write at the age of 43. He converted to Unitarianism.
(One of these days, I plan to research Ricardo more thoroughly, hoping to clarify his relationship with his wife’s family and her meeting and with Quakerism in general. Was she herself disowned for marrying out of meeting? Why did he become a Uniterian instead of a Quaker? What affect, if any, did his new religious identity and his exposure to Quakerism have on his economic thinking? If political economy was, in that time, essentially moral philosophy, and if theology was shaping the work of his primary intellectual correspondent, and he himself had undergone some kind of religious transformation, how could these factors not have helped to inform his own ideas?)
No Friends, evangelical or otherwise, contributed significantly to this new discipline of political economy until the second major transition around 1900, and evangelicalism did not alter substantially the momentum or direction of Quaker wealth-building. But it did help to shape the way that Friends approached poverty and other negative consequences of capitalist expansion during the 19th century. And Joseph John Gurney, the great evangelical Friend of his time, was a close associate and a deep admirer of one of the preeminent evangelical political economists of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1740-1847).
Evangelical political economy dominated economic policy and politics in Great Britain throughout the first half of the 19th century and its moral philosophical approach to social problems has returned to favor periodically ever since. In subsequent posts, I want to
- talk about Chalmers and explore his relationship with Gurney as a window into how evangelical thought helped to shape social and political responses to the structural violence of capitalism;
- look at how evangelical Quakerism adopted and adapted this moral philosophy;
- examine the rise and fall and periodic resurgence of evangelical political economy and the role of some Friends in that history; and
- look briefly at the different course that these issues took in America, where Friends had always been more diverse, not just theologically, but also in terms of social class, social and political geography, economic development, and relative influence over social policy.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Fulfillment
February 22, 2011 § 10 Comments
How does a covenantal community focused on debt relief and ministry to the poor work?
I said in the earlier posts in this series that, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God by declaring a Jubilee, a general redemption of debt and of debt slaves. How did he plan to make good on his claim to be fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy? Jesus himself raises this question in the course of the story, but he doesn’t answer it. Luke shows us how the first disciples implemented the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God in Acts, chapters two and four. Presumably they did so according to Jesus’ teachings. There are hints elsewhere in the gospels, notably in the story of Zacchaeus and of Mary and Martha, that Jesus had already begun to organize his household churches along the lines described in detail in Acts. In Acts four and five, Luke actually gives us two case studies of how this was supposed to work, one positive and one negative. In the positive case, Barnabas “sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostle’s feet” (Acts 4:37).
The negative case study (Acts 5:1-12) is an astounding story much overlooked by everybody, I suspect because it’s so bizarre. Ananias and his wife Sapphira, like Barnabas, sell a piece of property, but instead of bringing all the proceeds to the apostles, they agree to secretly withhold half the proceeds. They naturally, I think, fear that they’ve joined a cult whose future looks pretty shaky—their leader has already been executed, their present leaders have already spent time in jail, the secret police are hunting them down. We can speculate that Ananias and Sapphira are hedging their bets, leaving themselves an exit strategy.
Peter knows what’s going on and challenges Ananias. Ananias denies the fraud, and then Peter says he’s lied to God and the man drops dead. Young men wrap him up, carry him out and bury him. Later, Sapphira shows up and Peter challenges her to own up to the subterfuge, but she lies too, and she drops dead. She’s buried next to her husband.
What’s happening here? What’s their crime? Was the punishment really death? Did Peter utter a death-curse? Did God really strike them dead? And what is Luke trying to tell us with this incredible story?
I believe this story encodes the first excommunication in Jesus’ community, defining both the rationale for taking action and the process for expulsion. We know the Essenes excommunicated members by performing a burial ceremony, and even today, some very conservative Jews will say that relatives who have married Gentiles are “dead to me”. This rests on the passage in Deuteronomy that famously says, “choose life”—a theology of life in the covenant and death outside the covenant (Deuteronomy 30:11-20). The first few chapters of both of Luke’s books are full of Essene influence; especially relevant in this context is the mass conversion on Pentecost recounted in Acts 2, which was also the holy day used by the Essenes to admit new members and expel unwanted members. Especially suspicious as a detail in the story is the note that the young men wrapped up Ananias’s body and then carried him out for burial—did they really prepare the body for the grave right there in the midst of the day’s ritualized distribution of money to the poor? Or was this part of the ritualized ceremony for expulsion, which would have been a public event?
So why were Ananias and Sapphira excommunicated? For filing false financial statements. More specifically, for “putting the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (Acts 5:9) by undermining the community’s commitment to care for the poor. That is, for defying the Spirit of the Lord that had anointed Jesus as the Christ, whom the Father had sent to bring good news to the poor.
So, to answer our question about how our meetings would function if we tried to follow Jesus’ intention with the good news, we would first seek to find out who among us suffers under a crushing burden of debt and who among us possesses surplus wealth that could be used to relieve this suffering. This would probably mean that financial disclosure would be an obligation of membership, for this would be the most transparent way to know who has need and who has resources. And we would set up a system for distributing the welfare.
Several of Paul’s “gifts of the spirit” (ministry, giving, leading, and showing compassion—Romans 12:6-8) seem to represent various offices in the welfare distribution system that he had set up in his churches, each one inspired by the same Spirit that Ananias and Sapphira had defied. These offices are only hinted at in the gospels and Acts, specifically, Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” all of which took place, if I’m not mistaken, at the time of the day’s main meal. “Fellowship” here is the Greek word koine, which means sharing, the sharing of food and money as well as each other’s presence.
Can you imagine organizing your meeting around these principles?
Such a radical covenant of governance, in which discipleship meant this kind of disclosure and discipline, would need to stand on a sure and clear foundation of authority. For Jesus himself and his followers—and for the early Friends—that authority was the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Christ. Where would today’s liberal, mostly post-Christian meetings turn to for a foundation of authority that could carry such a weight? More importantly, perhaps, why would liberal meetings organize themselves this way, having mostly abandoned the teachings of Jesus as authoritative? Without the authority of the gospel, without the example of the first disciples, a meeting would realign itself toward the poor in this way only if deeply moved by the Holy Spirit—as, indeed, the first Christians were. But this is no less true for mostly Christian meetings. Would they be willing to recover the economic heart of the Christ’s teachings? Would they be any more willing to reorganize their meetings around the good news for the poor?
I propose that the gospel message of Jesus the Christ does, in fact, offer us a powerful place to start in experiencing, articulating and proclaiming a revitalized testimony on economics. But would such a testimony languish at the doorstep of action?
Here the traditional faith and practice of the Quaker testimonies comes into play. The testimonies are not, properly speaking, social action positions to which we are encouraged to subscribe as Friends. They are in theory the natural and even inevitable expressions of movements of the Spirit within and among us. The ‘written testimonies’ are the shadow and not the substance of a testimonial life, empty forms without power, until and unless the spirit of God anoints us. Once we are in-spired with compassion for the poor, the actual words of the testimony and the concrete actions of the testimonial life will follow. Without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the good news for the poor is just a notion, an intriguing radical ideology, a matter for study and discussion.
When it comes to the poor, I myself hold only a shadow in my hands. I am the rich young man who walked away (Luke 18). I could not live in such a meeting, for a bunch of reasons. I have not surrendered authority over my life to Jesus the Christ (though he hasn’t yet come to claim it).
We believe—I believe, having experienced it myself—that each of us is called to direct inspiration by God, and that the meeting as a community is also so called, and that God is always trying to reveal to us new truth and lead us into renewed life (and by ‘God’ here I mean the Mystery Reality behind our experience of being inspired and led, however that experience manifests). This much I can do: try to open myself to God’s inspiration and revelation and guidance. Try to be faithful to the call when I hear it.
I have answered several calls; I have tried to remain faithful to them. One of them has led me to spend decades studying Jesus’ economic teachings, to write a book about them, to become something of an authority on them. Yet I’ve never let them overwhelm my own desires. I have never truly sought the fellowship of the Spirit in the sharing of wealth and the ministry to the poor. I am Ananias. I guess I am running from the shadow of the cross.
