Religion and Economic Inequality

2019-2020

With the 2013 publication of his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty brought the subject of wealth and income inequality to the forefront of public debate. The French economist argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth. In short, the world is set for increasing wealth inequality.

"Economic inequality separates people from each other in a confronting and alienating way," says theologian Robert Gascoigne, professor emeritus at the Australian Catholic University and a member of CTI's workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality. "Although material well-being is only one aspect of the development and flourishing of the human person, it is the precondition for many others, and spiritual development is put under grave stress. Authentic religious faith is called to draw attention to this and to encourage and challenge human communities to achieve some degree of material equality."

At CTI, says Director William Storrar, "Economic inequality calls for dialogue across disciplines to deepen our understanding of its contested relationship to religion." Hence, the focus of the 2019-2020 workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality, the third in a five-year series focusing on Religion and Global Concerns.

This year, the Center's finely-tuned selection process is bringing together a multifaceted set of individuals, eleven senior, mid-career, and promising scholars from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America in economics, religion, literary studies, sociology, biblical studies, Catholic theology, cultural and political studies, and bioethics. Most straddle multiple fields, making them open to the sort of interdisciplinary dialogue that characterizes CTI's method. While Gascoigne focuses on ways in which Catholic tradition "can foster economic equality as a key part of the Church's witness to human dignity," fellow member Marcia Pally is developing a framework for economic policy and practices that address inequality and its consequences.

To this end, Pally, who participated in a 2017 CTI preparatory consultation on Religion and Economic Inequality, examines concepts of relationality in Christian and Jewish traditions. "If we took our relationality seriously, then we would all need to see and to see to, to recognize and to attend to, all of our relationships, starting with those nearby but with our global connectedness as those relationships extend out. And, if we took that seriously, our economic policies might be considerably different from what they are today," she says.

Besides teaching at New York University, Pally is a regular guest professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her most recent books are Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality and America's New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good. "What I've been looking at for a long while are the theological, the cosmological ideas in the Christian and Judaic traditions that emphasize relationship with the transcendent and simultaneously relationship among persons as mutually constitutive-you don't get relationship with God without relating to other people and our relationship to God supports us in our relationship to other people. You really don't get one without the other. It's a very covenantal idea. At the moment, our economics is not very covenantal, and we suffer from a lot of difficulties because it isn't."

Born and raised in Manhattan, where her first love was dance, Pally was ultimately drawn toward scholarship in cultural and political studies. Her interest in Reformed Covenantal Political Theory stems from earlier work on the cultural history of the United States that led her to examine aspects of the American experience (the immigrant experience, the frontier experience, British liberalism) that, along with a very robust synergy with many religious traditions, contributed to the basket of cultural ideas, presuppositions, values, and norms that came to undergird America. This led her to look specifically at Reformed Protestant traditions and to covenantal political theology as it developed in Europe.

"Reformed Covenantal Political Theology is based on the notion of covenant and of situating the individual within networks and layers of relationships; it is these bonds, these people, that form sovereignty and the polity. This is the ground for the work I'm doing now."

Relational Economics

When it comes to economics, Pally regards markets as inherently relational. They will "only flourish this way within society and within societal relational values," she says. "Markets don't work if you don't understand that they are set within relational societal entities, and the worldview that separates the individual or the individual enterprise out is foundationally incorrect. We get into trouble if we pretend that is the way things work. When you have runaway greed, without concern for any other actor in the market, you get financial crashes like we had in 2008/2009, which was devastating."

In terms of her commitment to potential real-world solutions, Pally is a good fit for CTI. Having explored policies that fail to recognize the individual's relational embeddedness, such as the out-sourcing of work with its concomitant lack of retraining or redevelopment for workers made redundant, she suggests policies that would address inequality, such as "broad-based investment in education, through-life job training and infrastructure with combined funding and organization from business and government."

Practical as well as theological matters also preoccupy Nico Koopman, Vice-Rector for Social Impact, Transformation and Personnel at South Africa's Stellenbosch University. Cognizant of the urgency to develop the deep and transformative understandings that are needed to guide universities, churches, faith communities, civil society, political, economic and ecological life, public discourse, and opinion toward a society in which everyone can enjoy equal dignity, Koopman appreciates CTI 's environment as a safe space for experimentation and creativity.

"CTI facilitates hard work individually and hard work together," he says. "In this interwovenness of individuality and commonality, new insights and knowledge come to the fore. We can do the work in a heuristic fashion. Such lightness and risk-taking is crucial for new understandings and new knowledge."

Gascoigne also expresses his appreciation of the Center's environment. "I value both the freedom it gives to focus on a topic of shared interest, and the focus it enables by bringing together a group of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds and a shared interest in the topic."

