The Republican Party has championed conservative social policy and free trade since the Ronald Reagan administration. What many Republicans fail to recognize, however, is that these two commitments mix about as well as oil and water.
How did these values come to sit side by side on every GOP yard sign and television spot? The answer lies in the work of William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review. Following a half century of ascendant progressivism from both Democrats and Republicans, Buckley understood that postwar America would need to contend with the growing threat of Marxism and resist the rising tide of socialism.
Through political skill and cultural influence, he helped forge what came to be known as fusionism, an alliance between religious, pro-family conservatives and free-market libertarians. The one thing these two camps had in common was a shared opposition to communism. By the time Ronald Reagan entered the White House as the face of anti-communism, fusionism had effectively become the “conservative” platform in the United States.
In truth, free market economics and the family have always been strange bedfellows. Free market economics is, in fact, liberal anthropology applied to the science of economics. If all humans are self-interested actors seeking personal gain, in a state of war against everyone else, as described by Thomas Hobbes, then intense competition can be harnessed to generate unprecedented wealth and prosperity. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations.”
Two things are true. If humans do behave as though their existence is a war of all against all, this will generate competition and growth in GDP. But if they behave this way, “all” really means all, extending to family and friends. This is why Hobbes describes even the relationship between mother and child in stark contractual terms, and why John Locke suggests that parental duties arise from obligation and future dependence rather than love.
If one is to really adopt these beliefs, what is to stop us from reducing all relationships to economic exchange? If you think about it, a mother who is not charging her baby for breast milk could be seen as presenting a kind of market inefficiency. There is value being left on the table. Taken to their logical conclusion, these ideas produce a bleak and impoverished vision of social life.
The inherent tension between prioritizing family, community, and solidarity and an economic system that presupposes and often produces competition helps explain many of the fractures within the conservative movement today. What James Lindsay has termed the “woke right” can be understood, in part, as an attempt to retain social conservatism while rejecting aspects of classical liberal economics, something that earlier European conservatives might have simply called conservatism.
So what then? Should pro-family Christians abandon the market and become socialists?
There is, thankfully, a third way that avoids the evils of both championing markets but recognizes that they must be ordered toward the common good and animated by love of neighbor. This way of thinking also warns that a free market populated by purely self-interested actors will tend to exploit, dominate, and advantage the strong over the weak. If all we are is self-interested creatures at war with one another, we would be foolish not to behave that way. This is how monopolies form and why so many ordinary Americans find themselves locked out of owning homes or businesses.
“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” author G. K. Chesterton noted. In a world where everything is a competition, eventually someone wins, and everyone else loses. Instead, God entrusts property to private owners but expects stewardship, use that is not merely self-interested but directed toward the good of all.
At the risk of being reductive, a truly Christian approach to economics holds that private property is good, and markets and trade are good, but they are only truly good when wielded by people formed by virtue and oriented toward love of neighbor.
The lesson is clear. Free markets are only a good idea insofar as the people participating in them love one another. In other words, free markets function best when grace undergirds economics. Christians, in the ever-evolving religious landscape of America, would do well to keep this in mind.
Elijah Newcomb is a graduate of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He aspires to advance and defend religious liberty in public life.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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