Religion and economy as universalist cultures

Abstract

I have been wrestling with the core idea behind this article ever since, while preparing for a colloquium, I read an article by an economist who claimed that “economics is a theology”, and added that Marx, Hayek and Keynes were “the most influential theologians of the twentieth century”. By comparing the expansion of the great universalist monotheisms with that of the modern market economy, I slowly realised that the parallelism between religion and economy is more than an idle exercise in analogy. Through the universalistic expansionism that drives them, and the language with which they invade and describe the world, they both permeate our lives and serve as the somatic infrastructure of the societies they have conquered. It is no accident that the problem of poverty and its theological value has generated schisms within the Catholic Church. This is an atavistic question and should come as no surprise, because poverty is related to both economics and theology.