Three Muted Cheers (Review of Stark, Part IV)

Now, to close on a good note, here’s three good things in the book:
First, it thoroughly dismantles many smug and self-satisfied Protestant attacks on Catholicism. Stark is right to point out that Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was driven partly by an anti-Catholic sentiment that wanted to insist that all the progress had happened in the Protestant countries because of their Protestantism, and the Catholic countries were stagnant because of their Catholicism. Such arguments are a dime-a-dozen in modern American Protestantism. Of course, it goes the other way too--Catholic anti-capitalists have tried to pin all the blame for capitalism on Protestantism. Stark’s account shows fairly clearly that, whatever you want to think about capitalism, the praise or blame has to be more evenly distributed among Catholics and Protestants, and it will remind Protestants that Catholicism has been, in general, a friend of progress, freedom, and development every bit as much as Protestantism has.

Second, this book lent a great deal of support to a hypothesis I’ve been nursing for a while; namely, that there is a direct connection between the size of a political entity and the amount of genuine freedom that is possible within that entity. Stark argues that it was the medieval city-states that prospered much more than larger kingdoms or empires, because their much smaller size was conducive to greater freedom for the people and the commerce and greater responsiveness on the part of their governments. The post-Reformation stagnation of France and Spain vis-a-vis the Netherlands and England was due to their much larger populations and more centralized governmental structures, which could not help curtailing freedom simply because of their size. So, lots of good ammunition here for anarcho-syndicalism. Of course, Stark does not seem to realize the importance of his own observation here, and generally reverts to repeating the tired formulas of despotism vs. market-friendly governments. This means, incidentally, that he has rather too much faith in the “market-friendly” US government, not recognizing that its sheer size means that it will undermine freedom.

Third, in a fascinating passage, Stark confirms another hypothesis that had materialized in my mental matrix last term: to be a social good rather than a social ill, capitalism requires well-distributed land ownership, or at least, easy access to land ownership. In reading about the horrific depredations of British capitalism, I wondered to myself why we had not, in general, experienced the same social misery here in the US with the rise of industrial capitalism. A combination of Belloc, Berry, and the Torah hinted at an answer: in Britain, industrial capitalism arose against a backdrop of landlessness, and hence workers were ripe for exploitation, social dislocation, etc.; in the US, industrial capitalism arose against a backdrop of almost limitless private access to land, as the country expanded westward; hence, workers were in principle free and self-sufficient economic agents, capable of holding their own against capitalist manufacturers (though of course one could argue here that this relative well-being was simply maintained at the expense of tremendous exploitation of the Indians). This is precisely what Stark argues on pages 222-25. If this is true, it suggests an explanation for why industrial capitalism is having such deleterious effects in Third World countries, and also suggests that Torah principles of land-ownership may still have a lot of truth and relevance.

Scratch-and-Sniff Christianity (Review of Stark, Part III)

Now, let’s return to my central objection--Stark has to distort Christianity to make it ift his account--either misrepresenting or marginalizing crucial elements, or else focusing on features that, while historically true features of Christianity, were depeartures from the orthodox and Biblical tradition. I will try to substantiate this charge in detail.

Right at the beginning, in seeking to equate Christianity with “reason,” he says, “Theology consists of formal reasoning about God.” (5) That is certainly one definition of theology, but it sounds like something from Turretin. Although formal reasoning about God is certainly part of the theological task, few theologians would want to describe theology’s essence in such an arid way. Curiously enough, when Stark goes on to give examples of how Christian theology uses reason, he cites Aquinas’s defense of the perpetual virginity of Mary--an “irrational” doctrine if there ever was one. The irony seems lost on Stark, but in my mind, this example illustrates well the role of reason in the Christian tradition--disciplined reasoning about tenets of faith that often radically subvert what reason itself would tell us.

Shortly after this, Stark admits that, to be sure, many influential churchmen opposed an over-reliance on reason in favor of a greater role for mystery and mysticism. But these views, he asserts, remained outside of the mainstream of true Christianity that was to be found in the universities. On what basis, we may well ask, can Stark, an unbeliever, presume to make such sweeping judgments about what constitutes the mainstream and the periphery of the faith?

