This captivating but flawed volume emerged from a 2009 interdisciplinary conference in Edinburgh, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. The participants, who hailed from multiple continents, included distinguished professors from Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, and Sciences Po. All the contributions are worth reading, and most open up important vistas on a neglected dimension of Smith’s thought. Perhaps the most illuminating entries are those by Paul Oslington, Eric Gregory, Joe Blosser, Peter Harrison, James Otteson, and Brendan Long.
In his lucid, careful, and reference-rich introduction, Oslington usefully conveys biographical information about Smith’s religious activities (e.g., signing the Calvinist Westminster Confession in 1751), about the religious context that early readers perceived in his books, and about the religious perspectives (Stoicism, Scottish Calvinism, British scientific natural theology, and natural law) that might have shaped his views. John Haldane’s essay, “Adam Smith, Theology and Natural Law Ethics,” provides a valuable supplement regarding the activities and the context, while the essays by Harrison and Adrian Pabst provide a compelling sketch of natural theology.
Building regularly on discussions of the competing religious orientations in eighteenth-century Europe, various contributors explore the theological themes that pervade Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): the intimate linkage between morality and religion; Smith’s occasional invocations of divine design when explaining order, beauty, virtue, and happiness; and the echoes of the Augustinian view that although aspects of human nature are tarnished by original sin, God in various respects has apparently chosen to bring “good out of evil” (Harrison’s words on p. 81). This last theme, needless to say, calls to mind Smith’s gargantuan effort in The Wealth of Nations (1776) to prove that materialistic selfishness, when efficiently constrained by “the system of natural liberty,” can promote a society that is peaceful and law-abiding as well as industrious, affluent, and free (the volume’s most extensive and penetrating discussion of Augustine comes in the essay by Pabst, “From Civil to Political Economy”). In an essay that compares Smith with Calvin, Blosser points out that God “frequently accomplishes good works through wicked and corrupt people” (p. 48); along these lines, Oslington notes that Smith’s accounts of certain “irregularities” and “disorders” in our moral sentiments resemble the Calvinist emphasis on how the warped nature of human sensibilities limits the guidance we can derive from nature (p. 8), while Pabst argues that Smith’s defense of the market echoes the way that Augustine portrays the state as being both a vehicle of divine punishment and a remedy for sin (pp. 112–113).
Although the collection succeeds in describing a variety of theological configurations into which Smith’s writings could be placed, the analysis of Smith’s texts is often skimpy (perhaps the limitations of the conference format are visible here). In addition, no contributor discusses how either of Smith’s books is organized, or systematically analyzes any of their sections or subsections. The major defect of the volume, however, is that it persistently reads Smith’s later and longer book in the light of his earlier and shorter one. None of the contributors seems to have plowed carefully through The Wealth of Nations from cover to cover and noticed how secular, if not atheistic, it is; despite their repeated assertions that Smith’s teachings presuppose a providential God (pp. 5, 7, 10–11, 55, 71, 107, 108, 112, 117, 119), the contributors seem unaware that The Wealth of Nations never mentions God or Providence. The silence about God is particularly salient because of the book’s pervasive appeals to “nature,” its sweeping discussions of history (including church history), and its systematic analysis in Book V of “institutions . . . for religious instruction” (the only authors Smith cites in this section are Hume, Machiavelli, and Voltaire). Although Smith’s section on “the Education of Youth” offers a friendly reference to “the Deity,” it does so while commending the pagan philosophers who located the Deity among the “parts of the great system of the universe” (p. 770), and it proceeds to denounce the “debased” Christian philosophy that highlights the Deity’s rewards and punishments in “a life to come” (pp. 771–772). Brendan Long’s essay informs us that there are “403 substantive references to God” in Smith’s works (p. 99), but he seems oblivious to the absence of God in the 950 pages of Smith’s magnum opus.
As I have elsewhere elaborated at length (Minowitz Reference Minowitz1993), The Wealth of Nations ignores or trivializes the Bible, it relentlessly (albeit unobtrusively) dismisses the prospects of an afterlife, and it overlooks the contributions worship, prayer, ceremony, dogma, devotion, and piety make to religious vitality. Adam Smith as Theologian occasionally meshes with my argument: Oslington, Harrison, and Pabst acknowledge that there are significant contrasts between Smith’s two books (pp. 65, 83, 107); Oslington, Pabst, and others (Blosser, Ross B. Emmett, and Paul S. Williams) convey some of the religious skepticism that surfaces regularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (pp. 55–56, 96–97, 114, 126, 139); and Blosser concedes that virtuous works, for Smith, “do not get one saved or change one’s ontological status” (p. 51).
Although Smith, as Haldane and Blosser stress, issues striking praise of the “presbyterian” (i.e., Calvinist) clergy in Scotland, Holland, Geneva, and Switzerland, The Wealth of Nations treats churches as human institutions that should be assessed entirely in terms of their social, political, economic, and moral consequences. Needless to say, none of the contributors acknowledges Smith’s uncharacteristically splenetic suggestion that the medieval church was “the most formidable combination that was every formed against . . . the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind” (1776, pp. 802–803). And, although Blosser relays Smith’s lament about “the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” (1776, p. 788), none of the contributors acknowledges his critique of “penance” (p. 771) or his lament about “the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” (p. 796; “Science,” Smith adds, is “the great antidote”).
Had the authors been better attuned to such features of The Wealth of Nations, one may infer, they would have been more sensitive to the challenges to Christianity stated or implied in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, e.g., its erasure of Jesus Christ (Smith never mentions “Jesus” or “Christ” in any of his books, essays, or surviving manuscripts/letters). They would also have been more sensitive to the utilitarian strands in the latter book’s treatment of religion and to its deep skepticism about the prospect that God has participated in human affairs via covenant, incarnation, prophecy, or miracles; the book barely acknowledges the Bible.
Both Oslington (p. 65) and Eric Gregory (p. 43, n14) quote a dramatic statement from The Theory of Moral Sentiments—that everyone in the universe is under God’s “immediate care and protection,” a care designed to maintain “the greatest possible quantity of happiness” (1759, p. 235)—without noting its conditional character. Smith’s primary point here is that a person whose “good-will” embraces “the immensity of the universe” will be distraught unless s/he believes in a Providential God (by quoting the relevant sentence in its entirety, Blosser does better [p. 49]).
Contemporary economists are already tempted to dismiss Smith because his approach is so non-mathematical—there’s not a single graph in The Wealth of Nations—and readers persuaded by this volume might presume that, regarding religious and other matters, Smith was simply a creature of his time and place (see pp. 47–48, 88, 98). On this issue, I would commend the suggestions offered by Anthony Waterman in the volume’s preface: that “human sensibilities have not changed too much since Odysseus bade farewell to Penelope” and that “the human intellect is pretty much the same now as it was in the days of Moses and Thales” (p. ix).
Even if I am correct about Smith’s rejection of the Bible-based religions, finally, Adam Smith as Theologian is an indispensable work for at least two reasons. First, it provides anyone interested in Smith with a marvelous exploration of key theological themes, traditions, and practices with which he appears to have grappled. Second, it forces us to consider that the founder of modern economics may have been deliberately—and very subtly—using elements of Europe’s Christian heritage to advance a profoundly worldly agenda (for speculation about how Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke may have been comparably “appropriating” Christian doctrines, see Minowitz Reference Minowitz, Blitz and Kristol2000).
