If you’re looking for more insight on, or perhaps simple confirmation of, the economic agenda of the ‘ecumenical’ movement (the World Council of Churches [WCC] the World Alliance of Reformed Churches [WARC], et al.), here’s an insightful little tidbit from Ecumenical News International:

Pacific islanders are a source of hope for other Christian communities seeking a culturally-based communal economy based on sharing and cooperation, participants at a global church gathering have heard. During the 14-23 February ninth assembly of the World Council of Churches some participants have identified Pacific island communities as an alternative to the type of economic globalisation that happens under regulations adjudicated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). [523 words, ENI-06-0186]

For more on the WARC view of economics, check out this article I co-wrote awhile back, “Ecumenical Economics: Confessing against the Empire,” about the ultimately abortive efforts by radicals to get the alliance to declare a status confessionis regarding the global economy.

Today’s BreakPoint commentary by Chuck Colson gives a brief review and survey of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason.

Concludes Colson: “This book will you give you some very good ammunition to answer those critics who come up with the same tired, old arguments about the fact that Christianity held back the progress of civilization. Nonsense. The evidence is exactly the opposite.”

For previous discussion of Stark’s thesis on the PowerBlog, check out these posts:

Christian Reason and the Spirit of Capitalism

Capitalism and Christianity, Part II

A Stark Contrast

Reason and Revelation

As America celebrates Black History Month, Anthony Bradley looks at the forces that threaten the very foundation of black society in this country. “Two aspects of pre-civil rights-era black history — strong men and strong families — will have to be recovered if we wish to have any black history in the future,” Bradley warns.

Read the full commentary here.

Clive Cook has a terrific article in the March 2006 Atlantic Monthly that is worth reading in its entirety. But here’s my favorite paragraph:

What is most striking, so far as the movies’ treatment of capitalism goes, is not the hostility of films whose main purpose is actually to indict corporate wickedness (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, and so forth). It is the idea of routine, reckless corporate immorality—maintained as though this premise were inoffensive, uncontroversial, and hardly worthy of comment—that drives movies whose principal interest lies elsewhere, whether in the human drama of contemporary geopolitics (Syriana, to cite a recent instance), knockabout comedy (Fun with Dick & Jane), children’s fantasy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), star-crossed romance (In Good Company), or, classically, in some dystopian near or distant future (Alien, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, and many others).

The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil.

I’ve been compiling a list of popular movies in which the business entrepreneur is treated in a positive manner. It’s a very sparse list. One of the few I’ve thought of is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The fact that Cook cites it in his list illustrates that even this is an ambiguous example. There are bad-guy business people who want to steal Willie Wonka’s secrets, but at least in its most recent incarnation, with John Depp playing Willie Wonka, Wonka is portrayed as a good, if highly eccentric, entrepreneur. Perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule. When Hollywood occasionally portrays an entrepreneur positively, he must highly eccentric–that is, atypical.

I’m sure there are some exceptions to the Hollywood theme of business=evil, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

The Jesuit journal In All Things devoted its Winter 2005-06 issue to the question of poverty in the United States. The issue brings together a number of perspectives from Jesuits, both liberal and conservative. The Rev. James V. Schall, S. J., contributed an article titled “On Weath and Poverty,” one which the journal editors have described thematically as “choosing not to be poor.”

Here is Schall’s article in its entirety:

The most famous book in economics is The “Wealth” of Nations, not The “Poverty” of Nations. Yet, Christ says, the “poor” will always be with us. Not a few still are. No one needs to learn to be poor. It is easy. Do not make, develop, invent, or concoct anything productive. Someone had to invent the wheel, plumbing, tooth brushes, hybrid corn, and computers The question of poverty implies “how not to be poor.” Unless we talk about the latter question, it is useless to talk about the former one. If we do not know how to produce wealth or if we choose not to learn or effect those things that actually work to produce it, we will be poor. We will likewise make or keep others poor. Not all “good” ideas work for the good. (more…)