Stark then proceeds to sketch the differences between Christianity on the one hand and Islam and Judaism on the other. Of course, I heartily agree with him that Christianity fosters cultural progress in a way the other two do not, but any Biblical Christian should reject the reason he provides: “Scholars often refer to Judaism and Isalm as ‘orthoprax’ religions, concerned with correct (ortho) practice (praxis) and therefore placing their ‘fundamental emphasis on law and regulation of community life.’ In contrast, scholars describe Christianity as an ‘orthodox’ religion because it stresses correct (ortho) opinion (doxa), placing ‘greater emphasis on belief and its intellectual structuring of creeds, catechisms, and theologies.” (In the margin here, I scribbled “Nay, you beast!”) While it is certainly true that Christianity has always had a tendency to indulge in doctrinal debate to an unhealthy degree, and has developed a rather sophisticated system of doctrines, it is a particularly modern, Protestant, post-Enlightenment notion to think of Christianity as being in essence a set of intellectual propositions. In the New Testament, and throughout most of the Church’s history, Christianity has been all about right practice and community life. Inasmuch as it has failed to focus on this, it has failed to live up to its proper calling, and so the Enlightenment obsession with reason that in some ways grew out of scholasticism, though a child of Christianity, is a bastard and no true son--a distinction that Stark does not recognize.

In distinguishing Christianity from Islam and Judaism, Stark also tries to claim that Christianity does not read its texts about Jesus as “divine transmissions” that “have encouraged literalism.” (9) Christianity has a freer, more flexible relationship to its founding texts that enable it to accomodate progress. For example, he says (having apparently not taken the effort to understand the New Testament teaching on slavery) “While Christian theologians could plausibly correct Saint Paul’s understanding of God’s will concerning slavery, such corrections were (and are) essentially precluded in other faiths--except as heresies.” Again, while it may be true that Christianity has at times (especially in modernity) treated the Bible this way, this is not true Christianity and Christians should be immediately suspicious of Stark’s project.

These problems continue to crop up throughout Stark’s crucial opening chapter.
For example, on page 11, he calls Aquinas’s Summa Theologica “a monument to the theology of reason” which “consists of logical ‘proofs’ of Christian doctrine and set the standard for all subsequent Christian theologians.” Of course, while logic and reason played a major part in the work, it is hardly accurate to describe it as a collection of “logical proofs of Christian doctrine.” Plus, it certainly did not set the standard for all subsequent Christian theologians--ever heard of Protestantism?

A little later, he says, “Aquinas and his many gifted peers could not have excelled at rational theology had they conceived of Jehovah as an inexplicable essence.” But, of course, they did conceive of him that way!

On page 14, he cites the “great, if neglected, medieval theologian-scientist Nicole d’Oresme” saying that “God’s creation ‘is much like that of a man making a clock and continue its own motion by itself.” Well, no wonder this theologian was neglected if he said stuff like that--that’s a classic statement of the heresy of deism. Stark’s confusion of deism and Christianity continues for quite a number of pages. For instant, on page 16, he enlists Descartes’s view that “God is perfect and therefore ‘acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible,’ except for the rare exceptions of miracles.” Later, on pages 20-21, he contrasts Islam’s “extremely active God who intrudes on the world as he deems it appropriate” with Christianity: “Islam did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the creation but assumed that the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis.” Of course, there’s a big problem with this--orthodox Christian theology has always taught the latter!

Next, he goes on to gush about how individualism is the product of Christianity: claiming that “It is the individual citizen who was the focus of Christian political thought.” (23) Now, I’ve studied Christian political thought quite a good deal, and I don’t ever remember this particular emphasis; in my experience, the opposite is generally true--Christian political thought is particularly concerned with social bodies and the common good. On the next page, he says, “From the beginning, Christianity has taught that sin is a personal matter, that it does not inhere primarily in the group, but each individual must be conscerned with her or his personal salvation.” From the beginning? The beginning of what? The Enlightenment?

In his discussion of individualism and personal liberty, he claims a thoroughly anti-predestinarian stance as the orthodox Christian one. He enlists Augustine in defense of the proposition that “while God knows what we will freely decide to do, he does not interfere,” but, notably, he is working off of Augustine’s De Libero Arbitrio, rather than his later anti-Pelagian writings, in which he retracted many of his earlier statements.

The point here is not that Christianity has not encouraged rational enquiry, scientific investigation, individual liberty, the progress of civilization, prosperity, etc. I would contend that it has. But in Stark’s hands, all of these points are made in a fashion that is only half-true. True Christianity does promote individual liberty, but not individualism; it promotes rationality, but not rationalism, prosperity, but not capitalism.

