Several full-length academic treatises have been inspired by a recognition of economics as continuing the
priestly function into our secular age. Professor Robert Nelson’s Economics as Religion (1992)
is competent, sincere, and openly commendatory toward economics’ presumption of the redemptive calling.
Professor Nelson finds economics continuing Jewish Messianism in a new inspirational art form where
‘efficient and inefficient’ have replaced ‘good and evil’. His analogy goes so
far as to distinguish Catholic and Protestant lines of development:
Aristotle, Aquinas, Saint-Simon, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and Samuelson constitute progressivism,
‘Cambridge’, and the scientific management of society;
Plato, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Darwin, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman develop individualism,
‘Chicago’, and Libertarianism.
Irrespective of any particulars by which these analogies might be drawn, their general import cannot be resisted.
Altars are built for the propitiation of what we fear. As economic development has utterly transformed what
have to be afraid of, so have the celebrations of our deliverance been transformed. We no longer fear a stinted
offering will render the fields barren, or that a misspoken incantation must bring a disastrous flood. We are
confident that, should the old gods scowl on our land, the broad economic fabric of which we are a part will
deliver from afar whatever is needed to knit-up our local misfortune. Are we not now extensively supplied from
remote and exotic environs in even the normal course of business?
The passing of seasons having become economically irrelevant, old forms of religious observation now fall into disuse. But fear itself abides: will the material order hold now that it is so huge, so disperse, so extensively self-actuating, and consists so much in the mere abstraction of its organizational form? Could it all be heading toward a collapse that we will not foresee in time for corrective action? Will the value of my labor's marginal product cover my needs and obligations? Have we not been delivered from one mystery into another that might yet hold more terrors than were there before?
Thus the wise and well-situated among us have directed portions of our expanded wealth to the establishment of temples and the lubrication of a priestly order to celebrate accord with this new mystery. The new dispensation is rational materialism; edifices of the world's central banks are its temples; and economists are its priests. Economic science is the theology of our rationalist-materialist age. It is secularism's sacred mystery: the hand of economic adjustment remains unseen (Smith); markets only organize themselves miraculously (Mises) or spontaneously (Hayek). The interest rate does not occur naturally, but is divined by a deliberately obscurantist clerisy headed by a disciple of Ayn Rand.
Where the old gods required priestly supplications to assure benign regulation of the seasonal cycle upon which human fortunes once depended, the new gods require equally arcane abaisances from our economists so that tenderness might be granted to the business cycle.
While we must agree that the latter-day custodians of our economic well-being constitute a genuine priesthood, we have difficulty accepting their liturgy as a continuation of Christianity. Rather, these clerics appear to be creating economic science for the popular mind as if material order were the plaything of fierce, remote, essentially pagan gods:
As the Achaean fleet was becalmed by Artemis at Aulis, so was the world economy rendered motionless by unappeasable fortune in 2008;
As Calchas advised Agamemnon that the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia was required to speed the fleet on to Troy, so Paulson advised Bush that selling another generation of his people into tax slavery was the only lubricant that might release the engines of commerce;
As Iphigenia volunteered to lay her life on the altar of Artemis to realign her race with the divine order, so have the present-day faithful resigned themselves in hope and obedience to our modern oracle.When President Bush told CNN television, I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system . . . to make sure the economy doesn't collapse,1 he clearly exhibited the liturgical function, confounding mere verbal logic rather in the manner of a priest officiating at a funeral, expressing his sure and certain hope of something resembling deliverance.