Economic Issues and Religion

Most religious traditions have been profoundly ambivalent about economic issues. On the one hand, many religious teachings advocate a division of the spiritual and the material and the religious necessity of becoming removed from worldly life. On the other hand, most religious traditions teach the importance of moral responsibility for social matters. This requires the need for discipline and justice in economic affairs as in other areas of public life.

In the Hindu tradition, these contradictory attitudes are expressed by the differing moral and spiritual requirements for each of the four stages of life. While the last stage of life stresses ascetic withdrawal from the world to seek spiritual perfection, the householder stage of life requires responsible engagement in economic and social activities. The classic Hindu text, The Arthashashra, is a manual for correct behavior in the political and economic realm. In other religious traditions, the ambivalence toward economic issues is expressed in the moral restraints on economic activity that are prescribed in religious teachings.

There are several ways in which religious traditions have conceived the relationship between religion and economic matters:

• 1.
  Religion and economics are separate: This is the position taken by many Christians in their interpretation of Jesus' statement “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's” (Matthew 22:21). When asked about the requirement to pay taxes, Jesus showed his followers a coin that had the image of Caesar imprinted on it. Some Christians regard this as meaning that religion and economics are distinct from each other and that religion has no role in economic life.
• 2.
  Religion includes economic obligations: The sacred scriptures of most religious traditions include rules of behavior that touch on economic matters. Debt bondage from usury, for instance, is a form of wealth creation that is banned in Islam and discouraged in Judaism and Christianity. All three major monotheistic faith traditions recommend tithing for the purpose of charity, as well as enumerating inheritance laws that increase opportunity and prevent stagnation. Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions incorporate economic morality into their rules for daily life.
• 3.
  Religion provides values that affect economic behavior: Max Weber argues in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the rise of [Page 326]capitalism in Protestant countries is related to the value system of the society, which in turn is influenced by religion. Protestant values, for instance, require the faithful to work hard and responsibly but prohibit them from displaying their wealth in an ostentatious manner. With the creation of excess wealth that individuals are prevented from lavishing on themselves, the money is saved and reinvested in business, thus stimulating capitalist economic development.
• 4.
  Religion involves a kind of economic exchange: Marcel Mauss, a disciple of the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim, wrote in The Gift that religious rituals and practices involve a kind of reciprocity of gifts, offering sacrifices and prayers to God and receiving worldly and spiritual benefits in response. In another way of thinking about this interrelationship between religion and economics, religious teachings require humans to be responsible stewards of the world. Hence, the world's religions are concerned with securing and regulating the creation and circulation of worldly resources, including monetary wealth. Slavery is a special case of an economics issue that is also a profound issue of human rights. The practice extends to ancient history—Plato and Aristotle, for instance, agreed in The Republic and Politics, respectively, that human beings are inherently unequal and that, thus, slavery is legitimate. The early books of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) assume that slavery was a normal condition, and hence, for example, Deuteronomy 5:14 states that everyone is equal on the Sabbath; even slaves should not be forced to work. In ancient Hebrew society, every 50th year, some slaves were offered their freedom in accordance with the admonition given in Leviticus 25:10. In the name of Christianity, Theodora, the showgirl-turned-empress, outlawed slavery in the Roman Empire.

In recent centuries, all religious traditions agree that all human beings are equal before God, and largely as a result, slavery is illegal. When most Westerners think of slavery, they picture the transatlantic transport of Africans to the Americas chained in the holds of ships, and indeed, this form of slavery is illegal today. More broadly defined, slavery is the inability to change employers due to the weight of debt or the threat of physical violence. In that sense, slavery has never been more prevalent than in recent decades, with only a limited amount of religious protest against it. In 2001, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that human trafficking at its current growth rate will surpass drugs and guns as the world's largest illegal industry. Laws against underage prostitution or child sex tourism are inconsistently enforced around the world.

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