HOLY SCRIPTURE IS THE STANDARD, NOT CAPITALISM

Document of the week. Extricating the church from the neoliberal trap. A memorandum of critical Christians

[This memorandum published in: Freitag 46, 11/13/2008 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.freitag.de/2008/46/08461001.php.]

[In July 2008 the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) published the memorandum “Entrepreneurial Conduct in an Evangelical Perspective.” Despite different approaches, the signatories of the critical memorandum concluded after careful scrutiny that the EKD is obviously on a completely wrong track from a Biblical-theological, economic and worldwide ecumenical perspective.]

1. The memorandum grotesquely whitewashes the socio-economic reality and thereby separates itself from the majority of the earth’s population and from the losers, particularly from the losers in Germany.

2. By naming this reality “social market economy” instead of describing it with its real name neoliberal capitalism, the memorandum legitimates capitalism – in a time when the majority of people and increasingly states turn away from neoliberalism.

3. The memorandum distances itself from its own past social-ethical insight that entrepreneurial conduct must be socially and ecologically embedded in a society through a recalibrated social policy. Instead it urges reducing “state regulation to the most necessary” in harmony with the neoliberal mainstream.

4. Those responsible for this memorandum and its circulation endanger the unity of the EKD with the worldwide community of churches that joined together in the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Reformed World Alliance (RWA) and the Lutheran World Alliance (LWA). These bodies clearly rejected neoliberal capitalism.

Since the 1980s the social restraints of liberal capitalism won by the working class movement were dismantled step by step. Global deregulation and liberalization of capital was the background. All life on this earth was subjected to the goal of maximization of capital accumulation.

The large majority of humanity and increasingly governments as in Latin America reject this development to neoliberalism. Social movements worldwide rise up to resist neoliberalism and seek alternatives. This is also true for the ecumenical movement. All the plenary assemblies of the aforementioned church communities passed resolutions in this direction – with collaboration of delegates from the EKD.

Describing the dominant system as a social market economy is a deception. The programmatic interventionism of its father, Muller-Armack, is irresponsibly reduced when “social balance” is merely understood as redistribution of the results of market processes that cannot be influenced. His idea was making “social justice… into the integrating element of our economic order. The memorandum urges the conversion from the “classical” social market economy to a “new social market economy” propagated in the neoliberal spirit by employer associations.

THE EKD BIDS FAREWELL TO THE TRADITION OF GERMAN SOCIAL PROTESTANTISM

With this change, decision-makers of the EKD bid farewell to the tradition of German social Protestantism. At the founding 1890 Evangelical-Social congress, the economist Adolf Wagner asked about the function of the state: “Where, how and when must state authority intervene in the economy?” Then he admitted: “We made the tremendous mistake of thinking salvation comes from the complete freedom of economic movements while we needed to constrict economic egoism with firm norms of the law.”

The basic idea of a social reform through the creative activity of the state from ethical conviction is the vital social-political contribution of Protestantism since the beginning of the welfare state in the Bismarck time. A state capable of action that limits entrepreneurial freedom of action is crucial for the social-ethical tradition of German social Protestantism, not expecting an improved capitalism from the sum of individual “honest merchants.”

An individual businessman must minimize his costs. That lies in the logic of the system. He cannot be criticized for this. However law must limit this logic so it does not become destructive. The responsibility of politics has priority for a “conscious social control of the market” (Social Declaration of the Churches). Then the morally conscious “honest merchant” is subsequently challenged in his or her responsibility.

Whoever like the memorandum signatories relies only on “ethical consciousness,” clear orientation and commandments and the spiritual naturalization of the entrepreneur to prevent inhuman developments renounces on forming framing conditions and allows crises to intensify. The memorandum falls into this neoliberal trap.

Isn’t it an irony of history that the memorandum appears at a moment when the house of cards of casino-capitalism would collapse if states did not intervene? The tried-and-tested criterion was already set down in evangelical social ethics and catholic social teaching: labor before capital. Opening economic processes for working persons would have been a beginning concretizing the biblically established option for the poor in economic ethics. Dependent labor and labor's real situation from the perspective of the option for the poor allegedly chosen by the memorandum as a criterion is the critical and ethical standard for the normative evaluation of economic systems.

The sum total of individual ethical conduct produces a macro-economic process not intended by the individual actors. This micro-economic fallacy is in fashion again where “right” operational thinking and acting are transferred to the macro-plane and prove false there.

THE PROPHETS SINCE AMOS REACTED CONCRETELY TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC MALFORMATIONS

For a church that calls itself evangelical, the whole Holy Scripture is the theological standard of speaking and acting. According to the biblical testimony, justice is not something additional to faith in God. Rather whether we trust the biblical God or an idol is manifest there. The prophets since Amos reacted clearly and concretely to socio-economic malformations.

The prophets criticized that the rich owned the land and the upper class of the city legitimated bribery. From prophetic criticism, a right was created that protected the poor and developed the first social net. Therefore Jesus asks us: God or mammon, the biblical God of justice or the idols of accumulation of riches (“Amassing treasures”)? Nothing of this can be found in the EKD memorandum.

The third Poverty and Wealth report of the German government shows how far the real existing market economy is from the beautiful models. Every food distribution project of diakonia or caritas is mentioned. As in a textbook, the memorandum extols this reality. “This striving for personal well-being leading to everyone’s prosperity is possible in a framework that guarantees both intense competition and social balance.”

Trust in the “invisible hand” that allegedly produces harmony between the striving for personal advantage and the public interest is the ideological core of the religion of the market.

Since the memorandum consciously fades out the fundamental system questions raised by the economy and the biblical-theological criteria of judgment and conduct and draws a completely unreal picture of the “honest merchant” with an abridged and interest-bound understanding of a supposedly leading “social market economy,” it actually legitimates the dominant neoliberalism falling into crisis.

After everything that happened to the Evangelical Church in Germany in the 1930s, we are urgently challenged to return to the tradition of the “theology of the Confessing Church” and to begin a new confession movement.

The worldwide ecumenical community of the churches in the framework of the WCC, the RWA and the LWA has done this for over ten years – even if hesitantly in German churches and notoriously repressed in the statements of the EKD. This confessional process was affirmed in a series of important consultations that culminated in the plenary assemblies of the aforementioned organizations and their resolutions. The 24th general assembly of the Reformed World Alliance in 2004 in Accra formulated the core sentence: “We say No to the present world economic order as forced on us by global neoliberal capitalism.”

We call upon all Christians, communities and regional churches to oppose the entrepreneurial memorandum on biblical-theological grounds, to urge the EKD with clear arguments to end the adjustment to the dominant powers in the economy and politics, to stay true to their own social-ethical traditions and return to the worldwide ecumenical community of the churches with its insights and initiatives.