Toward a Quaker culture of place
February 14, 2011 § 1 Comment
My meeting (Yardley, Pennsylvania) sits on a beautiful piece of property. The meetingroom has windows along two opposing walls and one set looks out into a stand of mature conifers to a vigorous, volatile stream that falls a decent distance from a dam. The waterfall is easily audible from the room when the windows are open in warmer weather. Some years ago, the stream flooded catastrophically and filled the room with mud. A third wall, opposite the entrance to the room, has more windows framing a large fireplace that hosts a blaze in colder weather. The elements are treasured members of our worshipping community.
Many Quaker meetings have similar experiences. Even urban ones. Brooklyn meeting went into a period of mourning when a new skyscraper radically altered the skyscape offered by the meetingroom’s huge vertical windows. These intimate connections with an environment sometimes draw the meeting into outward engagement, as well. Yardley Meeting has been central to a local movement to save the stream’s dam system and the pond one of these dams created and which some ancestors of the meeting had played a part in creating in the first place.
So history, ecology and worshipping Quakers often form a mutually supportive bond—a covenant—that can enrich the meeting’s life, protect the meeting’s place and contribute to the wider community’s well-being.
My favorite example of this convergence of history, ecology and religious life is the settlement of Friends in Richmond, Indiana. Why Richmond? Friends settled in Richmond originally, having migrated from the slave culture of the South, because it was as far away from slavery as they could get and still live within the territory ceded to European Americans by the indigenous peoples of the region in one of the few land transfer treaties all parties considered legitimate (the Treaty of Fort Stanwick, I think it was)—and still have a stream suitable for a mill. The White River is one of the reasons Richmond is an epicenter of Quaker life.
This piece of history is potentially a seed for a religious culture of place for Richmond Friends. But how could we go deeper, to a deep ecology of the spirit? How could we integrate the ecosystems our meetings inhabit with the religious life of our meetings more intimately? Or do we want to?
A seed for this kind of spiritual ecology does rest hidden in our Quaker DNA, but apparently as a recessive gene. One only has to think of the role that Pendle Hill and Firbank Fell played in the visionary life of George Fox and thus the history of early Quakerism. Then there’s the incredible amount of time Fox spent outdoors during his long ministry, but especially in the beginning. George doesn’t talk much about these things and it’s impossible to speculate about their role and importance without having been to these places. But once you go there—wow!
I’ve not been to Pendle Hill, but Firbank Fell blew my mind. Bill Samuels has a couple of good photos and the excerpt from Fox’s Journal recounting his preaching to the Seekers there. But the photographs do not convey the sense of height and distance you get from standing there, the closeness of the sky. The Yorkshire Dales are narrow valleys situated between tall, steep ridges. Standing where those Seekers stood, your view is blocked by the surrounding ridges on two sides, giving an enclosed, even intimate feeling. Turn ninety degrees, though, and you look out over a vast prospect from a great height. It is a powerful place that richly rewards the pilgrim who visits.
But this ‘spiritual ecology’ gene is recessive, driven underground, as it were, by our religion’s intense interiorness, our inward focus on the Inner Light and the Christ within, our silent worship, the way we’ve raised up the direct, personal experience of God. Many of us have had profound, even life-defining spiritual experiences in nature, but our corporate experience is almost completely circumscribed outwardly by the meetingroom and inwardly by this inward attention.
It’s worth noting, though, that virtually every major revelation in the Jewish and Christian and even Quaker traditions has taken place outdoors and often through natural agency and/or in the wild: this God seems to prefer meeting God’s people out of doors. Jesus himself was so familiar with the “deserted places” of Galilee and Judea that he could have served as a trek guide. He’s always hiding out in the wilderness, from the beginning of his prophetic career right after his baptism (and later, from his own disciples) to the end of his career, hiding from the temple police on the Mount of Olives. I’ve made a study of the spiritual ecology of Jesus’ ministry—where he went to do what and why, and the role that the landscape played in these key events—and it’s clear that he worked the landscape as part of his own spiritual practice. And this kind of land-based spiritual ecology goes back to the very origins of western religion, in which ecology, technology and the highlands of Palestine played an essential role in shaping the emergence and early evolution of our tradition (a topic for future posts).
