St. Maximos' Hut

Economics is the science of choice under conditions of scarcity. Christianity (and many other religions) is (at least in part) about making choices too. Are they incompatible? I don't think so - perhaps orthogonal might be a better way to describe them. Economics tells me about how people, given human nature, make choices. Christianity tells me about human nature (fallen). The economist in me sees my religious views as a set of constraints I've adopted. I give up behavior that might prove immediately gratifying (eating a steak during Lent) in return for something more worthwhile (spiritual discipline that improves my spiritual life, a reduced level of passions that enables me to focus on repentance, and so on). These two pieces of my life thus seem to fit together nicely, rather than being in conflict. But we'll see. In part, that's why we've assembled (and the others will be signing on soon, I hope).

And another member of the blog identifies himself. I am P.J. Hill, a member of the Business and Economics Department at Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois. In case you aren't familiar with Wheaton, it is a Christian college that is Protestant and evangelical in its faith commitments.

I also am associated with a research center in Bozeman, Montana, PERC (Property and Environment Research Center) where I spend my summers.

My spiritual journey started (at the conscious level) when, as a senior in college, I decided the good news of Jesus Christ was true. Since then my wife and I have been members of numerous churches, all Protestant, as we have bounced around the country.

Now to the topic of the blog, the relationship between faith and economics. Andy, I'm not sure that I fully agree that our Christian faith and economics are orthogonal. I agree that economics tells me about how people make choices, and my faith defines a set of constraints on my choices. But my faith position also gives me much more information about the quality of choices than economics does, since economics assumes that each individual knows their own best interest. In other words, the discipline of economics provides no mechanism of evaluating choice other than utility maximization. But my belief in a transcendent God who has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ leads to a way of judging my (and others) choices. That doesn't mean I necessarily want to coercively impose what I think is God's evaluation of people's choices (surely the subject of future postings), but it does move me considerably beyond the economics answer to choices of "if it feels good do it."

I was using "orthogonal" to suggest that economics and religion talk about very different subjects and to suggest that I see no contradiction between looking at the world as an economist and looking at the world as a Christian.

For example, economics suggests utility maximization as a goal. In economic terms, Christianity tells me how to define my utility function. Once I've done that, I don't see a contradiction between maximzing my utility and living according to my faith, for an essential feature of my faith is the belief that living life as a Christian is what I (and all mankind) was created to do. Can't maximize utility much more than that.

Of course, not everyone accepts the same faith - and even amongst ourselves here at St. Maximos' Hut we've got a wide range of Christian denominations with some fairly deep theological differences. Economics can't tell us anything about how to resolve those differences or the even deeper ones between Christians generally and those of other faiths. An economist can tell us something useful about which religious faiths might succeed in gaining "market share" through practices that improve their success at winning converts. (You can read some excellent work on that topic, collected by the Center for the Economic Study of Religion, here.) But that is a topic for another day/post.

So my claim of orthogonality merely was a claim that there was not a contradiction between being an economist and being a Christian.