Stark accepts the Constantinian thesis--that there was a radical shift in Christian values as Christians were catapulted into positions of power and quickly set to work providing theological legitimations, rather than critiques, of power. The problem is that Stark thinks this is altogether a good thing, and this should make us immediately suspicious. The same pattern appears all throughout, as he identifies genuine shifts that occurred within Christianity, but, where true Christians would see corruption and apostasy, he sees great progress and innovation. For example, he is very enthusiastic about the way the great monastic estates and other church institutions accumulated vast wealth, sometimes growing into huge profitable institutions resembling modern corporations in some ways. In one bizarre section about the monasteries, he talks about how “The manual labor prescribed by the rule of Saint Benedict was reduced to entirely symbolic tasks about the kitchen. The monks lived like lords” and then goes on to gush, as if this were a good thing, “All of this was possible because the great monasteries began to utilize a hired labor force.” (61) (To cap off the oddity, he starts praising the Christian work ethic and contempt for luxury on the next page, right after praising the monasteries for finding ways to ensure they didn’t have to do work and could live in luxury. Of course, this particular contradiction is endemic to capitalist thinking.) But the problem is that these developments were decried on all sides, and critiqued by one reforming movement after another, from the Cistercians to the Franciscans to the Protestants. Christians repeatedly insisted that the monasteries that turned into engines of profit had abandoned monastic and Christian principles.

The same problem appears with usury, where he tries to argue that, despite the traditional usury prohibition, Christianity actually favored usury, because many of the worldly hierarchy engaged freely in usurious practices to help finance the buying and selling of church offices. These and other related practices of the exceedingly corrupt late medieval Church are embraced as part of the development of capitalism. Never mind the fact that they were condemned by all honest Christians and eventually incited the massive schism of the Reformation.

In my mind then, the book actually demonstrates, contrary to the thesis that Stark is seeking to advance, that genuine Christianity opposed capitalism as a corrupting force, rather than encouraged it. Stark recognizes this challenge in the form of the traditional theology of the just price and the prohibition on usury, and so he seeks to address these. But his response to this challenge is so pitiful that it leaves one more doubtful than ever about the strength of Stark’s thesis. A single paragraph addresses the issue of the just price, claiming that Christian theologians basically considered the just price to be the one determined by free market forces. On usury, he is even worse, apparently having made no serious effort to understand the scholastic teaching on the issue and dismissing it as “confusing” and “fuzzy,” though it is clear, in his mind, that the gist of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century developments is to nullify the usury ban in the face of the pressure of worldly economic realities. Stark ends this section by scolding Islamic banks for holding firm to their religious convictions and attempting to do business accordingly, unlike their Christian counterparts, who more willingly abandoned their Scriptures: “Religious opposition to interest, combined with the avarice of repressive regimes, prevented capitalism from arising in Islam, and still does. Victories of reason have yet to be won.” (68) In passages like this, Stark shows his true colors: he is not really in favor of the Christian religion, but is in favor of what he sees as the Christian willingness to abandon religious scruples in favor of reason.

The same movement appears in his treatment of property rights, which was shockingly naive, clearly ignorant of the complexities both of Biblical teaching on the subject and of early modern developments and disputes concerning how private property was to operate and be protected. Here too his narrative is one of an irrational early Christianity which was against property rights, superseded by a late medieval rational Christianity that set the stage for full-blown modern capitalism. The narrative has a vague truth to it, but as Christians, we should ask which stage in the development was Christian, and which was heretical.

Indeed, Stark occasionally seems to mess up and accidentally enlists examples that directly contradict his thesis, such as when he discusses a “Puritan”-style Italian ascetic movement (“the Humiliati”) that arose in opposition to the materialism of Italian capitalism, and details how Protestant Puritanism also strove vigorously against the affluence of Dutch capitalism.

The clearest evidence that Stark’s project is sharply at odds with orthodox Christianity comes in the last chapter, where he treats religions as economic competitors in a religious marketplace, and argues that Christianity succeeds better the more the Church is divided, because then it benefits from competition, and is able to offer a diversity of “religious products” to suit various needs. Churches are encouraged to take a more and more explicitly marketing-oriented approach to “promoting” their religious “products.” Of course, this is entirely antithetical to the orthodox confession of “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” and should be proof to Christian readers that Stark’s values and his understanding of Christianity are far from theirs.

