"It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism." G.K. Chesterton in "Three Foes of the Family" found in the collection of his essays The Well and the Shallows.

To many American evangelicals, or other conservative American Christians, the above quotation may sound strange. This sense of strangeness occurs because by the early 1800s most American evangelicals were embracing capitalism. Earlier Protestants had some initial reservations about capitalism, for example the Puritans insisted that all human relations, including economic, were subject to God's righteous morality, so that prices, for example, should be fair rather than simply what the market would bear. Even over a century after the Puritans, debates were conducted in some Protestant papers during the Panic of 1837 between those who thought Christians should pay living wages and not take advantage of the troubles of others to buy land too cheaply, and those who advocated following the market. Those who embraced the capitalist market economy won in almost all denominations. The changes involved were not limited to economic transactions. By the mid-to-latter 1800s most evangelical churches had begun to act like other parts of the capitalist market economy, seeing people as consumers who needed to be targeted, and tailoring their approaches and product so as to appeal to the largest market segment. Today's mega-churches, the Box Stores of Christianity, are the culmination of this trend: consumers come for the most personal value for the cheapest price. In addition, the Red Scares and the Cold War pushed many American denominations into supporting the American Way of Life against "godless Boshevism" or "atheistic Communism." Capitalism was regarded as an essential part of the American Way. Therefore, any criticism of capitalism, implied or explicit, falls on ears of American Christians like a foreign language.


I have been approaching this quotation at a glacial pace precisely because Chesterton's words will sound strange to many. In the first post, I presented some brief biographical information on G.K. Chesterton. In the second and third posts I tried to introduce Chesterton's economic preference, Distributivism. My hope is that today's post has created an awareness that Christianity has not always and everywhere seen Capitalism as a godly system. Next, G.K.'s Roman Catholicism and economics.

If you have not already done so, I recommend you take a look at the American Chesterton Society website, and also that of Gilbert Magazine.