Introduction to Economy and Persons: The Future in

Christian Perspective

Christians have a highly significant contribution to make to

economics. They say that economics is fundamentally about human
interaction. Since they have a high view of human beings,
Christians have a high view of the possibilities of their interaction.
Human beings are not fundamentally bundles of needs or desires in
a collisions that can only be prevented by the price system. In the
view offered by Christians, each human being is a social being who
deliberates about what they desire, explains their reasons, and can
change their mind. Simply because this human being is free, he
may if we wants to, do things for other persons; he may do so
because he loves them. These two elements of freedom and love,
are fundamental to economics. By saying this, even when they are
the only ones to do so, Christians offer their fundamental
contribution to economics. When these two components are
omitted, we fail to understand something fundamental about human
encounter and our economic crises reflect this failure. This book
shows that crises occur when a generation has failed to place
enough value on human freedom and love.

Economics, especially in the modern form which has dominated the

last two centuries, has a rather low view of man. Sceptical of his
ability to get on with other people, it offers a minimal account of
what we have in common. It relies on the effect of large numbers of
people – conceptualised as ‘the market’ – to restrain us from
impacting too heavily on one another. Modern economics does not
offer a full version of its minimal view of man, but that is because
economics itself is a deliberately minimal explanation. It offers an
economical account of our interactions, for its proponents believe
that longer accounts are either not desirable or possible. Economics
is a short account of the possibilities of life together, by which it
also implies that only a short account is possible. It tells us that the
only interactions possible between people are limited ones. This
economical and minimal view has the long-term effect of reducing
the expectations we have and demands we make on one another. It
reduces our confidence in one another as beings we can appeal to
and reason with. What is more, this minimal description of man is
periodically in danger of making itself true, for modern economics
has been hugely successful in convincing us that the possibilities of
human interaction really are limited.

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But first, what is an economy? An economy is the sum of the many
interactions by which we encounter other people and procure the
means of life. Economics limits its interest to those outside our
household, interactions with whom are expressed in terms of
payments. Money specifies and delimits the scope of this encounter,
so we are compelled to provide them with what our contract
delineates, but no more. It is the contention of this book, that we
do not just enter exchanges because we have to, but also because
we want to. We transact with one another deliberately and willingly:
other people are attractive and fascinating; through interacting with
them we find out what is worth having. Our desires are constantly
being re-shaped as we interact with other people. An economy is a
set of arrangements by which we organise these interactions in a
particular place, for a particular time, and so it refers to the way we
organise our affairs and the way that, since a large of people are
interacting even without us, for each of us affairs seem to organise
themselves.

It is a fundamental Christian insight that persons inform one

another. They do so not by necessity only, but also in freedom.
We buy and sell the material goods we need, of course, but we also
supply one another with accounts of what we want. We exchange
accounts of what we want and who we are, and buying and selling
is the form in which we do so. The accounts of our identity that we
offer are more fundamental than the goods and services. These
goods and services are relevant and desirable to us because we
believe that, more than other goods, they will help us to gain what
we really want, which is the attention of those whose recognition we
seek. People are primary, material goods are secondary. Because
other people want our recognition, we can persuade them to
approach us through our desire, or their desire, for specific things.
We mediate their relationship with us through the various goods
and services that we offer, putting a great deal of effort into
persuading people to desire what we want to give them.

In this book we are going to look at the components of the

economy. As we point out the connections between them we will
show what makes for a functioning economy. But if we use only the
tight circle of light thrown by modern economics we will observe
only a small number of components, while the majority go
unnoticed in the darkness. We can hope to bring more pieces into
view by using the lights provided by neighbouring sciences and our
cultural history. In order to bring these piece together we also
require the appropriate mental map. We owe our mental maps to
earlier generations. We have inherited many more of these than the
discipline of modern economics makes use of; some maps are used
by other social sciences, others lie unused. Like every science,

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modern economics runs on a small number of metaphors. Over time
some of these are over-used and others neglected; the conceptual
basis for the disciple becomes narrower, though mathematics
provides ever-more sophisticated compensation. In order that it
remains a worthwhile explanation of the real world in which we
engage with one another, economics needs metaphors than the
modern discipline presently uses. We will achieve a better
understanding of our economy, and of ourselves, when we employ
the tools in the box marked ‘Society’ in addition to those in the box
marked ‘Economy’.