Of course, none of this is to say that true Christianity is necessarily antagonistic to capitalism across the board; clearly it isn’t. But the relationship between Christianity and capitalism is obviously a deeply ambiguous and conflicted one, contrary to Stark’s thesis, and the concept of capitalism itself is deeply ambiguous and conflicted, though you wouldn’t know that from Stark’s presentation.

Victories of Unreasonableness (Review of Stark, Part II)

Stark’s argument fails on logical and stylistic grounds because its method of argumentation is thoroughly propagandistic. I’ll never forget something I learned from Doug Jones about the difference between persuasion and propaganda. All art (and he helped me understand that academic research is no different) is trying to tell a story in such a way as to win over its audience to a particular thesis. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the persuasion will fail if it tries to resort to propaganda. What’s the difference? In true persuasion, the story alternates between thesis and antithesis, presenting the author’s viewpoint and the alternatives, leaving you with the conclusion that the author’s viewpoint is basically true, although there is much to be said for the other side as well. In propaganda, the story advances one viewpoint only, the entire time, without any serious attention given to alternatives. This is certainly the way that Stark proceeds, which is particularly egregious given that it is not as if he were writing in a scholarly void. Rather, his narrative directly contrasts with Max Weber’s highly influential thesis about the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism. So you might expect that, Weber’s viewpoint being so influential, Stark would expend considerable effort in addressing and refuting it. Not so. Instead, he merely mentions it from time to time to pour scorn upon it, claiming to treat it as scarcely worthy of refutation. Given that giants in the field, like R.H. Tawney, have felt otherwise, this is hardly a credible or scholarly tack to take. Of course, this is not to say that Weber’s thesis does not have a number of problems and does not need a number of modifications (nearly all agree that it does), but that it still holds enough sway that it needs to be dealt with and not dismissed.

Unfortunately, this problem does not appear only vis-a-vis Weber, but all throughout, such as in his dismissal of positive assessments of the medieval guilds (“Fortunately, reality has set in and fantasies about guilds as engines of social justice have mostly run their course”) and of liberation theology (“By now, Liberation Theology is widely recognized as a naive clerical fantasy, although many academics refuse to concede the point”). This kind of drive-by-shooting-style criticism is unhelpful, uncharitable, and unscholarly--if you think some widely-held position is wrong, then show me why, don’t just mouth off.

Indeed, throughout the book, the evidential basis for the most significant parts of Stark’s argument was often extremely thin. This was disguised, of course, under a mountain of statistics and facts, which hid the paucity of definitions and logical connections. The method is a common one in more popular-level works masquerading as scholarship: the author trundles out mountains of evidence in defense of individual building blocks in his argument, in order to impress the reader with his erudition, all the while failing to provide much defense for the logical connections between these building blocks. The resulting structure has the illusion of solidity, but will collapse under any pressure of argument. My general impression in reading the book was long stretches of head nodding--“Yes, yes, I believe you there, but I could’ve gotten that from any number of sources; indeed, I already have”--punctuated my moments of frustrated bafflement at crucial junctures--“Wait, hang on a minute! Where’d you get that from? Could you defend this proposition a bit?”

Part of the problem here, of course, is one of definition, particularly concerning the term “capitalism.” Stark acknowledges that the definition of this term is very difficult and controversial, but then, without interacting with any of the standard definitions and debates, he just whips out his own definition, and then proceeds as if this definition were established and uncontroversial. The rest of his argument is based on this assumed definition, and unfortunately, can only succeed insofar as this definition is meaningful and helpful. I’m reminded of the standard illustration in philosophy about “grue” objects. If I were to assert “All grater is grue,” in which “grater” referred to all objects that were either grass or water, and “grue” referred to colors that were either green or blue, then my statement would be largely true, but the explanatory value of any statements built off of this “fact” would be very limited, since the concepts “grater” and “grue” were entirely of my own making, and of little interest to anyone else. I think that something similar may well be happening in this book. If Stark’s definition of capitalism encompasses fundamentally different phenomena (medieval commerce and modern industrial capitalism) under the same heading (“capitalism”) and then says “See, capitalism was around in the Middle Ages” then all he is doing is begging the question--capitalism was around in the Middle Ages because he has defined medieval commerce as capitalism.

