Religion Of The Rich
By George Monbiot
10 November, 2004
by
Monbiot.com
"If Bush wins," the US writer
Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism
is possible in the United States."(1) Blind faith in a leader,
she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political
weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She's wrong. So
is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as "soft
fascism" in the Guardian last month.(2) So is the endless traffic
on the internet. In The
Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it
as "... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory
cults of unity, energy and purity".(3) It is hard to read Republican
politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not
come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something
which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not
to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition
of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope
of confronting it.
Puritanism is perhaps
the least-understood of any political movement in European history.
In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial,
obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception
which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption
of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic
transformation.
In England in the
first half of the 17th Century, the remnants of the feudal state performed
a role analagous to that of social democracy in the second half of the
20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy.
But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders.
As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926),
Charles 1st sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange
and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who
refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief
to the poor.(4)
But this model was
no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the rise of commercial
companies, no longer local, but international" led in Europe to
"a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before"
and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of
the Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was swept
forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than
of industry". The kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets
dancing on wires" held by the financiers.(5)
In England, the
dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth
by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing ("enclosing")
the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for
land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated
financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all
the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.
All this was furiously
denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first
Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and
punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th Century
among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn't
stand a chance.
Puritanism was primarily
the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money
lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the
old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism,
in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification
of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans
forged a new theology.
At its heart was
an "idealization of personal responsibility" before God. This
rapidly turned into a theory of individual rights in which
"the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly
reversed". By the mid-17th Century, most English Puritans saw in
poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral
failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion"
but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.(6)
It wasn't hard for
them to make this leap. If the Christian life, as idealised by both
Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual
soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by
the medieval Church, becomes redundant. Individualism in religion
led "to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality
to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric".(7)
To this the late
Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling
with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul,"
the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care
and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far
as it will go."(8) Success in business became a sign of spiritual
grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steeles words,
that God has blessed his trade. The next step follows automatically.
The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smiths invisible
hand by more than a century, when he claimed that the advancement
of private persons will be the advantage of the public.(9) By
private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily
destroying the advancement of everyone else.
Tawney describes
the Puritans as early converts to administrative nihilism:
the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs,"
they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered
by the intrusions of an antiquated morality".(10) They owed nothing
to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation,
which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual
dissolution, divorcing them from God.
Of course, the Puritans
differed from Bushs people in that they worshipped production
but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same
disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed
that the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered.
Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.
There were some,
such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original
spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit
of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly
impoverished lower classes.
Ronan Bennett's
excellent new novel, Havoc in Its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution
in the 1630s, has the force of a parable.(11) An obsession with terrorists
(in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the
vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public
support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters
could have walked out of Bushs America.
So why has this
ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the
elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying
ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology
has to be a religious one. Bushs government is forced back to
the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to
understand what its up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but
to the 1630s.
References:
1. Quoted by Quico
Alsedo, 27th October 2004. El Fascismo Es Posible Si Gana Bush
Dice Probst Salomon(sic). El Mundo.
2. Richard Sennett,
23rd October 2004. The Age of Anxiety. The Guardian.
3. Robert O. Paxton,
2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
4. RH Tawney, 1998
edition. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Transaction publishers,
New Brunswick.
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. Richard Steele,
1684. The Tradesmans Calling. Cited in Tawney (ibid).
9. Joseph Lee, cited
in Tawney, ibid.
10. Tawney, ibid.
11. Ronan Bennett,
2004. Havoc in its Third Year. Bloomsbury, London.
George Monbiot is
the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a Manifesto
for a New World Order and Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain;
as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed
and No Mans Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
© 2004 Monbiot.com