Calvinism and Capitalism: Together Again?

Thinkers of that era grappled as well with an emotion that clearly preoccupies the young twenty- first century Dutch in the news story – anxiety. It lay at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, and of Calvinism in particular, and formed the basis of Max Weber’s understanding of the “Protestant work ethic.” Weber shrewdly perceived that the radical separation of the spiritual and material in the Re- formed tradition, a “disenchantening” of the world, left humanity worried that there was no discernable path to the divine. He saw the anxiety engendered by this shattering realization as transformative.

Signs of Salvation

Weber primarily looked to seventeenth-century Pu- ritans, but the story begins earlier. Following Martin Luther, John Calvin’s conversion experience in the 1530s arose from a deep sense of spiritual anxiety. Calvin never questioned his own election, though he chose not to write about it, and when dealing with parishioners wracked by doubt he directed them to the love of Christ. Outward actions and events – he was emphatic – could never be taken as signs of salvation. Pastorally, however, this proved deeply troubling to the Reformed faith, and Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, made greater accommodation by allowing human deeds to be at least partial indicators of God’s love.

The question of certainty and its attendant pastoral issues remained in tension within the Reformed churches as they emerged in the Netherlands, England, and New England. The matter was not abstract, but hotly contested in terms of how the Bible was to be read, of relations of the church to temporal authority, and of the Christian in the secular world. The Reformation principle of sola scriptura had thrown open the question of how the Bible should be interpreted. Calvin and the Reformed leaders sought to ground interpretation once more within the church, but in so doing they faced fierce criticism that they were doing little more than restoring Ro- man authority. The Reformation made Christianity’s sacred text a battleground over contesting claims to authority – another source of the new anxiety.

With regard to the state, the issues were no less momentous. Although Calvin did not anticipate the separation of church and state, there can be little doubt that in Geneva during his lifetime significant developments began the process of secularization. Drawing on the Augustinian model of the separation of the two kingdoms, Calvin passionately believed

that the church should be free in questions of doc- trine and discipline. He fiercely resisted what he regarded as the unwarranted intrusion of the magistrates in the central affairs of the church.

In Geneva, however, he lost this battle. The Swiss model of churches ruled over by secular authorities prevailed, and Calvin was bitterly disappointed. Nevertheless, what emerged from his thinking is highly significant for modernity. Calvin increasingly conceived of a state where the rulers were limited in order to ensure protection of religion. They were expected to preserve the circumstances in which true religion could be practised. This was the resolution of the devastating Thirty Years’ War in 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia essentially removed religion from the political equation.

Building on medieval models, Protestantism of the sixteenth century named and sanctified work and commerce as part of the godly life. Calvin viewed economics as a way of linking the life of the community with the divine will. In many respects his perspective was entirely practical: as the leading author in Geneva he was responsible for the growth of its printing industry. He involved himself in the commercial life of the city, while his brother Antoine 

Calvin argued for moderation in business ethics. Lending and profit-making should be permitted only insofar as they were useful, never simply to build personal wealth. 

controlled his financial affairs. Calvin understood that loans and lending were an essential part of the market and of Geneva’s place as a trading center at the heart of Europe. He approved of the charging of interest and rejected older notions of usury on the condition that it not be abused. The poor, for instance, should not be forced to pay interest.

This gathering tension in the relationship between the fruits of labor and vocation became explicit after Calvin’s death, during the golden age of the Dutch Republic. In his magisterial account, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Vintage, 1997), Simon Schama has related how the prosperous Calvinists of the Republic were deeply unsettled about their material success, seeing it less as a sign of election than as a form of reprobation. The enormous 

wealth generated by the Republic’s trading empire financed the nation’s protection against enemies. At the same time, however, it brought material temptations that could destroy the godly society from within. The result was an unresolved anxiety that, in Schama’s interpretation, deeply troubled any sense that capitalism and Protestantism were easy companions.

Revisiting Weber

This returns us to Max Weber’s famous account Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/5), in which he interpreted the Calvinism of the seventeenth-century as an important source of modern economic practice. The broad outlines of the argument are familiar, though more often than not crudely caricatured. Weber was a subtle and perceptive student of history, theology, and economics. He never argued for a simple causal relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. Rather he identified the ways in which Calvinism contained a “spirit” or “ethic” that made possible the rise of capitalism and granted it legitimacy.

In brief, he wrote that the God of Calvinism is remote and inscrutable, leaving humans uncertain of their salvation. He focused his analysis on the doctrine of predestination and its effects. It is salvation anxiety that drives the desire to pursue with rigor a secular calling in the world. The pastoral literature of English Puritans revealed to him the depth of this uncertainty. The unknowable nature of God pushed Calvinists to seek signs of election in the world, yet, as the Dutch of the seventeenth century experienced, believers did not allow themselves to enjoy the fruits of acquisition. To ease the tension between their piety and their prosperity, wealth was instead to be reinvested in society, promoting an ascetic discipline in which commerce could be con- verted to the service of God. This “ethical” form of capitalism was seen to be consonant with Reformed teaching. As Weber himself fully understood, such conduct was not limited to Protestant lands alone, but it was here, in particular the Anglo-American world, that he cast his gaze.

Weber was clear that by the nineteenth century the religious dimensions of this asceticism had vanished in the increasingly secular and godless soot of the Industrial Revolution. His contemporary, the Dutch minister and politician Abraham Kuyper, responded to this secularization by attempting to cre- ate a Christian society that could embrace diversity. It was this vision, delivered in the Stone Lectures in Princeton in 1898, that spurred the growth of Neo-Calvinism in the United States, a movement currently enjoying widespread renewal. This is a movement that takes many forms, but its guiding principle holds to Kuyper’s view that the whole of creation is sacred (including secular institutions, higher education, science, etc) in which Christians are called to participate. It is an attempt to embrace diversity while preserving the hope of creating a Christian society.

Protestant Work Ethic?

The concept of the Protestant work ethic, which Weber understood to be part of a complex historical process, has been vulgarized into a descriptor for our modern culture of “workaholism.” Stripped now of any real religious content, it imagines a connection between the endless pursuit of goals, the denigration of meaningful leisure, the acquisition of material goods, and some vestige of Protestant con- science. The result, as we know, and as the young businesspeople in Amsterdam realize, is a culture of unhappiness, self-doubt, and fear of failure.

In speaking of doubt, anxiety, and fear we seem to have come full circle. Perhaps, but this is be- cause we have not been attentive to what Weber and others have argued. What the Dutch business- women and men are seeking represents the aspirations of many in our world of Lehman Brothers and subprime mortgages – a connection of ethics with commerce. This cannot be achieved by a return to some sixteenth-century polity or any other supposed golden age; we live in multicultural, pluralistic societies. Christians need to reconsider their relation- ship to the secular, questioning whether this word, so often demonized in our vocabulary, represents something to be embraced.