There’s a Christian case for capitalism. Justin Welby should be making it

The adage that the Church of England is the Conservative Party at prayer still has force. A 2015 survey, for example, suggested that lay Anglicans had a strong Conservative leaning in that year’s election. It might be thought that these political opinions would go hand-in-hand with favourable views of free enterprise, free trade and lower taxes.

So, if the Anglican in the pew is comfortable with a market economy, why are the elites so hostile? Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s recent interventions on economic policy – a blistering attack on the gig economy last week, and the continual call for higher taxes and more government regulation – would suggest that the Anglican hierarchy is ill-disposed towards markets.

But a robust Christian case can, and should be made for a market economy. The market runs all the way through the Bible. Many parables, such as that of the workers in the vineyard, are grounded in the reality of market exchange. The seventh and the final of the Ten Commandments relate to the honouring of private property. The Parable of the Prodigal Son presupposes business, market exchange and the inheritance of property – none of which are criticised by Jesus unless pursued unethically. This does not mean that a market should have no restraints. The question is whether those restraints should come from the state or from morality, religion and civil society.

At root, there seems to be two problems with recent clerical reasoning on economics. Firstly, it is not recognised that economic policy decisions involve trade-offs. Welby’s desire to regulate labour markets is a case in point. There are countries that regulate their labour markets much more than we do. They include Italy, Portugal and France, which have youth unemployment rates of 32, 21 and 20 per cent, respectively.

Secondly, senior people in a bureaucratic institution such as the Church of England overvalue topdown solutions. It is not that the economic problems senior clerics identify don’t exist. It is more that those at the top of a bureaucracy may not appreciate the limitations of top-down planning and give too little weight to the importance of individual initiative in promoting prosperity and creating deep social ties.

The reality is that the free market has delivered measurable benefits to societies that live by it. The extension of some form of market economy in the past 30 years to countries that previously excluded themselves from global trade, for example, has facilitated the mass exit of people from the drudgery of dire poverty and the first sustained fall in global inequality in 200 years. Certainly the market has played a greater role in economic development than government aid.

It is true, of course, that, despite the reduction in global poverty, many people at home do not believe the economy works for them. But, to continually put the focus on an apparent need for more taxes and more government regulation ignores the ordinary working person. A major

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reason why households are feeling the pinch is because taxes are at a 50-year high while in-work benefits are being cut. To a large degree this is a consequence of an ageing population, together with welfare and healthcare systems that rely entirely on tax funding. How can we provide a welfare state if not by encouraging the wealth makers who fund it?

But there is more to a market economy than prosperity. Economic freedom allows people the dignity of making their own moral choices and to reason and act purposefully in following their vocation in life. It promotes virtues such as hard work, thrift and reliability.

This does not have to make a market economy individualistic. Flourishing Christian societies with free economies have often been marked by the creation of vehicles for fraternity, philanthropy and socialisation – as distinct from socialism – which emerge within market economies and civilise them: witness the Friendly societies, which provided welfare and fraternity on a human level, and had more than seven million members in 1910.

It is the role of churches to promote and support this process, not to promote an ever-bigger state. Christian leaders should be helping people to understand how they should use their riches, rather than just proposing that all be handed over to the Government.

The outcome of a market economy arises from the free decisions of the people. The record suggests that they can be trusted a little more by our religious leaders.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son presupposes business, market exchange and the inheritance of property – none of which are criticised by Jesus unless unethical