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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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April 2006
Reason’s victory is Christianity’s gain
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success By Rodney Stark Random House, 2005; Hardcover, 281 pages
Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason argues that the Christian faith is the seedbed of a commitment to reason and a belief in human progress, and hence that it is the the major factor in the emergence of capitalism and hence economic development in the West. He summarizes his argument at its conclusion this way: “The modern world arose only in Christian societies. Not in Islam. Not in Asia.” (pg. 233) As such it makes feisty and readable jabs at opponents with academic hostility to Christianity or liberationist denigration of capitalism (in this he is reminiscent of Michael Novak). Along the way he gives an interesting account of technological innovations in the Middle Ages, which he claims were not so dark after all (at least in the great Italian cities of banking and trade).
In all of this Stark is best read as an emendation and expansion of the argument, almost a century ago, of the great sociologist Max Weber, whose “Protestant ethic” leading to the spirit of capitalism skipped too quickly past medieval Catholic contributions. The book concludes with a sympathetic account of the rise of capitalism and Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America which is reminiscent of (if more cursory than) the sociologist David Martin. In all this the book serves as a most useful corrective to a series of common assumptions.
The standard format of
the book review proceeds to the “yes, but...” section, which I now
offer on several counts. There are first of all a series of sizeable
contemporary pieces of counter-evidence, whose significance I
suppose only time will determine. What of the non-Christian economic
juggernauts of Asia, Korea and Japan, now China and India? What of
the turn away from democracy and toward socialism in contemporary
Latin America? Then there are features of Stark’s internal argument
which are unclear. He argues for the connection between Christian
theology and reason, and then shows the connection between political
freedom and economic vitality in medieval Christian
city-states. But the staple between one and the other is
harder to find. How strong a causal link is Stark proposing?
What, for example, are we to make of eastern Orthodoxy, which had
the theological commitment to reason but no economic bragsheet?
It would seem that a series of factors were required, one of which
was the faith, with its attendant virtues of reason and optimism.
At a logical level, one could imagine an unsympathetic reader who
might argue that the book is a case of the genetic fallacy: just
because Christianity was a condition for the emergence of capitalism
doesn’t mean it now needs it any longer. In fact one could argue
that the Enlightenment saw the cutting of the cord between faith and
progress, reason, ethics. Nowhere
The Victory of Reason is a valuable book with some loose logical hinges. Still it spurs thought. I found myself thinking about functional arguments for the faith: Christianity is to be commended because...it increases healing... lowers our blood pressure...keeps our marriages together...boosts the stock market.... These may be supports for the faith, insofar as we have theological grounds to believe that where Christ is confessed, there things of many kinds will flourish. Still we need to confess with Hosea that, though the crops fail, still will we praise the Lord. For his praise is not a means to something else, but is indeed our final end.
The Rev’d Canon George Sumner is principal of Wycliffe College in Toronto, and a canon theologian of the Diocese of Saskatchewan. |
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Reviewed by
George Sumner
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Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |