The Gospel of the Market: The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism-A Ten Part Series, Nr 4
How Capitalism Became a Theology
“The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money.”—Pope Francis
This essay is part of The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism, a ten-part exploration of the ideas, myths, and moral compulsions that shaped the American Right. I’m not here to sneer or to support it, but to understand how a movement that began with sermons and self-discipline grew into a politics of grievance and spectacle. Each essay stands on its own, but together they form an autopsy, not of a party, but of a moral psychology that still thinks it’s the soul of the nation.
A Small Revelation in the Produce Aisle
I keep coming back to this one ridiculous moment in a grocery store. I was standing between the oranges and the yogurt when my phone buzzed with a market alert. Without thinking about it, I looked at the little green and red line on the screen as if it were reporting the condition of my soul. Up meant I could exhale. Down meant I should brace. I realized I was letting a number tell me how to feel.
That was the first clue that something had gone sideways in my relationship with the world. I wasn’t checking the weather or the news. I wasn’t even checking for something that had anything to do with the food in my cart. I was looking for guidance. From a graph. In a supermarket aisle. Somewhere between the produce and the dairy, I’d discovered that I’d joined a religion without ever signing the membership form.
And once the thought occurred to me, I couldn’t unthink it. When had moral philosophy slipped quietly out the back door and let market faith take its seat. When had Adam Smith become the new St. Paul. And why didn’t anybody warn me that GDP had replaced grace as our source of national reassurance.
I’ve heard people speak about the market with a reverence that feels almost sacred. They say things like the market knows or the market will correct or the market punishes excess. These are not economic statements. They’re theological. They’re spoken with the same tone people used centuries ago when they talked about providence. You can almost hear the devotion humming underneath.
And if I’m being honest, I hear it in myself too. I wish I didn’t, but I do.
A Memory from a Different Life
There was a meeting once, years ago, back when I was working inside the machinery of government. A middle manager stood up and explained in a very serious tone that a particular policy couldn’t be implemented because the market wouldn’t tolerate it. Not the voters. Not the law. Not the public interest. The market.
I remember looking around the room and realizing that everyone else was nodding solemnly, as if a divine commandment had been handed down on a stone tablet. I didn’t say anything, because speaking up felt almost sacrilegious. Challenging the market’s authority felt like challenging the tides.
That’s when I understood that this wasn’t just an economic system. It was a belief system. I’d been breathing it for so long that I no longer recognized it as something separate from the air.
The Apostles of the Invisible Hand
Maybe this faith began with our national admiration for the apostles of the invisible hand. Adam Smith, Hayek, Friedman. Their names were spoken around me with the same quiet respect usually reserved for theologians. It wasn’t worship exactly. But it had the tone of something whispered in a sanctuary.
The irony is that if you pick up Adam Smith and actually read him, you discover a man obsessed with sympathy, conscience, and the moral obligations we owe one another. He wasn’t an evangelist of greed. He was a moral philosopher trying to understand the architecture of human concern.
But we didn’t canonize the philosopher. We canonized the slogan.
The invisible hand became a kind of secular scripture. A comforting myth that said everything would work out if we just let self interest run free. Never mind that Smith himself warned against precisely that kind of naïve simplicity. It didn’t matter. The slogan traveled lighter than the philosophy. And somewhere along the way we mistook the bumper sticker for the gospel.
I sometimes picture Smith watching all of this from the afterlife with his head in his hands, wondering how his nuanced ideas got flattened into a superstition about the moral purity of markets.
The Sanctification of Self Interest
Somewhere along the journey, self interest became holy. Not practical. Not predictable. Holy.
We didn’t just say people act in their own interest. We said they should. We said self interest would mysteriously produce the common good. It felt almost magical. Greed became rebranded as generosity. Personal gain became a public blessing. Every desire became a gift you offered the world simply by having it.
That’s quite a theological move when you think about it.
I still remember sitting in that conference room where executives, straight faced and serene, explained that laying off hundreds of workers was actually the noble choice because it aligned with market expectations. Noble. Not necessary. Not efficient. Noble.
It was the closest thing I’d seen to a sermon outside a church.
And I sat there thinking, if this is righteousness, then righteousness has been quietly replaced by profitability.
The Golden Calf of GDP
Of course, every faith has its idol. Ours is GDP.
I’ve watched politicians talk about GDP growth with a trembling excitement usually reserved for miracles. I’ve watched newscasters announce a bump in GDP like they were revealing a sacred omen. And I’ve watched the same people treat a dip in GDP like a national moral failure.
One evening, I saw a news segment celebrating quarterly growth. Beneath it, in a quiet little ticker, ran a statistic about rising childhood hunger. The headline was triumph. The footer was agony. And the moral hierarchy was clear.
Growth was grace. Suffering was background noise.
The more I stared at that screen, the more I realized we’d turned a statistical tool into a sacrament. GDP doesn’t care if people are flourishing or falling apart. It doesn’t remember the dead. It doesn’t comfort the grieving. It doesn’t love. It barely notices. Yet we treat it like a divine scorecard for national virtue.
That’s when I knew the theology had gone deeper than we admit.
