“The Market as God” The Rev. Dr. J. Carl Gregg 5 March 2017 frederickuu.org Almost a decade ago, the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox published an article titled “The Market as God.” I was interested to learn that he recently expanded his idea into a book of the same name because I’ve read a lot of articles over the years, but this one stuck with me much longer than most because I have found the central insight helpful in understanding certain aspects of our contemporary world. The basic idea is that “free market economics” has come to function in many ways like the idea of God used to function in our society: a perfect, all-knowing, allpowerful deity that will bestow its blessings upon us if we but put our unqualified faith in it. Cox first became aware of this perspective when a friend suggested that he was spending too much time reading the front section (“National news”) section of the New York Times—and that, “if he wanted to know what was going on in the real world,” he should, “turn immediately to the business section.” As Cox began paying more attention to the world of finance, he assumed, as a professional theologian, that he would encounter a lot of unfamiliar territory. Instead, he says, it was like déjà vu. He began to see many parallels between the contemporary business world and the history of religions: Behind the descriptions of acquisitions and mergers, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow and the NASDAQ, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things go wrong,
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