Understanding
Gospel Economics

A review of
The Moral Measure of the Economy.
Chuck Collins and Mary Wright. Orbis Books, 222 pages..

November 26, 2007

The holiday season is once again upon us, and this year, as in years past, countless people of faith are lamenting the rampant, nonstop commercial exploitation of what they feel ought to be a time for reflection.

“We live in a culture,” as Chuck Collins and Mary Wright remind us in The Moral Measure of the Economy, “that worships the marketplace.”

We’ve let market values, the two authors add, “virtually trump all our religious values.” The market is our shepherd, they note in a nod to theologian Harvey Cox, and we shall “want and want and want.”

Collins and Wright set out, in Moral Measure, to offer an alternative mindset that draws from biblical teachings, a “Gospel economics” rooted in respect for the value of every person and the importance of caring for one another, what U.S. Catholic bishops, in a landmark 1986 pastoral letter, called the “solidarity of the human community.”

Collins and Wright make an apt team for the task.

Collins co-founded the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy a dozen years ago and now heads the Inequality and Common Good program at the Institute for Policy Studies. Wright has served as the national education coordinator for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

Taking Gospel economics seriously, these veteran activists explain, means first encouraging a “preferential option for the poor,” working to end both poverty and the social marginalization of poor people.

But we can’t help those at the bottom of our economic ladder, the two stress, if we keep a blind eye to “concentrations of wealth and power” at the top. The “financial clout of the few,” they show convincingly, is warping the public policies that determine how our economy operates and undermining our social cohesion.

Without this cohesion, “our resolve to eliminate poverty” steadily erodes — and eventually disappears.

To reverse this dispiriting dynamic, Collins and Wright are urging people of faith to “push beyond the ‘gospel of the market,’” and they share ideas and inspiration for doing just that.

The two authors have come to know, from years of grassroots and national activism, many of the people and projects now working to make Gospel economics a daily reality, not just a Sunday homily. In the Moral Measure, they engagingly introduce these selfless souls to us.

Know any selfless souls who could use some help making sense of our current life-deadening economic inequality? Try introducing them, this holiday season, to this eminently eye-opening new Moral Measure.

— Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the weekly online newsletter on excess and inequality. For updates on inequality-related stats, trends, and books, just check here for a free weekly Too Much subscription.