Here is his definition: “Capitalism is an economic system wherein privately owned, relatively well organized, and stable firms pursue complex commercial activities within a relatively free (unregulated) market, taking a systematic, long-term approach to investing and reinvesting wealth (directly or indirectly) in productive activities involving a hired workforce, and guided by anticipated or actual returns.”
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, two problems, as far as I can see. First, in many ways, it seems to be too broad. Terms like “relatively well organized,” “stable” “complex,” “relatively free,” “long-term,” etc. are terribly vague. By this definition, capitalism is as old as civilization, and occurs whenever commerce is given time and space to flourish. Stark reserves a lot of criticism for the Roman Empire, arguing that such “capitalism” never really existed in Rome. But what about Athens, Carthage, or Tyre, the great trading and mercantile centers of the ancient Mediterranean before Rome? Certainly the Biblical description of Tyre sounds a lot like a “capitalist” economy. The particular ideology and set of practices and values underlying modern capitalism (the last 200 or 250 years) would seem to me to be much more specific than this general rosy sketch of free commerce. (The main distinctive, without going into it at length, is the isolation of economic rationality and economic practices as functioning according to their own rules and morality, independent of the rest of the social matrix--see The Great Transformation by Polanyi.)

The second problem is the anachronisms in this definition. First, what does Stark mean by “privately owned”? As opposed to “publicly held,” as in, held by the state? Given that “the state” itself is in many ways a modern invention, and that certainly the bifurcation of society into only two realms--“public” (state) and “private” (everything else)--is a modern invention, it seems ambiguous to discuss medieval economic enterprises under this rubric. This is particularly clear when Stark treats monastic communities as if they were modern private firms. Clearly, they were not; they occupied a position in the social sphere somewhere between our modern purely private institution, and our modern public governmental institution. I’m also suspicious of “hired workforce” after reading Hannah Arendt, who asserted that no such thing as “the working class” existed before the 18th century. Most labor functioned through an association of free or apprenticed artisans. I’m suspicious of Stark’s implicit portrait of a bunch of little medieval factories, consisting of the capital-owning manufacturers and their contracted laborers. Third, when he speaks of an “unregulated” market, he seems to envision the modern dispute over state-regulated or self-regulated markets. Of course there are other kinds of regulation that were pervasive in the Middle Ages, such as by “private” social institutions, like guilds, or by religious rules (like the Church’s rules for just price and against usury). Indeed, Stark seems aware of the potential rejoinder at this point, as he devotes a couple of pages at various points toward criticizing the former as a stubborn elitist holdout against capitalism, and toward minimizing the latter two as non-factors. The problem was, of course, that these couple pages were much too hasty to convincingly dispose of the obvious objections.

Of course, on each of these three possible anachronisms, I am open to being persuaded that I am wrong and Stark is right--these were truly “private firms” in basically our modern sense, there really was a “labor force” in basically our modern sense, and there really was non-regulation in basically our modern sense. But though I am open to being persuaded, I wasn’t, because Stark made almost no effort to persuade on these points--he simply asserted his definition, and then assumed it as accurate, relevant, and useful.

The other problem with Stark’s view of capitalism is his almost religious devotion to it. No doubt Christianity did contribute to the rise of capitalism, but Christianity also teaches the parable of the wheat and the tares--that as good grows and flourishes, evil grows up alongside it. And most sensible historians realize this too--any good historical movement is likely to generate many bad side effects. Stark, however, seems immune to this kind of common sense, speaking of capitalism in the same way that six-year-olds speak of cotton candy. Capitalism is always treated in the narrative as an unmitigated good, and everything that might hinder it is a villain in this story. Related to this is a fervent mammonolatry--Stark seems to think that as long as he shows an increase in material affluence (no matter what coincident increases their may be in vice or social disorder), he has depicted a rise from darkness into light.

His allegiance to capitalism is so absolute that he consistently holds up as models the “capitalist” Italian city-states, even when they were governed by deeply corrupt and brutal governments. As long as these governments helped encourage the free flow of wealth, he doesn’t seem to care too much about their other faults. For example, “Milan [was] vulnerable to autocrats able to impose civil order--especially members of the Sforza family, who rose to fame as mercenary soldiers (sforza is Italian for “force”). Fortunately for Milans economic affairs, the Sforzas were realists who understood finance, and during their rule they encouraged investments in manufacturing capacity and were friendly to commercial interests.”

This kind of bias is just bad history.

