Conversations among conservative Christians in the United States pertaining to questions of political theology tend to revolve around cultural or social politics and the retention of a Christian socio-moral order. The relationship of church and state to economics, in as much as the field of economic theory can be treated independently of a given polity’s social and cultural foundations, remains largely unexplored by Americans. One figure who serves as a useful gateway to relationship between establishmentarian commitments and socio-economics is Thomas Chalmers. A Church of Scotland minister who left during the 1843 Great Disruption and helped form the Free Church, Chalmers entered the lexicon of modern Evangelicals and Reformed Protestants through the influence of Timothy Keller. In a sermon entitled “The Gospel-Shaped Life” Keller quoted extensively from Chalmers’ well-known sermon “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” Modern Baptist intellectuals such as Tony Merida[1], John Piper, and Jared Wilson commended Keller’s cooption of Chalmers. Baptists and Neo-Calvinists such as Keller saw in Chalmers an important polemicist for how to order the human soul towards God in order to remove various idols.
The pastoral value of Chalmers’ famous sermon is commendable, but its possible that modern pastor-scholars misread the sermon by treating it independently from Chalmers other works. Although the sermon was not widely published until the 1850s after Chalmers’ death in 1848, it was likely written in Chalmers’ early period when he was teaching at St Andrews and then at the University of Edinburgh. In 1827 Chalmers published his On the Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments which argued for state churches on the ground that they were the best vehicle to temper the negative economic affects consequences of burgeoning capitalism on the urban poor in Scotland and farther afield in the rest of Great Britain. AMC Waterman noted in his Revolution, Economics, and Religion: Christian Political Economy 1798-1833 that Chalmers’ work on establishments was “his chief contribution to the ideological alliance between political economy and Christian theology” and consisted “of an altogether novel defence of the established churches in the British Isles.” In the late Eighteenth Century in Britain (as well as in France) “there was mounting attack upon the establishment in church and state, particularly upon the Churches of England and Ireland.” Chalmers weighed in firmly on the side of state churches and religious establishments. Chalmers, “attempted to prove by means of economic theory that church establishment was the only way to raise the condition of the poor and so to make the world safe for property.”[2]
Capitalism and the poor defined Chalmers’ urban ministry in the late 1820s, and it is not unlikely that “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” was preached shortly after and in light of On the Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments. There is good evidence in “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” itself that capitalism was something Chalmers was focused on confronting. Chalmers only used the term “idol” once, to refer to the “idol” of wealth.
“It is seldom that any of our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. At least, it is very seldom, that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning. It may be done by excessive pampering-but it is almost never done by the mere force of mental determination. But what cannot be thus destroyed, may be dispossessed and one taste may be made to give way to another, and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. It is thus that the boy ceases, at length, to be the slave of his appetite, but it is because a manlier taste has now brought it into subordination and that the youth ceases to idolize pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has become the stronger and gotten the ascendancy-and that even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of many a thriving citizen, but it is because, drawn into the whirl of city politics, another affection has been wrought into his moral system, and he is now lorded over by the love of power.”
The idol of wealth’s persistence and its potential cooption by other potential cultural and social idols long after the idolater has ceased to care about material gain led Chalmers to see a connection between the idol of wealth and the larger urban social context of Nineteenth Century Scotland and Great Britain. Where he differed from latter day Neo-Calvinists was that he did not see the city as naturally communitarian to the degree it created healthy communities. Where he differed from modern Baptists is that he saw the state church as essential for mitigating the social excesses of modern capitalism. Where he differed from modern neo-theocrats is that he did not see nationalized Christian culture as meaningfully sustaining Christian moral and social precepts. In some ways Chalmers was more akin to a Scot Presbyterian Fourierist or proto-socialist than he was to a modern American Evangelical. For Chalmers, the state church’s expulsive power lay in its ability to temper society’s—even Christian society’s—acquisitive will.[3]
[1] Tony Merida, The Christ-Centered Expositor: A Field Guide for Word-Driven Disciple Makers (B&H, 2016).
[2] Thomas Chalmers, On the Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments (Glasgow: William Collins, 1827); AMC Waterman, “Chalmers and the Establishment” in Revolution, Economics and Religion
Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217-255.
[3] Thomas Chalmers, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” (London: Hatchard and Co., 1861), 6.