The Reverend Mr. Ream is pastor of the First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.
I believe that a great number of clergymen in this country despise socialism in all of its forms, whether it be called the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, or the Great Society. But they are not in the majority, and they are not quoted continually in the newspapers and magazines. They are certainly not the executives of national church groups which are constantly issuing, or causing to be issued, statements proposing an ever greater expansion of the welfare state. You will perhaps have noted that most of the ultraliberal spokesmen for religion are in executive positions or in theological seminaries. Very few of them are parish ministers and parish priests. Unfortunately, however, great numbers of clergymen on the parish level are strongly influenced by the voices which emanate from church councils and seminary campuses.
Let me tell you what I think the typical clergyman is like when it comes to economic and political matters. First we must go back into history a bit. Back in the early thirties, a great many people in this country — clergymen included — developed what Ludwig von Mises calls an anticapitalistic mentality. Several religious denominations adopted resolutions which condemned capitalism equally with communism. One group voted a resolution condemning capitalism and advocating its elimination, along with the elimination of the legal forms and moral ideals which sustain it. Because churchmen, for the most part, were woefully ignorant of economics and the causes of depressions, they blamed all of the suffering and economic malfunctioning which existed in our country at that time on what they mistakenly referred to as laissez-faire capitalism. Although this mentality has moderated generally during the last thirty years, it is still prevalent in official circles.
Economically Uninformed
The clergy, like most of the population, is, as I have already observed, woefully ignorant of economics. There is one difference, however: the clergy are leaders in the community and have therefore a greater responsibility for being informed, especially if they are going to issue pronouncements and pass resolutions. But time after time I have sat in meetings where clergymen argued the pros and cons of certain political matters concerning which they were abysmally ignorant. I well remember on one occasion sitting in a meeting where a group wanted to pass a resolution favoring the adoption of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. They were almost unanimously in favor of it but when I asked them how many had read it, not a single person present had read the document through. It had a nice title, it sounded good, prominent persons were pushing it, so they were for it.
Most clergymen have been so trained as to develop a sensitive conscience. When they see injustice and need in human society, they want to do something about it. They do not always stop to consider what is the best thing to do, over the long run and for all concerned. Over and over again in talking with politically liberal ministers, when I have challenged the socialistic method of meeting the problem, I have been asked, “Well, don’t you care about these people who are suffering or undergoing hardship?” And of course I do care, as all of you care, but one has to be cautious in his care. He has to care enough to see the problem as a whole and not partially.
What Are the Consequences?
This leads me to another strong conviction shared by Dr. Mises. I had the privilege of studying under him, the dean of classical economists, in two summer sessions. Over and over again, when confronted with a difficult economic problem, he would insist that we have to consider the long run and not just the short run. To solve an economic problem by meeting an immediate need but ignoring the long run consequences, is not to solve it at all. Such a method often raises greater and more difficult problems.
May I suggest a very simple analogy. If a panhandler accosts me on the street and is obviously hungry, ragged, and in great need, I can give him a couple of dollars which will solve all his immediate problems. It will get him something to eat and a bed. But have I really solved his problem? Of course not. His problem is much more deep-seated than that, and although this is a simple analogy, it is a pertinent one. Many ministers think the solution of our complicated and difficult economic problems are likewise simple: just get the government to tax those who have and give to those who have not. That, they suppose, will create a just and equitable society.
Well, we have been doing that with increasing intensity over the past thirty years. We have, to be sure, met some of the immediate needs of men and women who perhaps didn’t have enough to eat and enough to wear and proper housing. But let us look at some of the consequences during those thirty years. We have a greatly enlarged national debt, we have greatly increased taxes, we have inflation, we have a greater crime rate, divorce rate, alcholism rate, narcotics rate; and in spite of our affluent society, there is a strong undercurrent of feeling in our country that not all is well. Now, would you reply that all of these consequences have enumerated are not necessarily the results of a socialistic economic policy? I think there is a relationship, and we need a lot more study to determine just what that relationship is; for those statistics apply not only to our own country, but to every country which has gone increasingly socialistic.
A Common Failing
Now, this condemnation of economic ignorance should not be reserved for clergymen. There are also businessmen who are economically ignorant. It is not an occupational hazard or professional disease reserved for one segment of the population. When Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago says that the two worst enemies of freedom are liberal professors and businessmen, this is part of what he is talking about. It is economic ignorance that tempts a businessman to seek a quick profit at the expense of a long-range economic gain. It is moral ignorance that lets a businessman break the law or pull a fast deal to the detriment of all business and businessmen in the future. I am no economic expert myself, but I know a fake when I see one; and lots of businessmen I have known are fakes in this area. In a really laissez-faire economy they couldn’t exist. It is the protection of government which often saves them from failure.
