The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

446 chapter 42surprising that the religion sprung from a brilliant trader of Mecca “protectsand endorses the personal right to own what one may freely gain, throughlegitimate means, such as gifts and the fruits of one’s hand or intellect. It isa sacred right.” 11 What is surprising is that a Christendom that generalizedthe bourgeois life and invented modern capitalism was by contrast withthese so hostile early and late to commerce, profit, trade, gain.On the other hand Jesus counsels, too, prudence for the ages. As the nineteenth-centuryliberal Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, WilliamLawrence, noted in 1901, “While every word that can be quoted against therich is ...true...the parables of our Lord on the stewardship of wealth, Hisassociation with the wealthy, strike another note.” 12 The very substance ofthe Christian deal is steeped in a sort of economics, Christ’s sacrifice leadingto “redemption.” The Vulgate’s redemptio translates Greek [apo]lutrosis,for example, Romans 3:24 or 1 Corinthians 1:30, connoting the paying inmoney of ransom or other obligations. Thus Christ in the Agnus Dei isredemptor, “the redeemer.”God’s grace, the free gift unrequited, is no such vulgar deal. In its vulgarform the deal is, according to Joe Hill, “You will eat, bye and bye / In thatglorious land in the sky. / Work and pray, live on hay: / You’ll get pie in thesky when you die.” Frank Knight depended always on a gospel-based statementof the faith—though his Campbellite upbringing emphasized Actsand Paul’s Letters. He noted that Christianity is “very much a religion ofreward and punishment. ...[The Christian] is explicitly promised a hundred-foldrepayment ...(Matt. 19:29–30; Mark 10:29–30; Luke 22:29–30).” 13Indeed all “Godly” religions, as the sociologist Rodney Stark calls them,are based on such a deal. Mere spirits of the rocks and fields are to be propitiated,perhaps, or at least avoided, by whistling ‘round the graveyard. But“because Gods are conscious beings, they are potential exchange partnersbecause all beings are assumed to want something for which they might beinduced to give something.” Zeus wants the ascending smells from theburning entrails of a sacrificial bull. Jehovah wants his people to keep theirside of the covenant made with Abraham and Moses, namely, to worshiphim, a jealous God. Stark’s surprising explanation for mission andmonotheism in Godly religions follows from the exchange, in contrast tomere trick-by-trick magic. “In pursuit of [large] other-worldly rewards