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Author: Gunter, Lorne

GO FORTH, BE FRUITFUL AND MAKE MONEY

A Catholic priest champions the bond between free markets and the godly life

DOING WELL AND DOING GOOD:
The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist
By Richard John Neuhaus
Doubleday Books, New York
312 pages; hard cover, $27.50

Blending religion and economics is as tricky as the chemical process of blending an acid with a base. Few thinkers can pull it off without having the mixture blow up in their faces. Fewer still can make the process understandable to laymen. In Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus meets this challenge and handles it very well indeed.

As a Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Neuhaus is a bit of an odd duck. He is traditional, conservative and Biblically orthodox, which makes him truly a rare bird among current Catholic theologians. Furthermore, he actually understands economies and the forces that make them work. He believes enterprise is a virtue (sanctioned by Christ no less) and maintains that profits are not sinful. Unlike most mainline theologians in North America, he does not operate under the illusion that the continent's economy generates more than enough money to solve every social ill, if only a few greedy rich people would stop hoarding vast sums for themselves. Nor does he believe that, if governments were to confiscate and redistribute all personal and corporate profits, the economy would continue to generate the wealth it does.

On the contrary, Fr. Neuhaus argues that as much capital as possible must be left in private circulation, where it generates wealth and jobs and economic growth, thus ultimately improving the lot of even the least pecunious citizen. This not only makes economic sense, he contends; it makes moral sense as well. Statism throws a very wet blanket over God-given initiative, and it also finances its "charity" (the welfare system) through forced taxation. This is contrary to Christian belief in free will, which holds that believers must do good deeds, but must voluntarily choose to do them.

According to economist Neuhaus, capitalism is not the major danger to the economy and to the soul. It is socialism in all its forms, void as it is of any moral foundation or concept of natural right, that is corrupt and soul-destroying as well as inefficient and impoverishing. Even social democracy as practised in western countries, for example, encourages indolence. It makes people dependent on the state. They become in consequence less than whole, which is both morally wrong and dehumanizing.

All of this is not to say that Fr. Neuhaus advocates unbridled, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, or that Doing Well is a klaxon call for an orgy of unremitting selfishness and gluttony. The political and economic freedom that enables most citizens to do well carries with it the obligation to give (and to give generously, both monetarily and spiritually) in aid of the poor, the sick, the elderly, the weak and children. But honest endeavour that leads to material gain is an integral part of God's plan.

Fr. Neuhaus, who edits First Things, a monthly journal of religion and public life in New York, is quite capable of building his arguments upon a foundation of his own making. Instead he has chosen as his base the 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, issued by Pope John Paul II on the economics of human freedom. (An excellent abridgement of the encyclical is included as an appendix.)

Doing Well, however, is no mere apologia. It is a better and much more truthful interpretation of the Pope's central ideas than any of the contorted explanations issued by the North American bishops in their attempts to rationalize their continued love affair with all things Marxist. This book may indeed provide the best mainstream theological defence of free enterprise since the Reverend Edmund Opitz wrote Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies two decades ago.

Mormons, Baptists, Jews, Independent Evangelicals and adherents of the Eastern Orthodox church well may wonder just why so much fuss is being made about this book, which has been a surprise item on a number of bestseller lists. But then, most laymen in these faiths never have abandoned the belief that doing well goes hand-in-hand with doing good. Nor have they ever adopted the notion that succeeding in life while others around them struggle is by itself a mark of spiritual inadequacy. But Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and United Church members have been subjected from their pulpits and from their church leaders to nearly three decades of propaganda for liberation theology and other extreme forms of the social gospel. For them, Doing Well can provide overdue relief.

To describe this as a Catholic book, or a Christian book, or even a religious book would be to sell it short. It is "an invitation to think theologically about the free society," which will appeal to fiscal conservatives, agnostics, libertarians, classic liberals--Christian or non-Christians. Beleaguered taxpayers will find comfort in Fr. Neuhaus' chapters on the link between property rights and creativity, and on how to unleash the potential of the poor by freeing them from the yoke of the social welfare system. So will any thoughtful citizen who has noticed that the more governments try to do, the more the problems seem to multiply.

"There is not a necessary opposition between doing well and doing good, between taking care of business and taking care of one another," Fr. Neuhaus concludes. "Far from these interests being opposed, they may actually need one another."

PHOTO: Fr. Neuhaus: A rebuttal to the social gospel.

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By Lorne Gunter

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