So what would a deeper Quaker culture of place look like?
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Proclamation
February 9, 2011 § 10 Comments
I said in my previous post that I think the Bible, and specifically, the gospel of Jesus should be one of the places we go for guidance and inspiration when trying to develop an effective and spirit-led testimony on economics. The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms. To see this, though, you have to let go of our traditionally Pauline christology and even the testimony of the evangelists, and turn directly to Jesus himself. You have to ask, what did “the Christ” mean to Jesus?
Nowhere in Christian scripture does Jesus forthrightly claim, “I am the Christ, the Messiah” (christos in Greek and messiah in Hebrew both mean “anointed”). In every passage in which these words are used—but one—someone else is speaking confessionally, proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, or simply assuming it. There is one place, however (Luke 4:18), where Jesus does say the word. Moreover, though he does so indirectly, nevertheless he quite plainly claims the title for himself. Yet this passage is almost never used to define what “Christ” actually means. Why in the history of christology (the theology of who and what the Christ is) do theologians so rarely turn to Jesus himself as their starting point?
I think it’s because of how Jesus defines his ‘christ-hood’. He mentions nothing about sin or salvation. Rather, he defines the role of the messiah in terms of liberation from poverty. The Christ is a redeemer—but in the economic sense of releasing someone from their debt. Though we must add that, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus equates sin and debt (forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors), and this, in fact, reflects a deep and far-reaching connection between spiritual and financial redemption, not just in his teaching, but in the very DNA of the religion of ancient Israel.
Here’s what Jesus said in Luke 4:
Jesus has just returned to his home town after being tested in the wilderness. Barely six weeks have passed since he heard his call to prophetic mission at his baptism. He is invited to give a guest sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth. These will be the very first words of his public ministry in the gospel according to Luke. He reads from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, the first couple of verses: (I’m quoting from Isaiah below, rather than from Luke, since Luke quotes the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Torah in use in his time; but Jesus and his synagogue would have used either the Hebrew text or an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew, a Targum; the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of these verses differ a little, but without changing their substantial meaning.)
The spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon me,
for Yahweh has anointed me (christos, messiah),
he has sent me
to bring good news (evangelion) to the poor/oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to captives
and release for the prisoners;
to proclaim the year that Yahweh favors.
After reading these verses, Jesus sits down and begins his discourse: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s all he says. He has claimed: “I am the anointed one that Isaiah foretold and my mission is to bring good news to the poor—to end their poverty and oppression; specifically, to proclaim the year that my father favors—a Jubilee.”
The year of Jubilee refers to the practice defined in Leviticus 25 in which, every fifty years, all debts are cancelled, all debt slaves are set free, all families who have been alienated from their family farms due to bankruptcy and foreclosure are returned to their ancestral inheritance, and the land is to lie fallow for a year’s rest. (Actually, for a second year’s rest, since the fiftieth year follows the 49th, the end of the last of seven sabbatical years—Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 established seven years as the maximum term for debt slavery, for paying off short-term debts with your labor, and the land was also released from labor every seven years. The Jubilee was for long-term debt.)
There is no evidence that the Jubilee was ever practiced at all, let alone every fifty years. But it was not too uncommon for kings in the ancient Near East to proclaim a Jubilee, often upon accession to the throne. It was in this context that Jesus, the anointed prophet king, claimed the authority of God’s own spirit to proclaim universal redemption—release from debt.
In the paralellism of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ poetry, in which the second line of a poetic couplet reiterates and develops the idea of the first, “the poor” are the “brokenhearted—men who have lost their family farms and must rely on day labor to support their families; the “captives” and the “prisoners” are people whose debts have completely overwhelmed them, so that they now have no prospect of paying off their debts through their labor, even in seven years; they have become permanently dependent on the holders of their notes as their servants.