If we use only use the pieces presently employed in economics, we

will find it difficult to account for events and changes in the actual
economy. There is a second box, labelled ‘Society’, which contains
the links which both hold the pieces in the first box together, and
enables them to move relative to one another so that they can
continue to hold together through time. Earlier generations of
economists knew that economies require a number of intangibles –
trust, confidence, public spiritedness, dedication to a common good
and fairness – not found in the box labelled ‘Economy’. We need to
get the tools out of the second box and learn how to use them, and
so remind ourselves of what recent generations of economists have
forgotten. To talk through any set of relationships requires the
concepts and metaphors appropriate to it. We will use the basic
tools of modern economics – self-interest, maximising, rationality
and efficiency, but we will have to use additional tools from the
other box, unconcerned if it is labelled ‘Culture’ or even ‘Theology’.
That is what this book is going to do.

The global economy has experienced a series of crises, and looks as

though it may continue to do so. This book offers some reasons for
this. I assume that our latest crisis is exceptional, and that it is a
bad thing, but I also suggest that it is not simply a bad thing, for it
also presents us with some opportunities. But to say that the
problem is with ‘the economy’ is to suggest that there is some vast
system which works well until, inexplicably, it malfunctions. But this
system is just one metaphor, that is, a particular way of relating the
individual tools relative to the whole task we have in hand. The
metaphor of ‘system’ is helpful up to a point, but no further. There
is no system or mechanism: there are simply very large numbers of
people, making decisions which affect us. We could concede that
they make their decisions just as we do, as best they can, and it is
not always straightforward to say which decisions are good and
which bad. Though other people are responsible for our problems,
we are also responsible for theirs, so we cannot simply identify a
fault, or blame a set of people, out there. If there is a fault with the
economy, this could be partly because we ourselves operate an

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inadequate understanding of what an economy is. If the economy
is in a mess it could be because we have operated a simplistic view
of human nature, operating on a shallow account of what people
owe us and we owe them. We have not invested very deeply in one
another or acted in those ways that help the economy to continue in
the long term. What is more, we may have communicated this view
and even perhaps imposed it on other people. Perhaps we have
done so because it has suited us, but perhaps it does so no longer,
in which case it may be time to develop a better understanding.

Modern economics examines vast numbers of interactions between

persons by analogy with the interactions of non-human forces,
using the metaphor of a system or machine. Let us pursue this
metaphor for a moment. Imagine that our national economy is like
a cruise-ship. Deep below decks the ship’s engine pounds away,
taking us across the ocean, while we enjoy the upper decks. But
recently the pulse of the engine has become less regular and we are
no longer making such good speed. The flow of services coming up
to us from below decks has also become less reliable. It is a long
time since most of us were down in the engine room or kitchens,
and we been able to live without acknowledging the places in which
what we consume is produced by actual human beings. But as the
ship’s engine falters it may occurs to us that we are not simply here
to be propelled along by unseen forces or to consume what appears
on the table before us. We may realise that the flow of services is
not going to resume until we pull on a boiler suit, go down to the
engine room and get to work.

This metaphor of mechanism helps us think, but it has also tempted

us not to think, but to assume that the machinery of this system
will work without very much attention from us. We need not just
this one metaphor, of the ‘system’, on which modern economics is
based, but others too. Before the economy was thought of as a
machine it was conceived as a household. Though it is based around
a family, a household has other members, some of whom work
while others are dependent; we might think of it as a small business
and mutual society that provides care to its members. We have to
let the first metaphor of the system, in which we are served by
unseen forces, be moderated by the second, of the household, in
which we know everyone around us, and work, sharing what we
produce, face-to-face. When an impersonal understanding of the
economy runs into trouble, we may find that a more directly inter-
personal conception helps.

More fundamental than the interruption of services, may be the fact

that we have got out of the habit of doing some things for
ourselves, or for one another. Many services are no longer available

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in-house, either at home, or locally, or even nationally, since many
products that used to be made in this country are made here no
longer. If the supply of economic services is not functioning well this
may be because we have allowed other people to exercise many
functions, and take responsibilities, in our stead. Work gives us a
set of abilities; when we no longer do that work, we will may find
ourselves losing some of those skills. Could it be that our crisis is
caused by a loss of our own abilities, not only skills associated with
producing things, but also the ability to get on with one another, in
families or in society as a whole? We may recover those abilities,
but only by going back to the kitchen or engine room, and re-
discovering how to perform some services for one another, face-to-
face.