This Sunday I went to Mass at a parish I’d never attended before. I was quite pleasantly surprised—the music wasn’t bad, the rubrics were followed, the homily focused on the gospel, they chanted the Agnus Dei, and prayed the prayer to St. Michael afterward; not apparently liberal and better than many typical “suburban rite” parishes. But, during the petitions, one of the prayers was for leaders of nations, that they would eradicate poverty. Here is a classic example of the right desire, poverty eradication, and the wrong way to go about it, government. It also betrays the common misunderstanding that governments solve poverty. Now, leaders of nations and governments do have a role in poverty reduction. They need to create rule of law and enforce contracts. They can help reduce regulation and tariffs and open their borders to free trade. But leaders of nations do not eradicate poverty, nor does aid from the developing world. What eradicates poverty is business. Entrepreneurs and businessmen who create jobs and opportunity and wealth. Michael Novak called small business “the strategic vocation for helping the poor.”

The desire for poverty alleviation through government involvement is a prime example of good intentions combined with unsound economics. Many people have good intentions, but they don’t understand basic economics so they often support solutions without “thinking beyond stage one” as Thomas Sowell says. A prime example of this is the enormously popular One Campaign. Thousands of people are signing on to a good intention without knowing whether the proposed solution will bring about their desired outcome. Good intentions are a start, but they’re not enough and Bob Geldof is wrong when he says do something even if it doesn’t work.

If it doesn’t work—stop doing it. Activism shouldn’t be done for the sake of being active. This is the problem with too many Hollywood stars and other “professional” activists. Activism should have an end that is beyond itself, so if it doesn’t work, we should use our minds to apply reason to the situation and come up with a plan that might. C.S Lewis said that “progress isn’t going forward if you’re going in the wrong direction.” You’ve got to stop and turn around. Acton Senior Fellow, Jay Richards argues that the Bob Geldof idea is reflective of many who believe that their actions or policies will be either good or neutral, but never harmful. But despite what they may believe that is not the case. Often things that don’t work exacerbate the problem. Hence the Acton Message, Don’t Just Care, Think.

We need to have good intentions, but this is only a beginning. If we are going to care about poverty and economic policies then we should begin by taking economics seriously. Some books I recommend include Basic Economics and Applied Economics both by Thomas Sowell, and of course Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Bono is a force for good intentions, can you imagine all the good he could do if he connected his intentions to sound economics?

A few items of interest from friends on our blogroll:

• The Evangelical Ecologist and Dignan’s 75 Year Plan react to news about Michael Crichton’s visit with President Bush.

• GetReligion writes on the government closing of a newspaper in Russia.
• Mere Comments talks about burgeoning threats to the dignity of human life, and the disarray of contemporary evangelical responses.
• No Left Turns discusses “Crunchy Cons.”
• Persecution Blog passes along concerns about the Bush administration policy toward Israel and the effect on Arab Christians living in the Holy Land.
• Servant-Leadership Blog relates a classic resignation letter.
• WorldMagBlog discusses the “porkization” of compassionate conservatism.
  

This story in the UK’s Education Guardian is remarkable for its links to a number of issues.

In contrast to the American system, Britain’s permits “faith” schools that are part of the government system. Thus, this Scottish “Catholic” school is, in the American usage, a “public” school. Now that 75% of its students are Muslim, some Muslims are demanding that the school switch its faith allegiance.

One of the obvious issues is the Islamicization of Europe. Here is a Catholic school in the middle of Scotland’s countryside that is three-quarters Muslim—and another 13% Sikh. France, with its headscarves-at-school controversy, is not the only nation struggling with this new reality.

Another issue is the Catholic identity in educational institutions. (The problem applies more broadly to other kinds of Christian schools as well.) The school is evidently making efforts to preserve it (given the priest’s reference to Mass), but it seems to me that it is possible to reach a tipping point in terms of numbers of non-Catholic students and/or faculty, when Catholic identity becomes impossible to maintain adequately. Serving non-Catholic populations is generally laudable and can even be evangelizational, but Catholic educators need to be realistic about how fidelity to an institution’s original mission can be threatened by a lack of Catholic majorities among students and staff.

Finally, there is the issue of government interaction with religious schools. This Scottish Catholic school benefits financially from depending on the government. But it also thereby depends on the government for its existence. If the state determines that it’s better off Muslim—or anything else, including secular—Catholics (who have made it, apparently, the most attractive school in the area) must stand aside and see it transformed.

