There is nothing un-Christian about the pursuit of money and power
Everyone has their own fate in their own hands: WELT columnist Thomas Mayer
Source: picture alliance / dpa / David Inderlied, Marc Comes / Flossbach von Storch / dpa
Protestant teaching was reconciled with the human thirst for power and economic success by the time of the Enlightenment at the latest. But now Christian hegemony has to assert itself against a Confucianism trimmed with Marxism
WITHFor world domination it takes a will to power. In his recently published book “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”, the economist Benjamin Friedman shows how will and power developed out of what Max Weber called “Protestant ethics” in Great Britain at the time of the Enlightenment and later exported to the USA became. For German readers who are in the Lutheran tradition, it is perhaps surprising that this development did not arise out of the confrontation with Catholicism, but with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
Following on from the teaching of Augustine, the French-Swiss reformer Calvin believed that the fate of all people was predetermined because of the biblical fall. Most would be damned, only a few chosen by God. Nobody on earth could change that.
Clergy of the Anglican Church, which originally adopted Calvin’s teachings, opposed this version of Protestantism. Unalterable damnation for ever is hardly compatible with the Christian image of man. Everyone has their own destiny in their own hands.
Self-love is also approved by Christ, provided it is not stronger than love for one’s neighbor. In this respect, there is nothing reprehensible about people pursuing their own self-interest in this context, because this creates benefit for everyone. This view not only inspired the original moral philosopher Adam Smith to write his work on the “Wealth of Nations”, the classic of economic science, but also laid the foundation for the development of a market economy and capitalism in Great Britain.
Hard-core Calvinists defied the zeitgeist and some of them, who were later called “Pilgrim Fathers”, emigrated to America. But even there, in the resistance to Calvinism, an understanding of Christianity arose that strongly emphasized the self-determination of people, especially in their economic activity. At the end of the 19th century, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embodied this understanding called the “gospel of wealth”.
In competition with this, the “Gospel of the Social” developed, which saw the need for social compensation organized by the state. The merger of the two gospels in the first half of the 20th century resulted not only in the American welfare state, which is rather frugal by European standards, but also in American politics’ sense of mission. The United States stood for the biblical “city on the hill” evoked by presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.
World domination dissolves when the means or will to power are lost. After two exhausting world wars, Great Britain ran out of funds in the middle of the last century. Today in the USA, self-doubts fed by identity politics are shredding the will. The gospels of wealth and social appear as instruments of oppression. This fits in with the chaotic withdrawal of military power from Afghanistan by an old president. The hegemon wavers because its self-confidence wavers. The Chinese challenger is not lacking in this. It can be doubted, however, that Marxist-disguised Confucianism is superior to the gospel of wealth and the social.
Thomas Mayer is the founding director of the Flossbach von Storch Research Institute.
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