Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem

Religion, power, and money – The Comfort of Tawney

Tawney’s book, noted below, is a source of comfort when politics get me down – which at the moment is every day.  They don’t write like that any more.  Nor do you often get such rude good sense blessedly bereft of footnoted caveats. 

The relations between religion and business and politics are as fraught today as when Tawney wrote – just over a century ago, and it may ease our pain if we look at a sane humanist response.

Tawney saw that the Church was part of the Establishment.  I do not understand how you can build a monolith on one sent to destroy it – who signed his death warrant when he took a lash to the money lenders in the temple.  The Church naturally ‘denounced agitations, like the communal movement, designed to overturn that natural order.’  The great Marc Bloch thought that the commune was one of the great triumphs of the west.  Perhaps the Church thought the commune stole its thunder.  Bloch said:

It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen with its violent hostility to a stratified society.  Certainly, these primitive urban groups were in no sense democratic.  The greater bourgeois, who were their real founders and whom the lesser bourgeois were not always eager to follow, were often in their treatment of the poor hard task masters and merciless creditors.  But by substituting for the promise of obedience, paid for by protection, the promise of mutual aid, they contributed to the social life of Europe a new element, profoundly alien to the feudal spirit properly so called.

It was in this context that Tawney made the droll remark referred to in the note below about the aversion of the Church to doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth.  Are ‘Left Wing’ and the Church contradictions in terms?

Elsewhere, Tawney said:

The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

That is as good a description of the English Tory as I have seen.  It is wholly foreign to the US, and beyond those who falsely claim to be ‘conservative’ here.

Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably English emerges……  ‘The triumph of Puritanism swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.’

The author could produce the scalpel.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

So much of this book published in 1926 is so relevant to the US in 2025.  The essential difference between the U S and the U K lies here:

The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different.  It was individual responsibility, not social obligation.

Roscoe Pound, the great American jurist, said exactly that at that time. 

Tawney saw a ‘philosophy of indifferentism’.

Naturally therefore they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate with any precision their application to commerce, finance, and the ownership of property.

But is there no limit?

Compromise is impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies…. ‘Modern capitalism’ writes Mr Keynes ‘is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’

All that sounds to me a fair pointer to the mess we are in now.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

R H Tawney

John Murray, 1936.  Rebound in quarter blue leather with red title label on boards in fancy paper.

Tolstoy wrote a book – another of his very long books –saying that the main reason for the failure of civilisation was our failure to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.  Could the British Empire have been erected by applying the Sermon on the Mount?  And how could Wall Street have been built in a pious nation that took seriously those warnings about the problems facing rich men trying to get into heaven?  Indeed, how could capitalism have even got off the ground if charging for the use of money is against the word of God?

This book of Tawney is on the shelf for three reasons.  It deals with those questions.  It shows how wobbly, if not downright silly, the Left/Right and Socialism/Capitalism distinctions are.  And the grace of its writing makes the book a pleasure to read.

To put it softly, tension is inevitable in applying religion to capitalism.  Loving your neighbour may be hard one on one, but is it not impossible when you are engaged in conduct, called competition, which has the predicate of Darwin that it is in order for you to annihilate your neighbour if he fails in the contest? 

We might see the history of the West as the story of the reduction of the impact upon us of the supernatural.  In the beginning, Tawney adopts the suggestion that ‘the secularization of political theory [was] the most momentous of the intellectual changes that ushered in the modern world…. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority…. the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.’

We see immediately that when it comes to religion and money, as it does with religion and government, faith-sapping casuistry – argumentation so clever that it just has to be suspect – is not the exclusive preserve of the Church of Rome.  Here, then, is the crunch question of the book: ‘Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal authority and the practices which are permissible in business?’ 

The same question arises for government.

The damnation of lending for interest, or buying and selling for profit, was very serious – as would be Wall Street’s diagnosis of madness today.  In the name of God, the books abound with claims that governments should set prices!  But the Church had a vested interest in protecting property and the class system, so that people like those fanatical Franciscans had to be closely watched lest they may be taken seriously with things that matter – like money.  This leads to a very dry remark by Tawney – ‘doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church…. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form….’  That might sum up the book. 

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality…. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.

Only an Englishman could have said that.

But were Luther or Calvin any better?

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine…..His sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness…..

It was [the] doctrine that all things have their price – future salvation as much as present felicity – which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. 

Then there was the cold, inevitable and bloodless discipline of Calvin.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organiser of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That sort of comment might get you into real trouble now, but if Tawney was right about Calvin blessing the middle class, then we might better understand the blank determination of the descendants of the Puritans never to let God come between them and the mighty dollar.  For those people, ‘a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions.  It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite.’  And just look at where that has left us. 

For better or worse, they don’t write history like that anymore – large and in the round and with style.  Instead, they have gone the way of the courts, and we get visual graphs and verifiable footnotes, and a timidity dulled by anxiety.  And we miss the relief of insight fed by common sense and simple decency.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.  The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.

And over there in the land of those who thought that they were free, we see the Antichrist, the most vicious manifestation of capitalism yet seen, reigning above the ‘tedious, stale forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.’  And tourists and locals throng to the Frick Gallery, a monument to grandiosity left in expiation by a baron of capitalism.  There they gaze in awe at a painting by El Greco, the supreme voice of the Counter Reformation.  The painting in the colours of jockeys’ silks is of the luminous Nazarene – the phrase is Einstein’s – taking to the money dealers in the temple with a lash, and he looks like he is doing so to a tune of Mozart.  He is putting an end to lucre’s defiling of the house of God.  And for that, a howling mob had him lynched á la mode by the corrupt stooge of a pagan emperor.  In a straight contest between God and Mammon, the latter generally starts at very short odds.  That may or may not have been how Professor Tawney saw it, but that’s the way it is.

And since Professor Tawney wrote this beautiful book a full generation before the Holocaust, he did not stay to notice the one truly awful consequence of the pussyfooting of the Christians about usury, and their squalid need to find a tribe of disposable scapegoats so that they could pretend that their hands were clean.  The questions that this book poses about capitalism and morality are at least as large now as when Tawney wrote it in 1926.  It comes to us from a different age but in the same world.  It is in the very best tradition of history as literature and we look to be unlikely to get much more of it.  It is my favourite kind of history – history as tone poem