Inverted Priorities (Review of Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, Part I)

If I had come across this book in a vacuum, no doubt I would’ve thought it mediocre and occasionally annoying, but nothing to get worked up about. But, knowing as I did (from word of mouth and from the enthusiastic blurbs on the cover) that many in conservative evangelical circles loved this book, I spent the entire time I was reading vexed by the question “Why?” And unable to satisfactorily answer that question, I found myself in a very ill temper throughout. Now, because this book received such endorsements from such unlikely quarters, I shall be ridiculously thorough in backing up my many criticisms, and if you don’t have patience to read the whole thing, I understand.

Of course, that’s not to say that there’s not much to profit from in this book--there certainly is. If you wade through the whole review, you’ll find at the end three things that I enthusiastically learned from this book. And, it’s understandable why Christians might get excited about this book at first glance. After all, it advertises itself as a sort of modern-day Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers--a defense of Christianity against the critiques of the Enlightenment and its followers, showing that Christianity is not in fact barbaric, backward, repressive, obscurantist, etc.

However, there’s a problem with this particular defense even more serious than that of the original Speeches on Religion--in this case, the author is an unbeliever, and not just any unbeliever, but one who seems to be particularly doped up on modernity, accepting uncritically all of its trappings as eminently desirable. This much is evident from the title, which made me highly skeptical despite the rave reviews: The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Now, for all my Kierkegaardianism, I’m certainly not one to say that Christianity is anti-reason--indeed, it is the only viable source of true reason--but it is certainly skeptical enough of it that it is oddly incongruous to describe its triumph as “The Victory of Reason.” Remember that we’re talking about a faith that preaches as its central event the voluntary crucifixion of its God as a lower-class ruffian at the hands of imperial authorities, and then claims that he popped up alive again three days later, having, somewhere in the midst of all this, conquered all evil spiritual forces and erased all the sins of the world. I can think of a lot of ways to describe the triumph of such a faith, but “The Victory of Reason” would not be among them. (It is perhaps rather telling that Stark does not, so far as I remember, once mention either the crucifixion or the resurrection.)

See, here’s the problem. There’s two ways a book like this could be written. One would be to assume that the Bible and the historic Christian faith were good and true, and then to show that it had borne good and true fruits in modernity, despite many troubling and countervailing tendencies in modernity. Such a book would have much to offer, though I would still be suspicious at points. The other approach is to assume that modernity and the Enlightenment are good and true, and then show that they grew out of many things that were good and true in Christianity, despite many troubling and countervailing tendencies in Christianity. Such is the approach of this book. In the first approach, Christianity is the yardstick by which modernity is measured; in Stark’s, modernity is the yardstick by which Christianity is measured. Of course, that could be said of any number of modern attacks on Christianity; what makes Stark’s book so maddening is that he claims to find that Christianity measures up to this yardstick--that Christianity is in fact reasonable, progressive, and capitalistic in our modern sense. Unsurprisingly, in order to make Christianity fit this Procrustean bed, he has to push it and pull it, emphasizing this odd element here, and covering up this important element there, in order to make it fit. The result is a “Christianity” that any sensible Christian should disavow, and a historical narrative that is scarcely coherent.

Now, it seems that some have latched onto this book because for them it provides a defense of capitalism as something Christians should embrace. But the problem with this (aside from Stark’s failure to clearly analyze “capitalism”) is that this isn’t what Stark is trying to do--he is taking for granted that capitalism is a great good, and is then trying to “defend” Christianity as something capitalists can embrace. This means, of course, that Stark’s hierarchy of values is quite inverted from that of a Biblical Christian, and it shows in all kinds of deeply troubling ways. Repeatedly, Stark points to a genuine historical change in how Christendom responded to some social or economic issue, and, because “progress” is his barometer, he consistently rejects the earlier form of Christianity as “irrational” and seemingly, un-Christian, while the later form represents for him the true (because “rational”) Christianity. The problem is, of course, that in general, Christians at the time (and Biblically-minded Christians today) would clearly recognize the later form as a heresy or corruption.

Thus, Stark tends to identify heretical or corrupt elements in the Christian tradition, holds them up as as the true Christian tradition, and thereby asserts that Christianity is friendly to his Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and mammon. The result, therefore, in my mind, is to mount a convincing case that genuine Christianity is in fact hostile to capitalism, since Stark repeatedly demonstrates that it became receptive to capitalism only after deserting its first love.

Now, I will return to illustrate the various ways in which Stark distorts Christianity to try to fit it into his “capitalism” mold, but first, I want to spend some time critiquing the ways in which Stark fails to even provide a persuasive account of capitalism, much less Christianity.