Creative Freedom

Bringing such a group together, however, is no small matter. As economist Paul Oslington sees it, much depends on the quality and mix of scholars. Oslington is Professor of Economics and Theology at Alphacrucis College in Sydney, Australia, and has been involved in dialogue between economists and theologians for many years. "Those who want to participate in interdisciplinary conversation are a small and non-random sample of scholars in a discipline, and CTI has a fine record of attracting people," he observes.

At CTI, Oslington, whose books include The Theory of International Trade and Unemployment, Economics and Religion, Adam Smith as Theologian, and Political Economy at Natural Theology, plans to work on "Economic Thinking about Inequality in Christian Context." This will form part of a book he is writing for Harvard University Press. Economic Thinking in the Christian Tradition will examine the connections between Christian theology and the rise of economics as a discipline in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and also how economics has been shaped by and has shaped Christian thought. "With the increasing extent to which theologians on both sides of the inequality debate draw on economic arguments, deeper understanding of the relationship between Christian and economic thinking on inequality is important," says Oslington." There is no single simple answer to how theology relates to economics, and history helps us learn what is fruitful and unhelpful in particular contexts. Knowing about the history of our disciplines enriches the conversations."

The long history of money and Christian theological doctrine is the subject of Devin Singh's book, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West. The Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College has been working in this area for well over a decade and is currently looking at the economic concept of "debt."

The Language of Christian Concepts

The term, says Singh, "emerges in history and society as an economic notion, and it has since ballooned to capture, or colonize, other ways that we speak about obligation with a sense of fealty, loyalty, gratitude, gift." Instead, Singh argues that the term "debt" should be relegated to the economic sphere for something that is quantified with an explicit obligation to repay. "We tend to speak loosely about debt as a way to explain how we feel obligated to one another. I might say casually, I am in your debt. Or I feel a debt of gratitude to you. Part of what I'm suggesting is that we might be doing ourselves a disservice by letting 'debt' be this umbrella term to explain these kinds of relationships or senses of obligation."

Although he was born in California, Singh spent much of his early childhood in international contexts and describes his early influences as both interreligious and cross-cultural. His father is a Punjabi Sikh; his Anglo-American mother served in the Foreign Service and he lived with her in Cameroon and Morocco from the ages of three to ten. Early exposure to questions of economic development and poverty through his mother's work with USAID (US Agency for International Development) led him to study biology and then medicine until his own personal spiritual quest led him in another direction toward religion. "The questions that I looked at were connected to poverty, to religion and revolution, and development and social change." Given his background and interests, CTI’s workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality seems tailor-made for Singh and he is aware of the serendipity that brought him here.

Early influences also had an impact on the future career of Leslie Wingard, Associate Professor of English at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Wingard grew up in Westchester, Pennsylvania, where her father was a teacher, then a School Principal and then Superintendent of Schools. A born teacher herself, even at a young age, she looked for ways to "pull the potential out of students." Immediately before coming to CTI, Wingard was helping to develop Princeton University Graduate School's new Graduate Scholars Program for incoming first-generation, low-income, and otherwise under-represented graduate students.

Wingard's current project is a book, under contract with the University of Georgia Press, titled Being, Belonging. and Beyond: Redefining African American Christianity in the 21st Century. Inspired by the Kathleen Norris bestseller, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Wingard's book is geared toward a general audience. Unlike Norris's work, written in the form of memoir, Wingard's will use literature and visual culture to analyze three pairs of Christian concepts: grace and peace, communion and virtue, and sin and hell. By exploring their 20th- and 21st-century histories and their particular resonance and significance in African American Christianity and culture, Wingard will unpack the expansive meanings of these concepts.

Works-in-Progress

At the heart of CTI’s program are small group work-in-progress sessions that bring close scrutiny to an individual Member's work with comments requested and received in turn from colleagues who have read the work in advance. “I've benefited enormously from the conversations I've had with my colleagues here at CTI," says Singh, who has been prompted to think about "debt" in connection to race and treatment of racial minorities. Wingard, too, speaks of insights gained "To be able to talk to other CTI scholars is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. As a literature scholar it's really helping to develop my religious and secular vocabulary and other members have helped me to think more about the section of my work that is steeped in issues of economic inequality." Such sessions demonstrate what CTI Director William Storrar calls "thinking aloud together." During them, scholars invariably discover parallels between their respective understandings. Alternative interpretations and challenges are weighed. Scripture, among myriad resources, is often cited and anecdotal experiences often reinterpreted from new perspectives. Definitions rarely fail to elicit requests for further explanation. Subtle themes and nuances are drawn out, pre-suppositions exposed and queried, lines to follow and examples suggested.

It's a nitty-gritty process that deals with complexities, footnotes to footnotes," as Storrar puts it: an experimental approach of "what if" questions. It is also a process that demands openness to other interpretations and to unforeseen consequences that a scholar may not have anticipated. It is a painstaking process, to be sure, but one where cumulative effort takes the participants closer to the goal of informing the way people think and act.