COMMITTEE ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION FEATURE

The title of Benjamin M. Friedman’s Religious Influences on Economic Thinking is dully academic but eye-catching all the same. It is a slim book, some of it a restatement of the argument the author made in his 2021 book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Mr. Friedman chiefly wants to know—this is only a slight oversimplification—what sort of religious ideas were afloat in Scotland around the time Adam Smith expressed, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the core principle of modern economics: that markets, engaged in by self-interested competitors, tend to benefit everyone. The individual merchant, Smith wrote, “neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Thus, Mr. Friedman explains, did Smith formulate what economists call the First Fundamental Welfare Theorem. The idea, we’re told, couldn’t have come from the Bible, which held that prosperity was a “reward for proper moral and religious behavior.” That will surprise anyone who’s ever read the Bible with care. The main idea in Mr. Friedman’s book is that Smith was able to formulate his theorem because, in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, orthodox Calvinism had receded and made way for Enlightenment-era religious views that took a more optimistic view of human potential.

The claim is dodgy on its face. Calvinism, the term assigned to the Reformed strand of Protestantism of which John Calvin (1509–1564) was the principal figure, prevailed in precisely those nations—Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain—that first formed capitalist economies. Mr. Friedman weakens his case by relying on a series of preposterous caricatures of Calvin and Calvinism. He defines it, based on its doctrine of predestination, as a kind of fatalism that denies human agency. No one who has ever read the French reformer’s writings—or indeed those of the Apostle Paul, from which he derived predestination—would conclude that Calvin rejected agency or subscribed to fatalism.

Mr. Friedman draws from this mistaken premise the claim that Calvinist doctrine led to a lack of concern with individual morality. “If men and women know that they are predestined either to be saved or not,” he writes, “and that God’s choice regarding their individual spiritual fate has been made before they were born (more than that, before the world existed), what incentive is left to motivate them to live moral lives?” Such a mindset led, in turn, to lethargy and an “inability to make choices or take action to improve one’s material well-being.” A moment’s reflection might have reminded Mr. Friedman that the Puritans were nearly all Calvinists. Whatever failings the Puritans may be charged with, an indifference to individual morality and a lack of personal agency are not among them.

By the end of the book we find Mr. Friedman having to explain why his contention doesn’t contradict the one made by the German sociologist Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s thesis held that seventeenth-century Calvinists, eager to prove their status as among God’s elect, cultivated industry and thrift and so helped create the capitalist economies of Northern Europe. Mr. Friedman’s argument, he explains, concerns economic thought rather than economic behavior, the development of economics as an intellectual discipline rather than the development of market economies. He would have been wiser to reject Weber’s thesis, as many historians have, on the grounds that its best remembered claims wholly lack empirical evidence.

As for Adam Smith, Mr. Friedman rightly notes that he kept his religious beliefs, if he had any, to himself. We can safely assume, based on Smith’s earlier book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), that he was not an adherent of orthodox Calvinism. Unless I’m mistaken, however, nothing in The Wealth of Nations contradicts any part of the Calvinist creed.

One example: Mr. Friedman, in an attempt to show that Calvinists held a narrow view of life’s purpose, quotes the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, documents drafted in the 1640s by English and Scottish Puritans. Yet Smith’s view that mutual benefit can arise from self-interested behavior finds wonderful expression in the Westminster Larger Catechism (composed in 1647), which asks, in question 141, what duties are required by the eighth commandment (in the Reformed tradition, “Thou shalt not steal”). The answer, in part: “The duties required in the eighth commandment are, truth, faithfulness, and justice in contracts and commerce between man and man . . . and an endeavor, by all just and lawful means, to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others, as well as our own” (emphasis added).

I suspect you could make a sounder argument than Mr. Friedman’s by asserting its opposite: Adam Smith’s description of a naturally functioning market of self-interested individuals wasn’t a rejection of the Calvinist outlook but a development of it.

The author is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal; this review first ran in the October 4, 2024, print edition.

Religious Influences on Economic Thinking: The Origins of Modern Economics by Benjamin M. Friedman. MIT Press, 98 pages.