HT: Mirror of Justice

One of the religion beat’s favorite canards is to implicitly equate what it calls American Christian “fundamentalism” with what it calls Muslim or Islamic “fundamentalism.” After all, both are simply species of the genus. For more on this, check out GetReligion (here and here) and the reference to a piece by Philip Jenkins, which notes,

Also, media coverage of any topic, religious or secular, is shaped by the necessity to summarize complex movements and ideologies in a few selected code-words, labels that acquire significance far beyond their precise meaning. Though designed as guideposts for the perplexed, all too often, such words rather tend to stop intellectual processes. One such demon word is fundamentalism, originally a description of a particular approach to reading Christian Scriptures, but now a catch-all description for supernaturally based anti-modernism, repression, and misogyny. Within the past few years, evangelical has been similarly debased, gaining its popular connotations of white conservative politics.

Indeed, evangelical and fundamentalist are often used interchangeably in media parlance.

One way to get at the radical difference, so to speak, between the two groups would be to guage the respective reaction when something sacred is mocked and blasphemed. We have seen what the Islamist reaction to the infamous Mohammed cartoons has been: violent protesting resulting in death. The Danish cartoonists have had to flee into hiding out of fear for their lives, a la Salman Rushdie circa 1989, and certainly with Theo Van Gogh circa November, 2004 in mind. (Update: It looks like they indeed have good reason to fear. A Pakistani cleric has put a $1 million bounty on the head of one of the cartoonists.)

By contrast, Charles Krauthammer has profiled some of the things that are offensive to many Christians, including the publication of pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with dung and the so-called “Piss Christ,” (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine). The most you are likely to see from Christian “fundamentalists” in reaction to issues like these are public expressions of outrage and disgust, maybe a letter-writing campaign with some vitriolic prose, perhaps some picketing and protesting, and even some threats to pull public funding thrown in for good measure. The upcoming movie The Da Vinci Code, based on a Dan Brown novel, which depicts much of the Bible and church tradition as fictitious, has not resulted in either Tom Hanks or the author fearing for their lives.

The trouble comes, of course, from the connotation of the word fundamentalist. For even liberals have fundamental beliefs.

Perhaps no one gets at the popular connotation of the word fundamentalist better than Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. In discussing his epistemological model in Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga writes,

I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged to first define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relative conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’ (pp. 244-45).

Rev. Edmund Opitz

The Rev. Edmund Opitz, a longtime champion of liberty, passed away on Feb. 11. Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, looks back on Ed’s remarkable life in an article today on National Review Online (also available on the Acton site as a PDF).

Never to be mistaken for an “economic fundamentalist,” much less a theocrat of any variety, Ed was always careful to note that Christianity qua Christianity offered no specific economic model any more than economics qua economics has any specific moral model to proffer — which is precisely why they both need each other.

In 2003, Rev. Opitz was interviewed for Acton’s Religion & Liberty. In “Religion, Morality and the Private Property Order,” he talked about scarcity and stewardship in opposition to the practices of planned economies.

What has happened is that modern man, freed from the “superstitions” of the past and energized by “Science,” believes he has become as God who can create the world anew and establish a heaven on earth. The teachings of the economists, however, stand directly athwart this mood. Wilhelm Roepke, a ranking economist and social philosopher of our time, reminds us that “Economics is an anti-utopian, anti-ideological, disillusioning science.” The great social drift during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is based on the delusion of a few thinkers involved in the French Revolution that “Mankind has now come of age and can take charge of its own affairs.” Translated into practice, this means that inordinate power comes into the hands of a self-chosen elite to operate a society as if it were an army, that is to say, by command and drill.

Rev. Opitz had an early and important relationship with Acton. He was a founding member of the institute’s advisory board, wrote and spoke widely for Acton, and donated a personal collection of books now housed in the Opitz Library here. Acton carries two of Opitz’s works in its Book Shoppe: Religion and Capitalism: Allies, not Enemies and Religion: Foundation of the Free Society.

The Foundation for Economic Education has also published “In Defense of the Individual,” a column that Rev. Opitz authored for the organization in 1955.