Jesus’ claim to be able to fulfill all these things was laughable on its face, as he well knew: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he said, for he was himself as poor as you could get. He had just spent six weeks living off the land in the desert. He must have been emaciated, his cloak full of dust and thistles, his hair matted, his eyes burning with that praeternatural shine that comes from extreme fasting. He must have looked like like that other nut, John the Baptizer.
We have to wonder ourselves how Jesus planned to pull off this outrageous claim. Luke gives us the answer in Acts, chapters two and four—new rules for community in which those with surplus wealth liquidate it for distribution to the poor (see specifically, Acts 4:34-37 for how this was supposed to work). Jesus’ answer to how he planned to fulfill such a radical promise was: that you will do it for each other. You will organize the community around the principle of koine, of fellowship, of sharing what you have to relieve each other’s suffering.
A Quaker testimony that rested on the gospel of Jesus as its foundation would likewise organize community around this kind of fellowship, offering good news to the poor and those in debt.
This has profound implications for community dynamics. It requires a completely new approach to the testimony on community, not just a new faith, but new practices, as well. Here also, the gospels (the Synoptic Gospels, anyway) and Acts offer clues as to where to start. Material for another post. . .
Renewing Friends’ Testimony on Economics
February 7, 2011 § 2 Comments
One of the reasons I’ve been writing on Quakers and capitalism is that I hope to invite Friends to consider more deeply our testimony on economics (and I don’t mean our testimony on money, but on the structure and institutions and worldview of our economic system) with a fuller appreciation of our economic history as context. I believe we stand in some ways in the same relationship with capitalism as we do with penitentiaries: our ancestors played key roles in the emergence of capitalism (industrial capitalism, anyway) and its early evolution, just as we did with the penitentiary. And just as the penitentiary was, in its inception, an advance in human welfare, a positive solution to a problem, and now has become part of the problem, just so industrial capitalism brought tremendous improvements to humankind, only to become in some ways a new source of suffering and oppression. In both cases, our historical role lays upon us some kind of obligation to reform the system and minister to the victims of our legacy.
Where to start? We have four paths to walk, I think. They are somewhat independent of each other and each deserves careful consideration. In my initial thinking, anyway, these four paths to a renewed testimony on economics are:
- Starting with divine inspiration. The first impulse, of course, is to turn to our Teacher, from whom we have learned to expect continuing revelation. Spiritual renewal comes from G*d (using G*d as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind/within our personal and corporate religious experience, whatever that experience is). So, in addition to study, thought and discussion, we need to pray and worship and support those who are called to ministries of witness in this area.
- Starting with secular progressive thinking on political economics. The vitality of our economic testimony depends on being Spirit-led. Its effectiveness depends, to a great degree, on knowing the science of economics and the work of its progressive thinkers and critics. There’s lots of material here, and therefore lots to learn and lots of work to do.
- Starting from our present testimonies. We can work our way ‘laterally’ across our testimonial life from the other testimonies. This is a common and natural tack. I’ve done this myself, turning the light of the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity and equality on economics. This yields great fruit and I will return to this approach in some future posts.
- Starting from our foundational traditions, including, especially, the Bible. I think a lot of ‘liberal,’ ‘post-Christian,’ ‘post-traditional’ Friends overlook the Bible, partly because they just don’t know it and partly because, in some folks’ hands, they have experienced the Bible as a weapon of regressive thinking. This extends to the sphere of economics no less than other areas social and political life. In fact, I devote a lengthy section of Quakers and Capitalism to the often, though not exclusively, negative influence of evangelical thinking on progressive political economics. Nevertheless, our Christian Friends are in a position to lead the way here, because the gospel of Jesus is, at its core, a powerful progressive economic message.
I’ve been writing another book on the gospel of Jesus whose sections on his teachings on ‘economics’ have grown so much that it now looks like it needs to be its own book. The new book’s tentative title is Good News for the Poor: The Economics of Redemption in the Common-wealth of God. I’ve explored some of this material in my other blog, www.biblemonster.com, including a series on the Beatitudes, which, when you know enough about the ‘economic legislation’ in Torah, turn out to be midrashim on inheritance law and, specifically, on bankruptcy.