Old Puritan Ghosts in New Clothing
Part of me thinks this whole belief system feels natural to Americans because we inherited the emotional residues of Puritanism. They never truly left us. They just changed vocabulary.
The old belief was simple. Prosperity revealed virtue. Hardship revealed moral failure. The elect flourished. The damned struggled.
We don’t use that language now, but we live by it.
We talk about the poor as if their condition reflects some personal flaw.
We talk about the wealthy as if their wealth reveals their character.
We use words like merit and deserving and efficiency as if they carry divine weight.
We replaced Calvin with Smith, sermons with TED talks, tithes with consumption, sin with inefficiency, and salvation with upward mobility. But the emotional structure stayed the same.
We took the old theology and dressed it in modern business attire.
And then we pretended it wasn’t a theology at all.
The Rituals We Perform Without Noticing
Every religion has rituals. Ours are no different.
Take Black Friday. If that’s not a national holy day, I don’t know what is. I’ve stood in that pre dawn line myself, wrapped in a jacket, clutching a cup of coffee, bonding with strangers who also believed that a discounted appliance might grant some kind of secular blessing. We laughed. We froze. We participated. It wasn’t shopping. It was pilgrimage.
Then there’s tax season. You can feel the penitential mood settle over the country. People gather their documents with the solemnity of gathering confessions. They speak in the tone of people preparing to face judgment. I’ve even heard whispered pleas for leniency, as if speaking about a moral reckoning instead of a bureaucratic process.
Every time I hear someone say I hope they go easy on me, I wonder if we’ve simply replaced one priesthood with another.
The Brief Gospel of Earnings Calls
There’s also the theater of the quarterly earnings call, where CEOs speak in parables and analysts respond like devoted acolytes parsing every syllable for hidden meaning. Plenty of people in this country have never stepped foot inside a church, but they’ve listened to an earnings call with the solemn attention of someone awaiting revelation.
And there’s always a question asked in a sacred whisper:
What guidance can you give us for the next quarter.
Guidance. As if the prophets were about to speak.
You can feel the ritual. You can feel the devotion.
You can feel the hunger for reassurance.
Crises and Cracks in the Faith
Every faith faces its limits. Ours cracks during crises.
When markets crash, you can almost hear the collective gasp of a congregation that thought its deity would never betray it. During the collapse of 2008, entire communities fell apart. Homes lost. Futures erased. Retirement accounts gutted. The devastation was everywhere.
Yet the sermons continued.
The market is cleansing itself.
The market is correcting.
The market is teaching a hard but necessary lesson.
We described human suffering using the language of spiritual purification. As if the people who lost everything should feel grateful for the experience.
But beneath the calm explanations, I heard something raw. I heard confusion. Anger. Loss. People wondered why the system they trusted had abandoned them. Why their loyalty had earned so little. Why their hard work had dissolved into air.
That grief still echoes.
And sometimes, late at night, I can still hear the questions unanswered.
Private Doubts and Quiet Heresy
The strange thing about unintentional faith is that breaking it feels like betrayal.
I’ve had moments when I caught myself slipping back into old habits. The market would rise, and I’d feel a small, irrational comfort. The market would dip, and a pinch of dread would buzz through me even though nothing in my actual life had changed.
I’d think, why am I reacting this way. Why am I still listening for wisdom from a graph that’s incapable of speaking.
It took me years to realize that it wasn’t the market I trusted. It was the promise of simplicity. The promise that self interest could somehow create justice. The promise that wealth reflected virtue. The promise that everything invisible had order.
That promise is seductive. It takes time to unlearn.
But more and more people are unlearning it.
Workers who know the system never recognized them as subjects of concern.
Parents who can’t keep their heads above water.
Young adults who understand that wealth accumulation doesn’t feel like purpose.
Families who are tired of being told their pain is a personal failing.
They’re not radicals.
They’re heretics of a faith they never asked to join.
And maybe heresy is the first honest step.
Toward a New Moral Imagination
Sometimes I sit quietly and wonder what it would look like to build a society that treats markets as tools instead of temples. Not a revolution. Not a utopia. Just a rearrangement.
What if prosperity wasn’t mistaken for virtue.
What if suffering wasn’t interpreted as sin.
What if we stopped pretending economic success reflected moral character.
What if human well being became the metric that mattered most.
What a strange and mature society that would be.
Markets can create wealth.
But they can’t create compassion.
Markets can reward innovation.
But they can’t teach empathy.
Markets can distribute goods.
But they can’t comfort the grieving or console the terrified or bless the weary.
Markets can remember profit.
They can’t remember people.
And if we forget that distinction, we lose more than money.
We lose part of ourselves.
What We Choose to Call Sacred
I keep thinking about that moment in the grocery store.
That buzzing phone.
That rising line.
That little flash of misplaced meaning.
And I wonder how often we hand over our spiritual attention without noticing.
How often we let numbers tell us who we are.
How often we kneel without realizing we’re on our knees.
Maybe the real lesson here is simple.
The market was never a god.
It never deserved the reverence we gave it.
It was a tool we mistook for a temple.
A tool that works better the moment we stop worshipping it.
And if there’s any grace left in this story, it might be this gentle truth.
We can still choose what we call sacred.
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