Last night Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the Arizona law proposed to protect people's religious freedom to not offer goods and services if they felt doing so would violate a "sincerely held" religious belief. Now, plenty has been said about this and other such measures elsewhere on the blogosphere, and obviously I agree with the outraged opposition (among the more salient criticisms: Since Jesus tells us that any remarriage is adultery, surely this would allow people to refuse service to second marriages, too? Does this absolve Quakers from paying taxes for the military? Does it allow for sharia law?). I won't jump on the bandwagon, but it does raise a point I think is rather neat considering that the same people advocating this law are the biggest boosters of free market capitalism.
One of the fundamentals of capitalism, it seems to me, is doing business with people you despise. The growth of first mercantilism and then early capitalism runs concurrent with the growth of toleration for exactly this reason. The Court Jews, as they were known, were required by the nations of early modern Europe for their service of usury, underwriting much of the growth in that period in trading ventures and very early industry. This during a time of little to no official or social toleration for them at all. Even the viciously antisemitic Russian Tsardom would occasionally free up movement in the Pale of Settlement in order to get Jewish capital moving around a stagnant Empire. Did it violate the religious conscience of European anti-semites to do business with those they saw as Christ-killers, child murderers, heretics? Of course it did. But they frequently had no choice, and the laws of capitalism saw to it that those who engaged their services prospered while others did not. Protestants and Catholics, Westerners and Japanese, Capitalist and Communist - where others see an untouchable, the canny see a business opportunity.
The increasing interconnectedness of the world has made it increasingly difficult to avoid doing business with people we don't like. It was assumed by many before the outbreak of war in 1914 that however much Germany and France disliked each other, their economies were too interdependent for them to fight again. It turned out to be wrong, of course, but now it seems like it might just be true for the contemporary balance of power - Chinese exports are so dependent on the manufacturing base of other countries that they are exporting components of iPhones that require the processes of fifteen other countries to complete. The USA is in a similar position, which means that however much the two nations make each other uncomfortable, indeed feel their consciences violated by their business with the sweatshop-runner or the imperialist, they are unable to pull out of the deal. This leads to general peace. Margins around the world are simply too tight to be picky about who one does business with.
Now, this doesn't demonstrate that a devout Christian should be happy to offer their services to practices that offend them. But it does suggest that capitalism is hard, and that if you live in a capitalist system, you should be prepared for it to be hard. Your business is not entirely your own; it is the way in which you interact with the world, and your right to refuse goods and services is limited not just to protect others from discrimination, though that would be a good enough reason on its own. Rather, it is severely limited because a capitalist system cannot well function when the free flow of commerce is complicated by the individual consciences of the actors involved. This is not a prescriptive law but rather a descriptive one; it is an argument not from human rights but rather pointing out to those behind the current wave of legislation that capitalism has never allowed for conscience, and that isn't about to be changed by tawdry bills in a couple of US statehouses.
Regardless of piecemeal legislation here and there, in the long term a Christian can no more choose to do business in a way that perfectly suits their conscience than I can avoid participating in a system of oppression whichever pair of shoes I buy: we live in a capitalist world, and capitalism is immoral, or at least amoral. If you cannot handle the "immorality" of providing services for a gay wedding, you should not be in the wedding business. If you can't stand having gay men share a room in your bed and breakfast, you should find another career. That is a freedom capitalism gives you, but it comes at the cost of being forced to engage in the muckiness that comes with the territory, and if that for you includes homosexuality, tough.
When Jesus told his followers to render unto Caesar, he was characteristically vague and unhelpful as to the limits of his command, but I would offer this interpretation: separate out your civil and spiritual lives. In a capitalist system, your civil life includes your mode of work; it is the being-in-the-world part of you every bit as much as paying taxes to a government you may or may not agree with. Jesus also said that following him would be tough, and this is ample proof of it - in order to live in the world, you must make compromises. If you want to avoid being eaten alive by the world, you must play by the world's rules, and that means your conscience must be sometimes subsumed in order to deal with your customers. The customer must be, for the worldly Christian, always right.
No comments:
Post a Comment