Church Investors Conference
June 2013
Rt Revd Michal Doe
Chair, Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility
Thank you very much for the invitation to offer the keynote speech at this Church
Investors’ Group conference.
What I want to try to do is to set the concerns of this
conference in a wider, Christian context.
My background is that for ten years I was the (first) Bishop of Swindon, an old railway
town seeking to re-invent itself through high-tech industry and as headquarters to
international companies. And from there I went to head up the Anglican mission agency
USPG, in partnership with over thirty countries around the world, including some of the
poorest ones in Africa and Asia.
And now, in so-called retirement, one of the things I do is to chair the Ecumenical
Council for Corporate Responsibility, concerned with how we apply faith and ethics to
matters of investment, business, and economic life. We engage in research – for
example on Banking, on the hospitality industry and human trafficking, on mining
companies and “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” by indigenous communities. We
are increasingly involved in education, on the relationship between Christian
discipleship and financial responsibility, encouraging what we call Ethical Money
Churches, local congregations which take seriously what it means to live out our
Christian faith in all aspects of life, including our finances.
But let me start a little further back.
The careers master at my Grammar School also taught economics. In fact he was the
Economics Department! The joke was that - whatever career you were considering when you went to see him about what A levels you should do in the Sixth Form, he
always had an (undeclared) interest. So when I told him that I wanted, “to go into the
Church” (as we used to say in those days), and I planned to do R.E. and English
Literature, he said “And have you thought about.... Economics ?”. At the time I found
this funny, but now, of course, I realise that the joke was on me. Because, seriously,
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can you be a good Christian without some understanding of economics?
That’s my
first question this morning, and I have three questions in all.
Can you be a good Christian, or at least can you be a competent Church Leader,
if you do not understand economics?
If being a Christian is about more than worship and prayer (important though they are),
if Christian discipleship is about more than personal witness and charitable activity
(though, again, these are important), is it possible to be a Christian, and a Christian
leader, in our kind of world, without understanding how economic systems work, what
they deliver, and the impact that has on the whole of society? Because only then can
we look at how wealth is both created and distributed and ask, where is the Kingdom of
God to be glimpsed, and where do we see it being denied? Where are the
opportunities to build the kind of world which God wants, and what is standing in the
way? Where in the financial world you inhabit is the saving activity of God in Christ,
and, in the more graphic language of St Paul, where are the “principalities and powers”
which would deny it?
That’s why your work and why organisations like ECCR are important. It’s partly about
how we as Church engage with these systems through the investment of our own
money, corporately and individually. But it goes much wider and deeper than that. We
are talking what is at the core of our faith about what God is doing (the “missio dei”) and
how he calls us to respond. Hence my first question: is it possible to be a good
Christian, or at least a good Church Leader, without understanding economics?
My second question turns that on its head.
Can you be a good economist without some kind of religious faith or at least
some commitment to a defined morality?
Now, many would say that that is a ridiculous question. Economics is a science, an
empirically driven activity. Those who engage in it may bring their own personal faith
and morality, determining how they as individuals work within it. That may raise issues
of trust, good practice, and even reward. But the activity itself is a value-free.
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I wonder.
In many ways that was the belief of the neo-liberals in the days of Thatcher
and Reagan, although when they claimed to be the inheritors of Adam Smith they were
ignoring what he actually believed about social equality. The larger irony was of course
that far from secularising economics the monetarists actually re-enchanted it, and the
market itself became deified. And for many, what happened in the economic collapse
of 2008 was that much of what this system was supposed to have created turned out to
have no substance at all. The idol, as Isaiah would tell us, is only man-made wood.
My question is therefore about how in economics, as a social and political activity as
much as a financial one, issues of faith and morality emerge and our met. For they are
certainly there:
in the creation of wealth, and whether or not it is real;
in the use of wealth, so that it might produce what is needed most in terms of food,
homes, and so on;
and therefore in the distribution of wealth, whether we are committed to anything more
than making the rich richer in the hope, usually forlorn, that some more might trickle
down to the people below.
And in all of that, the fundamental ecological question as to whether we do it in such a
way that future generations might still have a planet to live on.
Let me refer to two people who deserve to be heard in this area. The first is the
Harvard philosopher, Michael Sandell. In “What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of
Markets” he says that there is an allure to the idea of Economics as a value-free
science, but it is impossible to defend. Working from his Jewish roots his major
concern is the wider application of market thinking: "The question of markets is really a
question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is
up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and
money cannot buy?" But he also applies it to economics itself: “When the banking
crisis happened, the notion that we could trust everything to markets seemed to have
run its course. The most surprising outcome was that we wanted to try to restore the
same trust as quickly as possible”.