In fact, Christian scripture—the synoptic gospels, anyway (Matthew, Mark and Luke)—are totally saturated with economic testimony. Jesus was preoccupied with the poor and the people and social, political and religious institutions that oppressed the poor. (It’s worth noting that in Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue), the word is the same for “the poor” and for “the oppressed”—ani, as in Bethany (beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed), the little town not far from Qumran where Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Simon the Leper lived.)
Jesus healed the poor and I believe that several of these healings included a social welfare dimension in the healing itself—that we too narrowly define these ‘miracles’ as medical cures of disease, and miss the innovations and reforms in community life that serve as context for his healings. Several of his other miracles also have an economic dimension. Several parables deal directly with poverty. Many of our favorite sayings of Jesus are essentially teachings about economics or have economic elements, including not just the Beatitudes, but also much of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and the two love commandments. The Lord’s Prayer has economics at its core. But more importantly, Jesus defined his ministry, his role as the Christ, the Messiah, in economic terms. Economic justice was the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.
These are far-reaching claims, I know, and to some, all the more startling because these teachings often are virtually invisible to the ‘untrained eye.’ We know so many of these passages so well that it’s hard to believe such a different and radical meaning could be hiding in there. So it takes a while to make the case. I hope you’ll bear with me.
Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus’ teachings on ‘economics’ are comprehensive, far-reaching, radically progressive and totally relevant to our situation today, notwithstanding their original context in an agrarian economy very different from our own. The gospel is a great place to start when reconsidering out testimony on economics. I think I’m going to pursue this mostly in BibleMonster because that blog is dedicated to the Bible, but it will take time. For one thing, I have another theme I want to take up there, as well—what I call “spiritual ecology”: a look at how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice (where he went in Palestine to do what and why); and also a look at the role that ecology and technology have played in the emergence and evolution of the Western religious tradition more broadly.
In the meantime, I want to lay out in BibleMonster the “economics of redemption” as I see them and bring these principles into Through the Flaming Sword as planks in a platform for a more fully developed Quaker testimony on economics. More to come . . .
Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to the Emergence and Growth of Industrial Capitalism
January 28, 2011 § 2 Comments
Now we come to the material that never fails to blow Friends’ minds when I do presentations on the history of Quaker economics. When Friends hear the scale of these contributions, when they recognize the significance of some of these contributions, not only for capitalism but for modern civilization itself, they inevitably ask, why have we never heard this before? For the sheer length and scope of this list is astounding, and the impact of these developments could hardly be exaggerated.
Friends were, to a greater or lesser degree, directly responsible for the five developments that made a broad-scale economy based on industrial production possible:
- Industrial tooling materials. Quakers developed new, improved techniques for casting iron and, more importantly, invented a method for casting steel. These technologies made durable, mass-producible machine parts possible. Without them, the industrial revolution would have been more of a series of occasional local uprisings. Machines made it possible to mass produce goods for the first time in history, and cast iron made machinery possible. Cast steel made it possible to mass produce durable machines. This development exponentially accelerated the industrialization of the economy. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of these breakthroughs.
- Industrial strength transport. Friends built the first railroad in England and developed the technologies essential for its expansion: iron bridges, iron rails, steam locomotion. Horse-drawn locomotion on normal roadbeds, especially those outside of major cities, constrained the transport of everything: raw materials, prepared materials, supplies, parts, fuel, products, people, money—all moved in small quantities at a snail’s pace, when it moved at all. The problem was especially acute in the case of industrial metals like iron and steel, zinc and lead. (Quakers invented the passenger train, as well.)
- Finance. Friends formed many of the first private banks in England. Several of these banks soon became some of the largest private financial institutions in the world. The Bank of Norwich (the Gurneys) was for a long time second only to the Bank of England in its holdings. Lloyds was the first bank to diversify its holdings and invest in more than one industry. The other name in banking that everyone knows is Barclay’s, but there were other major Quaker banks, as well.
