Sons of the Covenant: Puritans, Capitalism, and a Review of 'The End of Work'

In the work of John Hughes' opus, the Anglo-Catholic priest who tragically died young, The End of Work (2007), an attempt is made to offer a Christian critique of capitalism. Hughes is far superior to many of the hackneyed attempts made by the intellectual exhausted Radical Orthodoxy, or its Leftwing Catholic imitators (Cavanaugh and McCarrick). Hughes wants to offer a Weberian (in the best sense) account of how capitalism developed its own theological pedigree and tradition. The end result was a collapse of ends into means, a means as an end, where the profit motive became an accumulative drive without final horizon.

Per the Weberian thesis, Protestantism, particularly Calvinism, produced the "spirit" of Capitalism. Weber (nor Hughes, as a good reader of Weber) was not saying that Capitalism emerged from Protestantism. There were plenty of medieval capitalists (like the Fuggers), let alone ancient capitalists in Rome and China. The point was that these structural arrangements lacked any explicit religious or ideological justification. The major change appeared in the Reformation. Against medieval Catholicism's hierarchy of norms, for the religious and for the secular/lay, the Reformers wanted a spiritual leveling. The life of perfection did not require a separation out from the hurly burly of life, whether that was in the town or on the farm. Instead, the life of the lay people was in every way committed to glorifying God as the life of the monk. The Reformers did not want to abolish the monastery as much as release its energy into secular life. Every monk was to become a lay person (typified in monks, like Luther, taking wives) and every lay person was to be a monk. Luther's doctrine mainly applied to rural Saxony and other German areas. However the Reformed spread much strongly in the towns and cities, which had a commercial bent. This meant the life of production was transformed into a form of sanctity. How could God be glorified through trade and coin-counting, which bore many marks of reproach? The answer, for these "worldly ascetics" was frugality and gain for the glory of God. Wealth was not to be indulged in, but utilized for expansion. Weber was quite clear that this Calvinist doctrine was typified in Richard Baxter and that his influence spread mainly among the petit-bourgeoisie which populated the cities of the English empire. Thus, despite his otherwise libertine appetites and aptitudes, Benjamin Franklin exhibited this same Baxterian trait. However, without the puritanical God of experimental predestinated piety, Franklin had immanentized and secularized this doctrine for the rising Deistic class of leaders within England's American colonies. The end result was the justifying ideology of capitalism which saw gain as its own reward, shoveled back into the company for endless growth.

At the level of historical theology, Weber's thesis can be criticized in how he pegged Calvinism. Baxter was, if anything, a post-puritan and a heterodox Calvinist. Nevertheless, Weber was correct in how Baxterian presbyterianism developed and influenced Protestant Christians throughout the Anglophone world. Nevertheless, in Hughes' capable hands, Weber's thesis is put more firmly within a historicized context of criticism of capitalism. Hughes' thesis is that the democratized aristocratic virtue of leisure promoted by Christianity had been overturned. Rather than the rest of the Christian before the kindly presence of God, the Christian was turned into his work. The irony is palpable: the Calvinist had effectively turned inwards to look for a salvation by works that some medieval Christians had done externally in their church. In both cases, Christians were set on a kind of treadmill, always reaching and striving and never arriving. While Luther had valorized vocation, Calvinist Puritans had turned this into a crusade against all "useless" activity. Instead, leisure and play was abolished for the hard work of assurance for salvation. When this impulse was secularized, where gain and frugality separated from eternal salvation, this established the ethos and ethic of the bourgeoisie. It was rigid self-discipline and self-control which marked their economic activities, not vain and vapid self-indulgence.

Hughes expanded this analysis from Weber to Tawney's Anglo-Catholic criticism of the Reformation as a blow against the social fabric of the Middle Ages. Tawney was a socialist and no reactionary, he was quite clear that Medieval society had its flaws and the Church had given into moral failure. Nevertheless, the guild system prevented the alienation of labor from the means of production. Even feudalism had provided a concrete, and legal, arrangement which kept employer and employee in the charitable bonds of sociality. It was a similar disposition carried on within English Socialism, prior to Fabian Soviet-sympathetic industrialization. William Morris, who dreamed a dream of John Ball's peasant crusade, emphasized the goods of English feudalism. While Morris would depart from John Ruskin's mild reform oriented crafts-guild movement towards Marxian revolution, he nevertheless saw continuity with medieval peasant revolt with modern Marxist revolution. Both wanted to restore the communal bonds of society from the wealthy and landed who were rapidly pulling ahead of corporate English society. This even had an aesthetic dimension. Per Eric Gill, it was the Renaissance which vaulted the individual against the communal in art, turning it into a vain demonstration of excellence. Instead, art was to service the community of man, which collectively would allow the individual to achieve a state of leisure and play. True art was honest about its intentions and origins, as well as its vision. Gill preferred the modern architecture, which exposed its inner workings on the facade, to modern romanticism, which disgusted its concrete base behind a gothic facade. For Hughes, this broader history of criticism was to expose capitalism's collapse of ends into means. It was the valorization of valor, the use of use, which had justified the worst culprits. It wasn't that the post/ex-puritan petit bourgeois which effected this state of affairs, but they had laundered the 1%'s greed through their own theo-poltitical ideology and justification.

Hughes' purpose is to recover a Christian beatific vision, an awareness that sanctification results in rest before God. However, as mentioned above, this critique of Calvinism depends upon a particular reading of the Reformation that throws the Christian back onto his own works to nail down his assurance that, indeed, God's grace was effective in his heart. Contrary to most antinomian descriptions of Protestantism, the Reformers made a strong emphasis on works as part of the drama of the Christian's pilgrimage through this life. The difference was the effect of this work was not primarily to please God, but to serve neighbor (which indirectly pleased God). Thus, the works of supererogation imposed by Rome, whether pilgrimages or crusades, were unnecessary in the course of salvation. One did not work to be saved, but because one was saved (and incidentally to manifest that one was saved). Nevertheless, the experimental piety which made assurance not only a blessing of God's grace, but a mark of one's salvation, was not normative for all Reformed Protestants, let alone puritans. John Owen, a Calvinist of Calvinists, denied that a feeling of assurance was necessary for salvation (a conclusion he came to after he had claimed experience of this assurance).