But when we go down to the engine room, we find that there is no

great engine there. That ‘mechanism’ is only a metaphor. There are
many wonderful mechanisms down there which we could call the
gears of capital. But our metaphorical ocean liner moves because
people provide the power. Even our highly-sophisticated economy is
at base powered by human beings, employed in labour that is still
physical for some of them. Metaphorically, our ship is being rowed.
But the crew not only provides the raw power, but knows how to
operate these mechanisms: this makes them more competent than
us who have spent the last couple of generations enjoying ourselves
on deck. Some, becoming as prosperous as we are, are beginning
to join us on the upper decks, just as we are having to get back to
work down below. But we are not really driven by any large
impersonal force: to speak about the economy as a ‘system’ is
simply a way of indicating that a group of issues have a unity.
Christians suggest that amongst the causes of our economic crisis
some are personal. How’s that?

The economy is the sum of all thing things that we do. It is our
work, the products of that work and it is the outcome of all our
decisions about which work to engage in. We have the economy
that we have worked for. We can blame bankers and hedge fund
managers, rightly, for some of its present crisis, but we created the
expectations of high returns which they competed to satisfy. We can
blame our politicians, but their fault is chiefly that they tried to give
us the uninterrupted economic growth that we demanded. We
blithely assumed that they would always be able to provide a rising
standard of living, in an expanding universe in which greater
numbers of people could be included in an ever-more secure social
covenant. They might be better leaders if they stood up to us, and
tell us that governments cannot make economies grow, but only
safeguard the conditions in which a growing economy can
occasionally emerge.

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The crisis is not simply out there in the impersonal system that we
call ‘the economy’, but right here, in our own motivations. We may
have over-stretched our governments by asking them to take on
those responsibilities that we no longer want to exercise for
ourselves. It might have been prudent not to buy in so many
services from the market that we made our own economic virtues
and skills redundant. Though they were regarded as opposites not
long ago, market and state seem to have become inseparable, two
heads of one corporatist, centralist beast. By trying to do for us
everything that we once did for ourselves, market and state turn
into a single hybrid entity, with the result that there is no other
entity to appeal to when we begin to feel squeezed. We have not
only made the market and state too powerful, but we have also
made them too weak. We have asked the government to intervene
constantly, rather than just occasionally, in the market to protect us
from financial losses. This has made it difficult for the market to
judge the true value of our work or the true worth of our economy.
The market cannot work well when we insist that the government
insulate us from the corrections and restraints which the market
would otherwise bring. Governments find it difficult to resist all the
groups which come to it for financial support. Having allowed them
to grow in order to compete internationally, corporations and banks
are able to dip into the purse which belongs to everybody and
governments have grown too weak to stop the biggest of them from
plundering our national economy.

Whether we are look at individuals, or corporations, markets or

state, Christians make a distinct contribution by putting the
question of the functioning of the economy in terms of our own
exercise of self-restraint. By doing so, they indicate that they
believe that each of us, individually or as member of an institution,
is capable of acting as a mature individual agent. They take each of
us seriously as a unique being with our own freedom and dignity.
We are not merely small parts of a large global system, but we are
also persons.

When the economy starts to falter, Christians are able to suggest

some reasons why this might be so. An economy gets into trouble
because there is a flaw in our operative view of human interaction.
By over-reliance on the concept of system, we are inflicting on one
another the consequences of an deficient conception of our
relatedness, itself the consequence of an inadequate doctrine of
man. A very high view of human beings is central to the Christian
account for, the Gospel tells us, Man is made in the image of God.
Two fundamental concepts of love and freedom follow from it. By
‘love’ we mean that attachment that binds a set of people together,

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uniting them into a team, society or nation, each member of it
ready to act beyond their immediate self-interest. In the Christian
view, therefore, there are two fundamental products of the
economy. The first is the human being, and the second is the
culture that keeps that human beings social creatures and so
sustains them in societies. Humans are formed by cultures to
exercise their generosity, and to do so in freedom, because they
want to.

For modern economics, man is on his own, without organic

relationship to anything that is not himself. In the Christian view, no
human being is on their own; we are all in fellowship with others.
Man is not a fundamentally isolated being but a relational and social
one, who will not ultimately fail to come to terms with his fellow
man. He is social because he is a creature of love: made by love
and ultimately secured by the love of God. He flourishes as he is
enabled to love and give himself in service. All communities and
societies are entities of love. Loves aspires to permanence: we want
it to grow, and it can grow when we take on the self-control that
makes that love long-lasting.

