Category: Economics

Ethika Politika (EP) houses articles by Distributist Tom Storck, “illiberal Catholic” Patrick Deneen, and a host of other Catholic writers who take the Church’s social magisterium seriously. It is also one of two outlets for Dylan Pahman, an ex-Calvinist convert to Orthodoxy whose other forum is the Acton Institute. How Pahman fits within EP’s vision remains something of a mystery. That fact is not nearly as mystifying, however, as Pahman’s recent article on “Scapegoats of Christian Social Thought.” Purporting to criticize the reductio ad Hitlerum (though Pahman doesn’t use that term) as deployed by “socially-conscious Christians,” it’s difficult to not read Pahman as criticizing only a certain type (or certain types — if socialists are brought into the mix) of “socially-conscious Christians,” namely those who oppose free-market capitalism. This is made clear enough with Pahman’s intentional swipe at Distributism — a swipe he refuses to take at his fellow free-marketeers who routinely castigate their opponents as “statists” (quasi-fascists):

Today is primary day in Michigan and that means an embarrassingly tiny fraction of the voting population will turn out to decide the Republican ticket for Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District: (A) Incumbent Tea-Party/libertarian darling Justin Amash; or (B) Challenger and quasi-Republican businessman Brian Ellis. (For some of my earlier thoughts on this race, see my commentary in Michigan’s The Bridge magazine here.) Since first taking a seat in Congress in 2011, Amash has positioned himself as a “Washington outsider” willing to challenge “the establishment,” albeit with few, if any, tangible results to show for it. Amash may have made headlines opposing the “Security State” and reports of the National Security Agency’s data-mining overreach, but let’s be honest. Amash knows full well that the current security ordo is too precious to too many Americans to overturn (or probably even reform meaningfully). Amash, like other “Tea Partiers,” has managed to curry favor with a significant number of Catholic (and Orthodox) Christians on the grounds that their platform opposes the contemporary Leviathan state which, inter alia, has threatened religious freedom on multiple fronts while upholding the onerous system known as “crony capitalism.” This is no doubt why many Catholics who take the Church’s social magisterium seriously have no qualms about endorsing Amash et al. A good friend of mine even suggested that those who are Distributist in principle can, and perhaps even should, support Tea Party-types in good conscience because they favor policies that are, at a certain level, closer to a system of localized governance Distributists — and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) — champion. While this claim may be superficially correct, it leaves much to be desired at the substantive level.

This should be unnecessary, but alas it is not. To those who have come across this blog in the last day and are, intentionally or unintentionally, inclined to make a fundamental interpretive error, let me be clear: Rejecting capitalist ideology is not tantamount to accepting communism. Other formulations which clarify that the Catholic critique of capitalism, as embedded in the Church’s social magisterium, is not a call for communal property, command planning, or the elimination of markets if, by “markets,” one means the exchange of goods and services.