But the critique of Hughes, applied to the dimensions of modern capitalism, undermines the very point of Christian sanctification in general. While he venerates leisure, the contours of its divine focus is obscured in his critique of capitalism. Most who seek play do not think of this in terms of contemplative piety. Of course, there's a certain breed of preacher who sees in the barbecue and bottle a kind of divine contemplation. However, the harsh realities of economic day-to-day do not allow most (barring academic preachers) this total eclipse of life into leisure. Most even self-confessed Calvinists do not valorize work to this point, as if they don't separate their wage-job (or otherwise) from vulgar relaxation viz. football games. In fact, the emphasis is that even in the average and mundane that work can glorify God if offered upon his altar. The Weberian Baxterian Calvinist doesn't exist, as much as the classical bourgeoisie has ceased to exist. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos lack the "worldly asceticism" of an Andrew Carnegie, who himself did not advocate laissez-faire but extreme estate-taxes. The idea that Richard Baxter leads to Ronald Reagan, even as the secular ideology shuffled off its God-oriented origin, is absurd. For even in the (neo)conservative presidency of Reagan, there was no wholesale end of government subsidization of economic activity. The classic petit-bourgeois would be offended at a government staffed with the "corporate socialist" Bechtel corporation, whose wealth ballooned through government contracts. Such is not the world of Margaret Thatcher, often the bugbear of left-liberal British critics of "neoliberalism". In someways, in a double-move, it's not only that Thatcher did little to curb the leftist welfare-warfare state, but it's that her ideological heir, Tony Blair, was no less rightwing than the tit he suckled on. It's in this sense that good critics of neoliberalism reject this ideological position as nothing less than a statism on behalf of capital. It's in no way a doctrine of free-markets, let alone the supposed puritan valorization of work in-and-of itself.

Criticisms of puritanism generally ignore that their beliefs were often no different than the monastery. The only shift was that this was to be applied, in some way, to the entire church, not only a subset that had taken oaths. Some Catholics rightly criticize this Reformation trend as watering down the terms of sanctity, but such has often come as a side-effect of ecclesiastical politics in a bid to established a national (if not princely) church. Nevertheless, the mere appearance of sanctity does not mean it exists. Crawling up the Scala Sancta is not prescribed holiness in Scripture, it's the invention of men. If modern men and women seem less holy, perhaps it's in part of a longterm hangover of false claims to sanctity which cannot, and should not, bind the conscience. The average Christian who does not scrupulously observe Sunday as a new Sabbath (as many puritans counseled) may indeed fulfill the spirit of that day through kindness and charity. Nevertheless, the problem that all Christians must pursue and possess this sanctity, not only monks away from society, is no blow to the truth of the gospel if it fails. It instead refocused Christians, Roman as well as Reformed, onto the voluntary elements of Christianity. It was not enough to simply be born into it, one must actively embrace the faith and choose to live in its light. Such was an emphasis that puritans, as "hot protestants", actively promoted. One could not simply rest on the laurels of an institution, but assume the light burden of Christ for his' self. It was this form of monasticism that first appeared in the Syriac east. Rather than isolation in anchorite or cenobitic communities, Syriac Christians had monks, called sons/daughters of the covenant, live amid mundane life. They took normal responsibilities, even as they committed themselves, as celibate Christians, to a pious life of prayer and study. Such was not a "religious" order, but open to all peoples who wanted to live in community and spear-head fidelity towards their God.

Applied to these critiques of capitalism, Hughes doesn't quite get at the fact that these criticisms of Catholicism require this revolutionary commitment among all members. Hence the play-pretend of Ruskin gave way to the revolutionary praxis of Morris. In a Marxist society, does Hughes truly believe that leisure is prioritized beyond the labor necessary to arrive at such a garden existence? Likely Hughes would denounce Soviet communism, but it was Lenin who quoted St. Paul that if one did not work, he would not eat. Ideally, leisure was the goal of sanctification, of theosis, of that beatific vision. Nevertheless, it was a hope that was fundamentally eschatological. In this age one had to fight. The Radical Orthodox emphasis on Neo-Platonic harmony often degraded the recurrent New Testament theme that, caught between two ages, Christians had to assume a militant posture. The purpose of a vigorous work ethic was simply not allow Satan to turn a Christian's rightful desire for leisure into a selfish cudgel to punish his brethren. This is not to justify every puritan's (especially Baxter's!) experimental piety, which effectively became a works-righteous religion. Instead, the hope was that the enjoyment of God would transform work into a form of play before the Heavenly Father. Such is the sweet fragrance emerging from the equally zealous puritans Richard Sibbes and John Cotton.

In the divine economy, it is ultimately true that the means (the power of Christ) is the end. Work can, as part of glorifying God and sanctifying labor into a form of play, serve this means. The valorization of value is not a necessary consequence that all people, clerical as much as lay, must seek to see the glory of God. Policed and regimented life has been one consequence of puritan piety, but it has also lead to true enjoyment of God's friendship, where even work and labor may become means of basking in the love of God and communing with him through his many creatures. Criticisms of "capitalism" can often simply burn out, turning one on to failed alternatives. Leisure is the goal, but one must not fail to appreciate that the Christian is a pilgrim. Nevertheless, for the joy set before us, so we bear our crosses...