The Shame of the Church; N. S. Ream

212 The Shame of the Church by NormanS. Ream I n 1948the World Council of Churches held its first assembly in Amsterdam, Holland. In Sec tion III of its concluding report it issued asear ing indictment of both Communism and capitalism in which the United States delegates heartily joined. Shortly thereafter, writing in The Christian. Century,the Reverend John C. Bennett, a promi nent American Protestant and a seminary profes sor,seeking to defend the Council's report, laid out four major indictments of capitalism: 1. Capitalism tends to subordinate what should be the primary task of any economy-the meeting of human needsto the economic advantages of those who have most power over its institutions. 2. Capitalism tends to produce serious inequal ities. 3. Capitalism has developed a practical form of materialism in Western nations in spite of their Christian background, for it has placed the great est emphasis upon success in making money.

4. Capitalism keeps people subject to a kind of fate which has taken the form of such social catas trophes as mass unemployment. These same charges have been laid at the feet of capitalism by prominent church leaders of nearly every major denomination for the past 70 years. I can remember in the 1930s hearing a prominent Methodist bishop, just returned from a guided tour of the Soviet Union, extolling the virtues of Communism over those of capitalism. In my sem inary days near Chicago, the then-conservative ChicagoTribune was consistently ridiculed and Dr. Ream, who served for many years as pastor of the First Congregational Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, lives in retirement with his wife in Estes Park, Colorado. scorned by my professors for its defense of the lim ited government, private property, free market way of economic life. Later on when I became a member of the social action committee of my denomination's state body, and it was proposed to endorse the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt had enthusiastically endorsed, I asked the other members of the committee how many had actually read the document. Not to my surprise, nary a one had done so. In their misguid ed idealism, they were supporting it because it sounded so good and were completely unaware of the traditional rights and privileges it would deny citizens of the capitalist United States.

Over and over again church leaders and church assemblies have passed resolutions that, in sub stance if not overtly, praised socialism and con demned capitalism. As a consequence, the Chris tian church and its leadership has made a large contribution to the denial of a higher standard of living and a larger measure of freedom to millions of men and women around the world. No PerfectSociety Let us not hesitate to admit that capitalism has its faults. Those faults, however, are due primarily to the fact that human beings are human and cap italism gives these fallible human beings the largest measure of freedom in whi.ch to exercise their fallibility.As the church itself says, "All men and women are sinners." Or as the Bible puts it, "There is none good but one, that is God." (Matthew 19:17) Those same fallible men and women exist in every society and will exist under any and every economic system. That they contin ue to exist and don't decrease in numbers is certainly due to a failure on the part of religion more than to a failure of the economic system.

There is no such thing as a perfect society, and there never will be. This has been acknowledged by the Christian church since its very beginning. Men and women, being sinners, frequently do what they ought not do and fail to do what they ought. Human beings are also partially ignorant, and thus make errors of judgment. The propensi ty to sin and the lack of perfection in knowledge and wisdom lead to an imperfect society. The most mankind can hope for is a society that is suc cessful in providing the greatest good for the greatest number. Without the slightest question, history and the millionsof men and women who have lived behind the Iron Curtain of socialism and Communism (the ultimate form of socialism) now testify to the indisputable fact that capitalism is far superior to socialism in providing the necessities of life to the masses, and in doing so without denying them their individual freedom.

But ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917, church leaders have tried to convince church members that socialism meets the moral and ethi cal demands of Christianity better than does capi talism. They have done so by constantly compar ing socialism as they believe it could be with capitalism as it is. In his recent excellent book, Capitalism,Arthur Seldon vividly points out that long ago we should have been comparing capital ism as it could be with socialism as it has actually operated in those parts of the world where it was enthusiastically adopted and is now being equally enthusiastically rejected. The clergy who have praised and advocated socialism through the years have done so, for the most part, without any real knowledge or under standing of economics and political science. They have been well-intentioned and misguided ideal ists who have looked at the end desired and failed to examine the means and calculate the costs.They didn't heed their Master's admonition in His para ble of the builder. (Luke 14:28ff)The clergy have been guilty of what F. A. Hayek calls "the fatal conceit." They were certain they knew what was good for society and for each member of it, and when one is in that position it is difficultnot to seek to impose one's ideas and theories on all.

As already pointed out, the great weakness in the pro-socialist clergy's argument has been the 213 comparison of socialism as an idealistic theory with capitalism as an operating economic system. It would be far more appropriate to compare socialism as it has operated in the Soviet Union with capitalism as it has operated in the United States. That, of course, would immediately and obviously lose the argument for socialism. Social ism only "works" in theory and can work in no other way for it never takes into account human nature. It takes no notice of men and women's burning desire for freedom, their inborn compet itive nature, their desire to get ahead, to prosper and succeed, which the church itself has praised in urging them to use their talents and abilities to the full. For seven decades many, if not most, leaders of the major Christian denominations have advocat ed a system that is now seen by the entire world as an economic and political disaster. It has robbed millions of their freedom. It has denied them a higher standard of living that could have been theirs. This is the shame of the Christian Church.

Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism,Social ism and Democracy that "... the impressive eco nomic and the still more impressive cultural achievements of the capitalist order ... could lift poverty from the shoulders of mankind." Church leaders however preferred blind faith in an abstract idea over recognition of the positive ben efits of capitalism. AnsweringCapitalism'sCritics Let us now return to the indictment of the World Council of Churches~nd the criticisms of Professor Bennett, which are prototypical of all those made since. The first charge is that capitalism does not devote itself to the primary responsibility of any economic system, which is the meeting of human needs. If economics is a science requiring a sub tlety of understanding, then it is obvious that any one making such a charge doesn't understand capitalism. When I was a freshman in college, I came across Edward Bellamy's paean to socialism, Looking.

Backward.I recall urging my father, a small busi nessman of that day, to read the work, and gave it my own fulsome praise. My wise and experienced father responded·by saying something like, "You can say things in books you can't put into practice 214 THE FREEMAN • JUNE 1991 in the real world." Many clergymen, however, have had little or no experience in the real world and, like politicians, look only at promised results, ignoring the tremendous costs of implementation. Men and women will differ in their definitions of needs and luxuries, but no intelligent entrepreneur would go into business without being reasonably certain that he wasresponding to a felt need for his product. Thousands of business es fail every year precisely because the owners miscalculated and discovered too late an absence of need. Ask those who have lived in the Eastern dicta torships if the socialist economies met their needs.

It is primarily because there are no free markets in those countries, and no private property, that socialism does not and cannot meet human needs in the same abundant fashion as can a free econo my. Again it is a case of left-leaning church leaders looking at socialist promises and ignoring capital ist results. The second indictment has been that capitalism tends to produce serious inequalities in society. There are indeed inequalities in any society. The primary blame, however, needs to be laid at the feet of God. The framers of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, there is no sense in which all men and women are created equal. If, as Christianity demands, we use all our talents and abilities to the full, we will become less and less equal. God has greatly blessed some, while others seem terribly deprived. Egalitarianism plays well on the lips of politi cians and the clergy, but in real life its goals are seldom if ever achiev~d. The MayflowerPilgrims tried it and gave it up as unproductive. Wrote William Bradford of the experience, "For this community ... was found to breed much·confu sion and discontent and retard much employ ment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." It destroyed the will of the ambitious, and encouraged the lazy and indifferent to con tinue being so. Socialism equalizes by bringing everyone down to the lowest common denomi nator (except the ruling class), while capitalism equalizes by tending to raise the living standards of all.

There may indeed bea sense in whichcapitalism promotes a form of materialism by making avail able to consumers so much more than socialism ever can. Nevertheless there is akind of "materialismof misery" that grips those who have very lit tle available to them and who must wait in long lines in order, they hope, to get that little. The "materialism of plenty" would be preferred by the vast majority of people in every country. But rather than being the result of capitalism, one could with equal verity claim that it was the result of politicians undertaking to convince the voters they deserved all of these "things" by right and promising to provide them in return for their votes. The church and the clergy also deserve part of the blame for their failure to effectively teach their people how to assess values. The final charge is that capitalism subjects cit izens to such social catastrophes as mass unem ployment. That is the only "social catastrophe"

mentioned, and one has difficulty thinking of any others that could be laid at the feet of capitalism. Let us recall that there was no mass unemploy ment in Nazi Germany. There is, allegedly, no unemployment in the Soviet Union. But again one must count the cost: no personal liberty, no free markets, constant scarcities of consumer goods. The Soviet Union can make these claims, but it is the only industrial power in the world whose living standards are declining, the only such country where the life expectancy has been falling and infant mortality rates are rising. So much for the benefits of "full employment" under socialism. Put against the criticismsof church and clergy is one irrefutable consideration: capitalism has produced more to meet human needs and aspira tions than any other system known to mankind, and it has done so largely without depriving indi viduals of their personal freedom. One must insert the word "largely" because· even in this country much of the progress made by capitalism has been in spite of the interference of politicians, which results in a loss of freedom. Capitalism has proven itself in practice. Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried.

Capitalism is the morally and ethically superi~r system, and as such should have been supported, not condemned, by church and clergy. Had the church and clergy supported capitalism, millions of men and women around the world might well have known a larger liberty and a greater happi ness. Even today, however, church leaders follow the lead of politicians and power-seekers, and while millions of people around the world reject socialism,they continue to embrace it. 0 215 Vive la Difference by RidgwayK. Foley,Jr. C omparisons-purported or real-are dan gerous. Superficial arguments can seem so plausible.Sincehuman beings dislikestrain and contention, we tend to accept the shallow or one-dimensional assertion without question. A common example, which appears in many manifestations, is the unflattering comparison of public expenditures by the United States and other nations for various social welfare programs.