Love is the motive of all human action. It is what holds any society
or group of people together. Of course we could refer to it more
soberly as ‘attachment’, since ‘love’ has become associated with
sentiment. Nonetheless love holds a man and a woman together,
and their marriage supports their love, so it continues ever when
their first love falters. Readiness to love is holds a society together,
and makes its member prepared to contribute in ways that do not
receive any reward, at least not payment. Love is the political force
that holds people together in families and communities, and
prompts them to work and serve, regardless of whether they are
paid to do so. These attachments give us a motive to enter
economic relationships with other people, both those we know and
with strangers from the other side of the world. Love sends us out
to work, to meet others and enter exchanges with them. Love –
attachment or commitment, if you prefer – is the motor of any
economy: this is not a sentimental statement, but a pragmatically
economic one.

We need motives to go to work. Motive does not feature in

neoclassical economics, and this is the omission that makes it
characteristically modern (‘neoclassical’) economics. Modern
economics assumes that we are simply driven by our nature, and
thus by necessity, and so that this drive is constant and uniform.
The Christian account of man gives us a large account of our
motives. It tells us that love drives us to find and meet each other,
and to love, please and provide for one another. You can start a

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business, or run a campaign, or raise money for a charity, or set up
a new political movement: your enterprise can express itself in
ways that are civic, commercial or charitable or political. Law and
government exist in order to safeguard this sphere in which any
individual can take initiatives, work for themselves and their family
or for any other group.

Long before we had a distinct science named ‘economics’ we had

rich accounts of man as economic agent. We may give and
distribute our resources deliberately, one person to one another, in
love and in freedom. Every economic act is directed towards some
set of goals which we can talk about and weigh and compare. Each
of us can judge for ourselves and is open to the judgment of others;
all of us are actors in the public square. Yet with its reduced account
of the possibilities for interaction, modern economics brought about
a turn away from thinking about ourselves as public agents in an
open economy. Although love and motivation, distribution and
purpose, were well-established economic concepts, modern
economics gave no place to love or self-giving in service. While in
the short-term, modern economics seems a very plausible
description of the human economy, when we ask about the
medium- and long-term its plausibility weakens. Could we count
this failure to discuss our motivations among the causes of our
crisis?

In this book I am continually going to contrast ‘whole-tradition

economics’ with ‘modern economics’. Whole-tradition economics is
the whole to which modern economics belongs, so we will be
comparing a part with the whole to which it relates. Modern
economics omits some of the elements that belong to the whole
discipline. But nonetheless, modern economics regards itself as the
whole of economics. The reduced account has replaced the full one,
the short version has been substituted for the long one. What is
more, it is in denial that there is any whole tradition or any
alternative to itself. I will be using the word ‘modern’ in a particular
sense, taking my cue from the derivation of the word, ‘modern’.
Modern has to do with mode, and so with what is modish and in
fashion at the moment. The contrast is not between past economics
and present economics, but between all schools of economics and
one particular school, ‘modern economics’, which has grasped a
monopoly. By becoming an orthodoxy this ‘neo-classical’ modern
economics has the same unfortunate effect on the marketplace as
any other monopoly. Modern economics is one way of doing
economics, not as it claims, the only permissible contemporary way.

I will suggest that we have been offering one another a reductive

account of our identity. Our past gives us our identity. Our historical

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tradition is a treasury of resources that help us to understand
ourselves, enable us to come to terms with one another and make
the necessary adjustments to changing circumstances. Modern
economics gives us a cheap and reductive account of our history
that leaves us with a very inflexible understanding of ourselves,
which makes it difficult to make sense of the changes happening
around us. By withholding essential aspects of our identity it
withholds the resources by which we can adapt and remain a
flourishing society, so in consequence we have not been adapting
well. As a result we have been suffering crises that appear
economic but which are fundamentally crises of our own self-
understanding and confidence.

Modern economics gives us an abbreviated account of how we are

able to interact with one another. Implicitly it imagines a particular
form of human being, the individual economic agent, who is master
of all. But the individual is a double, divided and psychotic, master
on one hand, but also slave of his own needs and passions on the
other. The assumption on which modern economics relies is that
each of us is a master who is not master of himself. The result is
that each of us has to live in a world filled with tyrants who cannot
be challenged or reasoned with, and are dependent on those who
have no intrinsic feeling for us, or we for them, and the result is
that we suffer a cognitive dissonance.

