Capitalism supposes a world in which the greatest good extends to the greatest number of people through free exchanges between men and women who are otherwise in pursuit of their own self-interests. Smith famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

ABSTRACT: To some, capitalism and Christianity seem to have little in common: Christianity teaches selflessness and generosity; capitalism promotes self-interest and greed. The self-interest that Adam Smith proposed, however, is not the same as selfishness; in fact, in some ways it overlaps significantly with Jesus’s vision of self-love. At its best, capitalism rests on unselfish self-love, the kind that serves our neighbors’ good rather than smothering it. Of economic systems to date, capitalism may hold the most potential for human flourishing — provided it operates in a culture abounding in the biblical virtues of trust, honesty, obligation, and cooperation.

Adam, Adam, Adam Smith,
Listen what I charge you with!
Didn’t you say
In a class one day
That selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all doctrines that was the Pith.
Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?

—Stephen Leacock¹

Did Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century moral philosopher and so-called father of capitalism, share with Jesus, Moses, Paul, James, and Jonathan Edwards a reasonably similar view of an unselfish self-love? And if so, why is capitalism in our day the alleged perpetrator of such villainy and the object of a rising generation’s fiercest scorn?

Adam Smith never used the word capitalism, but many regard his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, as the seminal articulation of an economic system in which private owners — rather than the state — control a nation’s trade and industry for profit. The embrace of Smith’s ideas created an unprecedented explosion in human productivity and flourishing that reverberates to this day.

Capitalism supposes a world in which the greatest good extends to the greatest number of people through free exchanges between men and women who are otherwise in pursuit of their own self-interests. Smith famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”²

On the surface, what could seem more contradictory to Jesus’s teachings on unselfishness? Jesus said,

Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:33)

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. (Luke 18:25)

One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. (Luke 12:15)

Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old. (Luke 12:33)

Jesus . . . saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them.” (Luke 21:1–3)

But God said to [the man who built even bigger barns], “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:20–21)

At first pass, Jesus hardly seems sympathetic to the butcher’s, brewer’s, or baker’s self-interested needs to push his respective wares. The Christian ethic eschews ego and unbridled aspiration, and venerates self-denial and sacrifice.

But are Jesus’s teachings on self-love entirely at odds with the capitalist doctrine of self-interest? In fact, they are not — not entirely. In some ways, the terms may be considered largely synonymous. The capitalist coin may be seen to have two sides: self-interest and other-interest. Together they spend. P.J. O’Rourke has written, “Smith wasn’t urging us to pursue wealth in the free enterprise system. He was urging us to give thanks that the butcher, the brewer, and the baker do. It is our good fortune that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are steak, beer, and hoagie rolls.”³ And a system in which people love each other the way they love themselves is not all that foreign to the teaching of Christ. William McGurn observed recently, “The voluntary relationship between buyer and seller at the heart of the free market isn’t the love of neighbor commanded by the Gospel. But in making market success depend on anticipating the needs of the other, it’s perhaps not as far removed as we might think.”⁴

What men and women make with and of the world, as opposed to what they take out of it, may be the idea that most distinguishes capitalism from the mercantilism that preceded it as the world’s preeminent economic model. Capitalism, more than any economic system to date, enables the kind of culture-making, the forming and filling, of Genesis 1. God gives grain. Man makes bread. Labor has fruit.

Theist with Calvinist Reflexes

Adam Smith came of age in what may have been the most thoroughly Calvinist culture apart from Geneva: eighteenth-century Scotland. Smith’s parents and grandparents lived within historical earshot of the Reformer John Knox, and in the Scotland of Smith’s day, “Calvinism seemed as easy as breathing.”⁵ Though a man of the Enlightenment who sought to understand and cast the world’s workings apart from God’s sovereignty, Smith was nevertheless the progeny of a Calvinist household, education, and society. He knew the principles and doctrines of Reformed Christianity, whether he professed them or not, and they seasoned his views of how humankind ought to cooperate in the pursuit of mutual well-being.

James Boswell, regarded as the greatest biographer in the English language, referred to Smith his contemporary as an “infidel in a bag wig,”⁶ but Smith is more rightly regarded as a theist with intellectual reflexes resident in a Calvinist’s muscle memory. Adam Smith believed in a big, superintending God interested in his creatures’ happiness. He observed, “The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man.”⁷ This happiness, as it did for many eighteenth-century moral philosophers, encompassed not just well-being and contentment, but virtue as well. It is the happiness cited in the American founders’ trifold declaration of unalienable rights.

Smith also was mindful of human depravity and saw the activity of humankind as that of “squeezing good from sinful tendencies.”⁸ He believed in a Creator God who at least had been involved in authoring the laws that govern the world’s workings. “The very suspicion of a fatherless world must be the most melancholy of reflections.”⁹

Although he attached no religious authority or biblical proof texts to his writing, he nevertheless constructed a framework of economic exchange that depended upon, even assumed, biblical virtues of trust, honesty, obligation, and cooperation. Even his concept of an “Invisible Hand” that promotes ends that are imperceptible and unintentional to those seeking their own gain (which, by the way, he referred to but once in the nine-hundred-plus pages of The Wealth of Nations¹⁰) seems indistinguishable in some respects from the active ministrations of the sovereign God of the Bible, whether or not Smith was willing to say so from the certainty of a regenerated heart.

Harvard professor David Landes, himself an unbeliever, has written that the main factors in the 244-year flowering of capitalism were at root religious: the joy in discovery that arises from each individual being an imago Dei, called to be a creator; the religious value attached to hard and good manual work; the theological separation of the Creator from the creature, such that nature is subordinated to man, not surrounded with taboos; the Jewish and Christian sense of linear, not cyclical, time and, therefore, of progress.¹¹

Capitalist self-interest in its original form also confronted the greatest human injustice of his day: human slavery. Smith was “woke” before Wilberforce. For Smith, such self-interest entitles one to the fruit of one’s own labor free from coercion in either its production or exchange. The capitalist concept of entitlement to the fruit of one’s own labor seasoned Abraham Lincoln’s public remarks in opposition to slavery more than any other concept. Slavery could not be more antithetical to self-interest. “Coercion destroys the mutually beneficial nature of trade, which destroys the trading, which destroys the division of labor, which destroys our self-interest.”¹²

When late in his life Smith entered a room in which were gathered the great abolishers of Britain’s slave trade — Wilberforce, Pitt, Grenville, and Addington — the statesmen rose from their chairs. Smith bid them be seated, but Pitt is supposed to have said, “No, we will stand till you are first seated, for we are your scholars.”¹³

Unselfish Self-Love

Smith drew closest to Reformed orthodoxy, even Christian Hedonism,¹⁴ in his appreciation of the biblical concept of self-love, but then tragically veered away from God in the eventual unbiblical outworkings of his economic model in the lives of people and nations.

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40)

The second-greatest commandment consists of two elements, love of neighbor and love of self — and love of self characterizes the quality of loving one’s neighbor. Most reference works accessible to laypeople, such as study Bible footnotes and online search engines, explain this second commandment in terms of the love extended toward neighbors, straying not far from the conceptual elegance of the Golden Rule. It requires some digging to find definition of the proper self-love that gives such reciprocity its quality. Here Adam Smith is in some agreement with John Piper and Jonathan Edwards on the idea of self-love, though an eternity apart from them on self-love’s origin and aim.

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