From the Associated Baptist Press –

Since the origin of Christian social ethics in the late 19th century as an Anglo-American academic-ecclesial discipline, economic problems have been at the center of our profession’s concerns. Christian ethics was born during the days in which the contrast between the vast prosperity of the industrial barons and the vast suffering of those who worked for them became unbearable. The moral concerns that drove early Christian ethics helped contribute to the regulation of industrialization’s excesses during the Progressive Era. The same social compassion supported the creation of a modest social safety net during the Depression and New Deal era.

As a Christian ethicist, I stand in a tradition that both rejected communism as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and recognized very early that the only way capitalism would or should survive was through legal regulation of its worst excesses. I don’t say moral regulation because, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in his formative work Moral Man and Immoral Society, huge group entities and social structures do not respond to moral suasion. If you are asking a corporation — or a group of corporations, or an entire economic structure — voluntarily to act in such a way as to limit profit, you will fail. You will have to coerce it to do so under the power of law or some other countervailing power, such as the organization of labor.

First, you should go read the whole essay. Gushee posts only after much thought, and since a Christian perspective on business ethics is much rarer than I would have believed, this is important writing.

Second, he is right that large economic units only react to force. The idea of a self regulating marketplace is only partially a reality at the best of times.

James Pilant