If we pursue only the short-term, to the exclusion of the long-term,

we will have a crisis of confidence about what is worth working for.
The cash value of everything cannot be fully understood from the
outset, and so it cannot be paid for immediately. If everything we
did was recognised and rewarded straight off, there would be no
room for interpretation, no risk, and no freedom of action. Whole-
tradition economics can see why we do not act solely for our
immediate consumption. It admits the rationality of self-restraint, of
decisions to act not only for our later selves but for those who will
come after us, and so of self-sacrifice.

Christians point out that the identity of every human being is

shaped by our passage through time. When it comes to identifying
the desires of this rational economic agent we have to ask what
time frame we are talking about. Do we mean ourselves in this
present moment of time, or in thirty years’ time? Which one are we
working for – this current version of me or some future one? We
understand an exchange to takes place over the length of time
specified by a contract. Since for the many transactions there are
either no contracts, or none that we make deliberate reference to,
we tend to conceive exchanges in short time-frames. Yet the
ongoing economy depends on the existence of covenants that

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extend many decades, which span a lifetime or even the life-times
of all those now living. The present state of the economy depends
on more than the present generation.

We will not find the origins of our economic crisis just within the
time-frame used by contemporary market analysts, for whom
‘short-term’ means between now and the end of next week,
‘medium-term’ refers to the next few twelve months, while ‘long-
term’ refers to the next five or ten years at the most. Each of us is
going to live much longer than that. Let us take a longer look and
ask ourselves what sort of economy we hope for in two or three
decades’ time, and what sort of economy present trends is likely to
produce. We used to say that we are working now in order to
accumulate savings which we will be able to live on when we are no
longer able to work; in fact when we stop work we will depend on
the earning power of those in work at that time. We need an
economy that will continue to work so that we can stop working at
some point in the future when we will be supported by those whom
we are supporting now. We rely now on the future health of the
economy. If you hope for an economy strong enough to support you
then, what direction should we take to bring about that economy
then?

The fundamental exchange, on which the whole human economy is

based, takes place between generations. It is a slow, life-long
transaction between parents and children and children’s children. All
the many transactions we are involved are simply episodes of this
one single life-long transaction. To gain this long-term view we
need to pull the camera back to bring into view our own life from
beginning to end, and perhaps occasionally take an even-longer
view that includes grand-parents and grand-children. Are we sure
that our own children will never have to live in circumstances as
difficult as those faced by our grandparents? What changes would
we make if we thought we had a chance of experiencing a savage
economic dislocation such as the Great Depression? How would you
prepare your children, or indeed yourself, if you thought that this
was in prospect? If we can establish this widescreen view we may
identify some of the long-term changes that are driving our present
economic crisis, and perhaps consider the costs and benefits to
ourselves of such a intergenerational view.

Every society builds on what it was left by previous generations.

Each city stands on the mound made up of all the practices and
habits that make up the culture of that society, which binds it us
together and make it a single functioning society. A deep and
unexamined set of instincts keeps us law-abiding and gives us
political stability. It makes us a people who are willing to take

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correction and so be adaptable, and who are motivated to act in
ways that do more good than harm to those around them. We are
restrained and empowered by notions of the common good that we
do not readily override. Over centuries that mound may grow into a
hill. Every generation re-uses the top layer of this inherited material
and hopes to add at least as much as it subtracts to that hill. But in
recent years we have been making deeper excavations into it and
digging up some basic bonds that give individual persons their
motivation. As a result each of us has fewer attachments to a
smaller number of people, those we consider to be family, and so
we have fewer reasons to go to work. But will the work we have
been doing replace enough cultural capital to enable our children to
live as well as we have?

We British have been going to work as usual, selling our products

and thinking up new ones. But what has been the value of our work
as a whole? Have we been laying down new layers of social-and-
human capital? Have we built as much as we have demolished?
Have we earned what we pay ourselves, or have we been spending
what was earned, not by us, but by the generations before us?
Value is decided by whether our society continues to be robust and
energetic. If it is losing confidence, all our work may turn out to
have been demolition rather than building. Have we been right to
reward and congratulate ourselves as much as we have? Two sets
of people can answer this question for us. One is those workers in
other parts of the world who, we hope, will buy what our economy
produces. And the other is the generation that comes after us. They
will tell us whether we made things easier for them or more
difficult, and so whether our work truly added value, or spent it
without return.