- Energy. It was shortage of fuel (wood) that had stalled the British iron industry in the seventeenth century. British Quaker iron magnates invented rotated crop coppice farming to solve this problem of dwindling virgin timber supplies for fuel. But their real breakthrough was coke, a refinement of coal, a fuel that burned hot enough to make quality steel possible. They also invented the match—for the first time in history, you could afford to let your fire go out because you could restart it easily any time you wanted. This significantly released the tremendous burden on fuel supplies.
- The industrial business model. New materials, especially cast steel, made a new kind of production possible. Friends were among the very first to develop a production model that capitalized on this material potential. The interchangeable parts plow developed by Robert Ransome in the 1720s represents the very beginning of mass industrialization. Also, Quakers created the first conglomerate, breaking out of the single family–single site business to create larger associations of many small business units in a variety of industries. Friends also played a key role in developing business associations. Finally, John Joseph Rowntree is the first person known to have engaged in industrial espionage, stealing trade secrets from his (mostly Quaker) competitors in chocolate production while interviewing them for potential jobs; he hired some of these people but he picked the brains of all.
So Friends came up with key technological innovations in such key areas as industrial materials, industrial processes, transport, energy and organization. They also built key industries and, of course, businesses in those industries. They created industries that had never existed before or introduced them to England for the first time. Here’s a partial list of the industries in whose development Friends played a significant, if not essential, role:
- banking
- iron
- coke smelting
- iron casting
- steel casting
- brass and zinc production
- lead mining
- silver mining and refining
- railroads
- canals
- porcelain
- safety matches
- chocolate
- coffee houses
- English cutlery
In the next post we’ll look at Quaker contributions in venture capital and the role of Quakers in creating the consumer economy itself, including the famous invention of the price tag.
Meanwhile, clicking here: Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism—will open a document that concisely summaries some of these contributions. It’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism—The Book page.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success
January 26, 2011 § 3 Comments
Here’s the next installment in Quakers and Capitalism, outlining aspects of Quaker character and community practice that helped make Friends so phenomenally successful in business during the ‘double-culture period” between roughly 1700 ad 1900. I realized while working on this section of the book that the last post in the series, on the Protestant ethic as discussed by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, really belongs with the material I had planned to publish in this post, so I’ve deleted the earlier post and combined the contents of both in a longer section.
This section would have been too long to post in its entirety here, anyway, so I invite readers to download Factors in Quaker Business Success; it’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism page, whose link is to the left. So here’s a brief precis:
Quakers & Capitalism—The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success
The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit
The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of capitalism. Weber himself mentions Quakers frequently, not just as a community, but also George Fox and Robert Barclay. He devotes a lengthy section of his book to “The Baptist Sects,” in which he includes Quakers. To my mind, he seems to understand Quakerism rather well.
Weber discussed at length in his book how two qualities of the “Protestant ethic” converged to produce just the double culture we are discussing: material engagement in a world from which you are spiritually withdrawing. The two forces he describes are worldly asceticism and rational asceticism.
Worldly Asceticism
Friends defined the ultimate spiritual value as the inward experience of Christ and then sought to ground all their actions in the world in the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This led to a rejection of the world as a source of spiritual fulfillment and recast the world as the sphere of spiritual expression. The combination generates an impulse to be perfect in the world. When you see leadings and moral direction as revelations of God, it sanctifies all action as calling. At the same time, hearing the call requires silence, that is, removal from the world.
Rational Asceticism
When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).
These are highly adaptive qualities for sustainability in the high-risk, intensively entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment of rapidly-evolving capitalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. First, though, you must get into the world of commerce in the first place. These ascetic spiritual qualities might have actually impeded Quaker involvement in the world of money and business, if Friends had been left to themselves. But they weren’t left to themselves; in fact, they were left no choice. Fate—in the form of the persecutions—threw them into the counting houses and fledgling factories of England. Of course, early Friends didn’t believe in ‘fate’; they believed in God’s ever-guiding hand. Once into the deep water, they determined to swim as though God had thrown them in.
