Study group - Week Three

Not Short Of A Pound

My maternal grandmother, born in 1882, grew up by the River Medlock in Ancoats, Manchester, one of the city’s earliest industrial areas. Local housing consisted almost entirely of small terraced properties. People worked very hard for long hours and were paid low wages. Employment was precarious in this polluted district and ‘getting the sack’ was something everyone feared. As a child Grandma only ever had the simplest of Christmas presents; an apple and an orange in one of her ordinary stockings. Even in later life, when her circumstances were generously secure, she never expected nor sought any kind of luxury.

We now no longer live in that world. In the West everybody aspires to an income which allows the purchase of luxury items and a freedom of choice through spending power which their forebears would have associated with the upper classes, really quite small groups of the wealthy, elite and fortunate.

With these changes we have developed a consumer economy, one that plans for a great deal of retail purchasing activity and encourages the provision of goods and services to meet such an extensive public demand. We live in a world extremely well supplied with cars, white goods, clothes, electronic equipment and games, sports kit and an ever-expanding range of children’s toys. For all this, much money is required and where money is lacking, credit serves instead. Indeed this nation is notorious for its levels of borrowing. If once we were a nation of shopkeepers, we are now a nation of customers and credit-card owners.

Meeting this demand, and, indeed, constantly creating this demand, is a wide range of designers and manufacturers. The really powerful bodies these days, it seems, are not governments or public authorities, but corporations and billionaire business people. It appears that money rules everywhere we look.

It is against this background that the Archbishop of Canterbury has written his recent book, Dethroning Mammon. He argues very successfully that the process of acquisition and ownership, the business of manufacturing items to sell and advertising to accelerate their sales has filled our culture and led to the marginalisation of moral and genuinely creative concerns; most significantly, it has eclipsed the spiritual. Without realising, we have become worshippers of Mammon, mere slaves of objects; worldliness and greed reign everywhere around us. As we rush to buy, God is left outside the store.

There are individual Christian people who have not been drawn into this new world of wealth, but they are not the norm. Those who enter a religious order or volunteer for long periods of service caring for the world’s poor do not predominate. Most of us fit only too naturally into the comforts of the First World. How far does this put us from the vision of the Kingdom of God revealed in Holy Scripture?

Jesus of Nazareth owned nothing but what he stood up in and even that was taken from him without resistance. He expected his followers to abandon everything - and everybody - to be with him in his public work. Even natural and good affection was to count for nothing beside loyalty to God’s work. The background to this hard standard was his teaching that time was very short. The end would come soon, with the fulfilment of all things consequent upon his return in glory. For this short and intense period, all secondary things, all ordinary considerations, must yield absolutely to personal loyalty to himself as the incarnation of God’s will.

Many followed obediently and Acts describes the foundation of  a form of communalism amongst Christians which ruled out personal ownership and secular aspiration. St.Paul appears to have come across this phenomenon in at least some of his churches and he begins by concurring with this ‘mind of urgency and single concern’. He recommends celibacy and utter commitment as the ideal, himself rejecting marriage and family bonds.

His later letters, however, are less clear on this subject and by the end of the first century Christians, whilst still revering the early single-minded ideal, were making provision for family life and faith together, were not normally living communally and were beginning to be more open about the use of the resources they had. The Second Coming had not occurred and daily life had be lived on sustainable and consistent principles which took into full account the whole range of developing Christian moral perceptions.

It became accepted that resources could be privately owned by a Christian, but that with ownership must come a deep duty of care towards others. The question turned from that of divesting oneself of property to making responsible decisions about how a significant part of it could be used for others in need. Whilst devout family life and personal ownership were certainly growing, there also came a move to the desert and a new asceticism; a discipline which lived and celebrated simplicity and single-purpose.

So a ‘harder’ and an ‘easier’ form of Christian living developed and these persisted through the Middle Ages in parallel. The Reformation brought a new and considerable range of responses to the question of money and possessions. One result was the founding of lay communities in the United States like the Amish, who re-established something of the original lay communalism. In the United States also, a movement has developed which links worldly success very closely with God’s favour. The relationship between possessions and faith seems to have the character of a shifting kaleidoscope image, where the same components spin and turn into new configurations.

Where, then, ought we to stand? There can be no doubt that the general observations of Archbishop Welby are correct. We have bowed down to Mammon far too often. Yet it is not evident that we should abandon the modern achievements in health and welfare, for instance, which are difficult to detach from the economic activity of ‘developed’ countries. At the same time, the policies of these same countries may well be a factor in diminishing the well-being of other peoples. Are we at all able to make meaningful moral choices here?Would we be better off without electronics or sophisticated transport? What would the world’s now enormous population do if it did not work, produce and consume? Could we and should we try to influence the economy of the world or our country politically? What happens if we withdraw form exercising such influence, even in our vote?

What is certain is that we are called to love God and love our neighbour. Whatever resources we have should be used generously for these priorities. As to the larger picture, intention and outcome are often quite remote from each other. Could there ever be a Christian economic policy? What would a fully Christian view of money, possessions and power look like? Perhaps those in the group who know more about economics might be able to help us? Or should we ask those who have little?

Fr. Alan