If we have dynamited parts of that hill, where has that material

gone? In recent decades we have blasted a significant amount of
social-and-cultural material into the air above our heads. This vast
cloud of atomised cultural material has become the money that is
traded in the global financial markets, travelling back and forth
across the globe from one international trading floor to one another.
The money and stocks traded in global financial markets represents
cultural capital changed from a fixed into a highly volatile form. I
will suggest that this cashing-out from fixed social and cultural
capital into liquid form represents the decision of millions of
individual persons to gamble in the hope of making themselves
secure in a future world which, they realise, is unlikely to care for
them otherwise.

This book suggests that the health of our economy depends on its
orientation towards the future. Any future requires children, so that

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the population remains more or less the same, and it requires that
these children grow up into energetic and motivated persons so that
we have a buoyant economy. But here is one reason why our
economy is in trouble: the proportion of economically active
members is dropping and the proportion of dependent ones is
rising. Those who realise are taking steps to safeguard themselves
and the effects of their attempts to do so is inadvertently making
the climate more difficult for everyone else. Let us take a moment
to sketch some of these connections.

We have assumed that the next generation of economic agents

would be at least as energetic as ourselves, so we could confidently
pay ourselves rewards in the belief that the future economy would
be bigger than the present economy and so easily able to meet the
financial obligations we left it to pay. But it does not appear to be
so. The coming generation is smaller than the existing generation,
so a smaller number of active people will be support a greater
number of the inactive and dependent. We have not regarded our
children as our chief investment in our future financial provision.

Children grow up in families. Based around the family, the

household is where people work for one another for free, and of
their own volition. It is where children learn what it is worth being
and having and become independent and energetic persons who are
able to take economic initiatives. In order that children become
persons, who have some motivation and drive of their own, we
need some other magic property, which I shall call ‘culture’. Culture
is those resources that give us the formation that turns us from
bodies, or bundles of wants and desires, into persons, who can
decide for or against any specific desire, in freedom, and decide in
love to act and go to work for specific other persons. Culture turns
us into responsible and motivated economic agents, who are not
merely consumers and clients of government, but producers and
benefactors as well.

Since the market has discouraged us from having children, we will

have fewer employees or tax payers in the future and so our
economy will start to shrink. The next generation will be carrying a
much greater burden than us, and this will not only have profound
economic consequences, for society and economy rebound off each
other. But these economic consequences are not just some way off,
for the economy always anticipates what is going to happen. The
financial flows of spooked global capital markets represent what we
have not yet managed to say out loud in political debate.

The Christian faith offers itself in a marketplace of worldviews. The

Church cultivates its own spiritual and intellectual tradition by which

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it is able to ask questions, affirm whatever is good, and identify
what is not. The Church suggests that man is both knowable to
himself, and so is fair object for study, and yet is also not entirely
knowable, and so not simply the object of economics, management
or any other discipline. Man is not the miserably anti-social creature
imagined by modern economics. Just as he has talked himself into
believing that he is, he can also talk himself out of this
impoverishing description again.

We have said that one contribution of the Christian faith in this

discussion is that it asks about the time-scale. By asking about the
long-term, the Christian faith gives us the tools to disenchant the
world of economics, to demythologise money, and keep economic
discourse within the limits within which it can be useful. We said
that the economy is the form of organisation that emerges from a
myriad deliberate individual decisions, and by extension it refers to
the way things turn out and will, we hope, continue to turn out.
Economic success is all about looking ahead deep into the future.
This is possible for any community made confident by the virtues
and practices that it has inherited and continues to practise. In this
book I suggested that it is the job of Christians to put some
questions to the world above us. In its modern form, economics is
full of unasked questions, embarrassing gaps and, and consequent
disorientation and bewilderment. Have we taken its reduced account
of the possibilities of human interaction too seriously, assuming it to
be the only one?

Christians ask the society around them whether it is suffering a

crisis of confidence. Our expectation that our circumstances would
become ever-more comfortable has suffered a set-back. Perhaps we
are witnessing the end of a consensus, perhaps even the breakdown
of a social contract? British Christians put this question to British
society. They do not know the answer, but then they do not have
to, because it is for the British themselves to answer. They will
answer either by recovering themselves, or by giving themselves up
to continuing economic decline. Christians can only help a society to
ask itself the hard questions, and decide for itself whether it will find
the vitality to endure. That is the best Christians can do, but it may
be the most positive economic contribution of all.

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