Stanley Fish on Faith and Finance

As the financial crisis gains an ever tighter hold on our pocketbooks and thoughts, one of the questions that arises is where faith, for those who claim it, might intersect with finance.

There are some obvious if regrettable answers that are routinely offered, two of which are worth mentioning here.

On Oprah Winfrey today, the billionaire hostess was offering one such answer: advice on simplifying our lives as a virtuous response to tough economic times. This is all very good, but of course it might sound a bit paternalistic to those in the trenches of real economic hardship. Downsizing is a discipline that usually comes easier to those who have first managed to upsize.

A second answer is the desire on the part of many to see an approaching economic cataclysm as a chance to return to a world of Little House on the Prairie or The Waltons, 70s television depictions of families and communities pulling together in the face of scarcity and need. However, the result of these challenges is just as often family breakdown, violence, substance abuse and myriad other expressions of despair. And the strongest believers in the virtues of privation are again usually those least hurt by it.

The larger problem is that both of these assume an ability to forge our own answers or solutions to financial adversity. In a brief essay on his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish engages this from a more original and I believe much more productive angle. He contrasts what he calls "a Protestant linking of thrift and virtue", the view that informs the two answers described above, with a more tragic, but ultimately redemptive view of our inability to avoid or transcend our ultimate bankruptcy, financial or otherwise, the recognition of which brings us to God and so to Grace.

One view, he argues, sees us redeemed financially by our own efforts. It is as if in exercising our strength and virtue we are doing God's work ourselves. And our faith is mostly in ourselves, whether individually or collectively. The other sees us as humbled by our inability to redeem ourselves, financially or otherwise and thus unable to rely on ourselves. It is here, says Fish, that many turn to God. And this, he says, is the beginning of wisdom.

I would suggest that, whatever our conscious motivations or rationalizations, the first path is always one of idolatry -- worshiping our ability, virtue and financial resources. The second offers the only real possiblity for faith and thus for real redemption. Admitting our powerlessness, we look beyond ourselves.

This, of course, is the great insight of the recovery movement that first emerged with Alcoholics Anonymous in the midst of the despair of the great depression of the 1930s. But when all of the rhetoric and rationalization of religion is stripped away, this is also the message of the Gospel. We are bankrupt, though some experience the pain of this more than others. And we are more often than not blind to this. Yet any belief in and reliance on our own ability and virtue proves to be worse than useless -- it hides from us the true nature of our situation. It alienates us from each other. And in doing so it alienates us from God.

Thus in this crisis, faith in our individual strengths or the collective capacities of our institutions is a blind alley. Bringing this back to questions of economics, Fish closes out his argument as follows:

This economy, in which funds depleted are endlessly replenished, is underwritten by a power so great and beneficent that it turns failures into treasures. Some economists identify that power as the market and ask us to have faith in it. God might be a better candidate.