Not only are most clergymen, like so many Americans, ignorant concerning the fundamentals of economics; they are also ignorant, like so many Americans, of our rich heritage, and of what it is that has made this country so great and wonderful. Typical of this national ignorance is that poll which recently revealed that 85 per cent of our young people did not think patriotism was vital or played any important part in life; 61 per cent did not think the profit motive necessary to the survival of free enterprise; and well over 50 per cent were in favor of close government regulation of all business.
Spoiled Children of History
I must confess that I am not optimistic about the future of our Western civilization and our traditional free institutions. Our civilization and the institutions of our Western culture depend upon understanding and awareness, and they often demand sacrifice. The American people today are in no mood to sacrifice. We are the spoiled children of history.
What it all comes down to is that, among others, the religious leaders of our Western civilization are disillusioned because the free enterprise system has not brought about a national and international utopia. Their reasoning seems to be somewhat as follows: The traditional American system has not transformed all men into saints and solved all the problems of human nature; therefore, there must be something wrong with the system. There being something wrong with the system, the obvious answer is to do away with it and try some other system. Such reasoning does not properly assess what this system has done over the past 200 years. It does not understand and appreciate its benefits to mankind around the world.
Free enterprise, on the other hand, has not sold itself to the recipients of its own benefactions. Those whom it has blessed most do not appreciate it or understand it. They seem blind to the fact that socialism has produced, when compared to free enterprise, practically nothing; and the little it has produced has been at the cost of human dignity and self-respect.
Did you see those figures published by the director of the census a while ago: According to our government, if you make under $4,000 a year you are in poverty. Yet, three-fourths of the families making less than $4,000 a year have their own washing machines. Almost 93 per cent of them have television sets; 60 per cent of them have automobiles available. The average Negro youth in the South in the United States has a better opportunity to get a college education than the average white young person in England. Why, in light of all of this, are there men and women in America — and especially clergymen — who don’t like the system that has made it all possible? Is it perhaps an underlying feeling that man does not live by bread alone, that we don’t have all we need in order to really live happy, useful, meaningful lives? There’s something missing, and clergymen are apt to see this more quickly, more sharply, than others.
The Role of the Church
Here, clergymen come face to face with their own failures and that of the church. It is the business of the church to purify men’s motives, to enrich their spirits, to inspire them with lofty aims and purposes. This is not the function of a manufacturing concern or a bank. When the clergyman sees business meeting man’s material needs, but the church failing to meet his spiritual needs, he gets a guilt complex which sends him to Selma, Alabama, and out onto the picket line. It is the business of the clergyman and of the church to build religiously oriented individuals with strong moral character and send them out into the world to transform that world into something more akin to the Kingdom of God. Because that Kingdom is so slow in coming, because the church is so ineffective and weak in its task, there are those who now want to go out and take the Kingdom by violence, as Jesus warned they would. Business, free enterprise, capitalism, the profit motive — all of this becomes the scapegoat for every evil that exists in society. The clergyman, I sincerely believe, is unconsciously passing the buck for his own professional failure. But it is not his failure alone. It is the church’s failure as well; and most of us are a part of the church. It is, therefore, our failure, too.
Each individual within the capitalistic system has a responsibility to be a moral man, and any time any one of us acts without integrity, it reflects on the system. When one business breaks the law, all business comes under condemnation. When one executive is immoral, all executives tend to be branded.
Do you remember what Albert Schweitzer said when somebody asked him what was the greatest force and power in the whole world? He answered, “Reason, persuasion, and example, but the greatest by far is example.” We have had too many examples of immoral businessmen or improper business activities which are not due to the system under which we operate, but due to immorality within individuals. All of these things, in the mind of the average man, reflect on the system, on business, on our free way of life.
Albert Jay Nock insisted, in the title of one of his books, that the state — not government, not politicians, but the state — was man’s enemy. By its very nature it tends to grow and intrude upon man’s personal freedom. It was for this reason the Founding Fathers sought to set up strong safeguards against the state’s arbitrary use of power.
Nock and the Founding Fathers were alert to the warning issued centuries earlier by Confucius. Traveling with some companions along a lonely mountain road he came upon an old woman weeping. Questioned by the disciples, she replied, “0, sirs, some time ago my brother was killed at this spot by a ferocious tiger. Last month my husband was killed in this same spot by the same tiger. Yesterday my son was likewise killed.” “But, old woman,” asked the disciples, “if the tiger was so dangerous why did you not leave this spot?” “Because, sirs,” she replied, “because there is no oppressive government here.” Confucius then spoke and said, “Remember this, my sons, oppressive government is more to be feared than a ferocious tiger!”
Civilized man has always felt himself to be a creature with a divine origin. As such, he has believed he ought to be free from the domination of other men. For this conviction he has often been willing to give his life.
The time will come, I believe, when men will once more cherish freedom as did our fathers; and it will be because they have learned anew that man does not live by bread alone, even that bread provided by a benevolent, but omnipotent government.
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Samuel de Puffendorf
He is justly esteem’d the more excellent Citizen of the World, and the more generous Benefactor to his Fellows… the more diligent he hath been in advancing his own Perfection.