Quaker Culture and Quaker Character
Quaker culture cultivated other personal character qualities that also served the phenomenal financial success of this period. Some, like their famous frugality, moderation and financial prudence and their Puritan rejection of entertainment, drink and gambling, protected their wealth from dissipation. Some traits, like their integrity and discretion, built up a reputation that engendered trust and attracted customers, suppliers, and business associates. Some, like their meticulousness and their sense of business as service, directly affected the quality of their products and services.
Here, I offer a simple bullet list of these character traits. For the fuller treatment of each trait, see the pdf file.
- Business as service
- Spiritual standards for daily life
- Meticulouslness
- Silence and discretion
- Simplicity, frugality and moderation
- Prudence and debt
Quaker Practice and Quaker Wealth
Corporate community practice also guided, supported and constrained Quaker business practice, and in many ways, these were more important even than Quaker character in helping them build their fortunes:
- the emergence of testimonies on the conduct of business that were enforced under the disciplines of gospel order, including
- the testimony against civil suit;
- apprenticeships;
- more or less enforced intermarriage; and, most importantly,
- traveling ministry, intervisitation and correspondence.
The written and visitation ministry networks soon became so active and fully developed that often only one or two degrees of separation stood between one Quaker business person and another. Students of the Internet have been developing network-oriented business theories that would offer very interesting opportunities here for more fully understanding this aspect of Quaker success. I suspect that this ‘network effect’ is the most important factor in the rapid expansion and extraordinary success of early Quaker capitalists.
Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic & the Capitalist Spirit
January 22, 2011 § 7 Comments
The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit
The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of capitalism. Weber himself mentions Quakers frequently, not just as a community, but also George Fox and Robert Barclay. He devotes a lengthy section of his book to “The Baptist Sects,” in which he includes Quakers. To my mind, he seems to understand Quakerism rather well.
Apropos to our current exploration of Quaker character and how it served their extraordinary financial success, Weber discussed at length in his book how two qualities of the “Protestant ethic” converged to produce just the double culture we are discussing: material engagement in a world from which you are spiritually withdrawing. The two forces he describes are worldly asceticism and rational asceticism.
Worldly Asceticism
Friends defined the ultimate spiritual value as the inward experience of Christ and then sought to ground all their actions in the world in the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This led to a rejection of the world as source of spiritual fulfillment and recast the world as the sphere of spiritual expression. The combination generates an impulse to be perfect in the world. When you see leadings and moral direction as revelations of God, it sanctifies all action as calling. At the same time, hearing the call requires silence, that is, removal from the world.
Rational Asceticism
When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).
These are highly adaptive qualities for sustainability in the high-risk, intensively entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment of rapidly-evolving capitalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. First, though, you must get into the world of commerce in the first place. These ascetic spiritual qualities might have actually impeded Quaker involvement in the world of money and business, if Friends had been left to themselves. But they weren’t left to themselves; in fact, they were left no choice. Fate—in the form of the persecutions—threw them into the counting houses and fledgling factories of England. Of course, early Friends didn’t believe in ‘fate’; they believed in God’s ever-guiding hand. Once into the deep water, they determined to swim as though God had thrown them in.
The next post in the Quakers & Capitalism series discusses specific character traits emphasized in early Quaker culture and how they fostered Quaker success in business.
The “angel of the meeting”
January 21, 2011 § 13 Comments
I learned from Bill Taber in a Pendle Hill class that, through the 18th and much of the 19th centuries, many Friends believed that each meeting had its angel. They got this idea from the second and third chapters of the Book of Revelation. Some ministers, especially when they had been invited (or sent) to a meeting to help sort out some difficulty, would ask to meet with the meeting in worship before talking to anyone so that they could try to commune with the angel of the meeting about the problem first. Ever since learning this, I’ve tried to commune with the angels of the meetings I’ve visited and I’ve had three such experiences, one of them quite intense.
Does anyone know more about the history and theology of this practice? Has anyone else tried this? Had any success? Or has anyone had such an experience spontaneously?
Through the Flaming Sword 