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The other person who I want to bring into this question is Pope Francis, who has a
much more radical assessment, calling for ethical reform of the financial system to
create a more humane society. "We have created new idols," he has said in a recent
speech. "The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in
the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any
truly humane goal." Attacking unchecked capitalism, he says that the growing
inequality in society is caused by "ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of
markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are
themselves charged with providing for the common good". "A new, invisible and at
times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irredeemably imposes its
own laws and rules." He says, "Money has to serve, not to rule."
The belated attempts at the G8 and elsewhere to increase corporate transparency, limit
off-shore tax havens, and regulate casino banking, are all in the right direction.
But we
have come a very long way from what the Church used to teach about Usury, about the
making of money from money rather than from work. There are fundamental questions
which Christians and others need to ask, not just about where we invest our money, but
about the morality of the system itself.
Now you may already be thinking that all of this has little to do with the real world in
which you as investors have to operate, in which case you will really be turned off by my
third and final question: Can we survive without a belief in Cross and Resurrection?
What does the Christian belief in Death and New Life have to say to us?
Some Christians, maybe of the more Calvinist kind, speak a lot about human failure:
people must do their best but we cannot expect a great deal. In a sinful world our manmade systems must do what they can for as many people as they can, but the scope is
limited. We should seek to reduce the number of victims and those left behind, but we
cannot avoid it altogether. There is no alternative to Austerity, and in such times the
only way to create wealth is to reduce the income of the poor. That’s just the way the
world is.
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If that’s the Death argument, on the other side there is a far too rosy and easy idea of
Resurrection. It’s there in the heresy called Pelagianism. It’s there in much of the
theology behind the Social Gospel. It prefers an optimistic assessment of human
progress rather than too much emphasis on Sin. It believes that, somehow, things can
always get better.
It seems to me that the Christian Gospel proclaims Death and Resurrection in a very
different way.
It says, Yes, there is Sin and Death, and the first thing we have to do is to face up to it.
It also says, Yes, God does promise Resurrection, but not as an escape, or an easy
way out. Transformation is possible, but only through sacrifice and suffering. You
cannot have Easter without Good Friday, and even then the hands that bless still bear
the marks of the nails.
But we really don’t want to go there. When the market economy was brought to its
knees in the 1930s, and again five years ago, we had the opportunity to look at what we
had created and see the signs of death: death in trust and community within our
nations, death (literally) to children all around the world, and the real threat of death to
our home planet. Instead we have tried to carry on as usual, and governments around
the world seem ready to make the same mistakes. It may be that Climate Change will
bring us to our senses, or it may simply increase our determination to defend what we
have, probably with increasing violence.
Maybe some us have been here before.
I started with a personal story, and bear with
me if finish with one. I’m here because I was born in 1947, part of the post-War baby
boom. The Bishop of London has recently criticised this generation, now in our 60’s, for
absorbing more than our fair share of taxpayers’ money. But we were the children of
the post-War settlement. Like many others I would not be here were it not for the
National Health Service, the provision of social housing, the 1944 Education Act, and
six years of totally free Higher Education.
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Those radical changes in the 1940s reflected a nation which wanted a different future,
and internationally similar movements were going on: from Western imperialism to
national self-determination, and the creation of the United Nations, the European
Community, and indeed the World Council of Churches. Here in the UK it was a
movement to leave behind not just War but a society based on class and great
differences in wealth. The nation rejected even Churchill himself. But since then
Thatcher, followed by New Labour, has undone so much of what had been achieved,
often under the pretence of modernisation and meritocracy. Looking round now you
might well think that feudalism has returned in the growing distance between the very
rich and the increasing poor, or the way that legal aid which was brought in to give the
poor equal access to the law is now being whittled away. Etonians once again run the
Government. And globally, Imperialism has reappeared in the shape of trans-national
companies.
You make think all of this is nostalgic and over-romantic, but my point is this. Every
crisis is an opportunity to acknowledge death and seek resurrection. There was
something of that after the War. Our current economic crisis could also be such an
opportunity, but it would seem that we are afraid, or perhaps we just lack the faith, to
embrace it. The signs of death are all around – the unreality of so much that we create,
our failure to share what we have more justly, the dying pains of planet earth. But only
if we start to die to ourselves will we begin to see God’s Resurrection.
My friends, I wish you well in your work. There are so many practical, and difficult,
things to be done.
But, as I hope I have suggested in this inadequate contribution,
there are also much larger, deeper issues on which people of faith cannot turn their
back.
Bishop Michael would appreciate any feedback, including critical comment, at michaeldd@btinternet.com
His latest book, “Saving Power – the Mission of God and the Anglican Communion” is published by SPCK
For more on the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility, go to http://www.eccr.org.uk/
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