“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” early church father Tertullian famously asked, sparking a centuries-old conversation about the relationship between religion and philosophy. Similarly, one might wonder today what law and political economy (LPE) has to do with Christian legal thought. Indeed, given the prevailing political winds, one might even share Professor Amy Kapczynski’s concern that American Christian theocracy may seek to latch onto market critiques as a part of forcing the vast power of the administrative state toward traditionalism. Yet in today’s polarized political discourse, it is easy to forget that the Bible’s economic values align better with LPE’s market critiques than with the neo-liberal right’s twentieth-century synthesis, and it would be a mistake, we believe, to surrender these resources to the post-liberal right.
As Christians and legal scholars who work in bankruptcy law, labor law, and poverty law, we perceive some overlap and promise for collaboration between these traditions, which we attempt to sketch out in miniature here. Of course, we can only gesture at some points of common ground: Christian legal thought has a literature that is thousands of years in the making, tracing back to the New Testament and early Christian practice, and LPE’s burgeoning literature is hard to keep up with, even for the most assiduous readers.
To make the connection between Christian legal thought and LPE, let’s start with some of the foundational premises of LPE. First, LPE underscores that markets are not self-sufficient but rather are products of law; the shape of markets is set by public values. Second, LPE aims to render visible the normative implications of efficiency thinking, driving public policy that is attentive not only to economic growth but also to economic justice. That analysis involves both historical and contemporary excavation, since many of our most popular metrics for measuring the economy, like the GDP or the unemployment rate, miss crucial aspects of how well the economy is working for everyone.
Christian legal thinkers should have a lot to say about all of this. The Christian Bible alone contains over 2,000 verses on poverty, justice, and compassion. Many of these verses use language that LPE scholars embrace. For example, Christian Scripture does not presume the existence of free and fair markets but instead calls on God’s people to build them. In passage after passage, the Bible calls for fair measures and honesty in commercial dealings (e.g., Deuteronomy 25:13–15, Proverbs 16:11).
How does this translate to modern day legal debates? In Harsh Creditor Remedies and the Role of the Redeemer, one of us (Hampson) has argued that restrictions on harsh debt collection measures help to protect the private law status of contracts. If we allow private parties to contract for harsh remedies like imprisonment for debt, those with familial or personal relationships to the debtor will be induced to pay the debt on their behalf, even if they are not legally obligated to do so. In this way, legal restrictions on debt collection, found in federal statutes like the FDCPA and state statutes like Florida’s FCCPA, help preserve the private nature of debt markets. Yet those kinds of restrictions are present in biblical law too, including ancient limits on disposition of collateral and debt collection methods (Exodus 22:26, Deuteronomy 24:10–13).
These commitments to fundamental fairness can also drive observations about contemporary bankruptcy law. For example, in Bankrupting Labor Power, one of us (Velazquez) argues that if corporations are to receive forgiveness for their torts in bankruptcy, then courts should also make that same forgiveness available to labor unions who engage in tortious conduct when they engage in causing labor strife. To do otherwise would be to make forgiveness of debts available to a powerful party, but not the weaker party on the same terms.
To take a different example, the Bible has anti-monopoly themes that resonate with LPE literature as well. In The Spirit of Jubilee, one of us (Hampson) argues that the Jubilee provisions of the Hebrew Bible operate to counteract monopoly, exploitation, and price gouging. By forgiving debts and releasing enslaved people on a regular basis, the Jubilee demands fair pricing for labor and land and ensures that every community can profit from their labor. These Jubilee texts come alongside fiery, prophetic denunciations of the accumulation of wealth that squeezes others out of the land (Nehemiah 5:1–13, Amos 5:11, 8:5–6, Micah 2:1–2, Isaiah 5:8). Similarly, the Bible contains workplace rhetoric that stands as an indictment against American labor law’s failure to ameliorate rampant wage inequality. At different times in America’s history—particularly during the 19th century and again during the Great Depression—it was common to hear from professing Christians that allied themselves with workers, as when Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement offered a staunch defense of labor unions.
The fact that Christian groups historically supported the work of labor unions should not be surprising. The Bible condemns those who exploit their workers (Isaiah 58:3), fail to pay those who labored for them (Deuteronomy 24:14–15, Jeremiah 22:13), or hoard their wealth (James 5:1–5). The first major work attesting religious support for labor unions was Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum” in 1891. It cites the Bible to condemn the exercise of pressure “upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another.” LPE work concerning workplace justice, including entries on this blog by Andrias, Coburn, Dubal, Reddy, and Velazquez, echo the moral values defended in Rerum Novarum. These scholars and others have examined how labor law subordinates low-wage workers and have called for a reimagining of labor law and its relationship to the constitutional order using a moral lens.
In many ways, Christian theology provides frameworks not only for analyzing law, but also for reforming it. That is why one of us (Velazquez) has argued in recently published work that the Christian Bible provides much “grist” for LPE scholars to work with in developing and morally defending a new labor law. Elsewhere, both of us have drawn upon religious themes of death, resurrection, and renewal in calling for legal reform. For instance, in The Death of Labor Law and the Rebirth of the Labor Movement, Velazquez argues that one of the most effective ways to resurrect labor law’s promise of protecting workers is to let the Supreme Court do away with the National Labor Relations Act and return labor law to “the law of the jungle, the law of the streets,” in the hopes of a new accord between capital and labor. Similarly, Hampson’s essay The Spirit of Jubilee draws on the biblical idea of a once-in-a-generation reset.
None of this is to say that the overlap between LPE and Christian legal thought is complete. Christians who theorize about law are as diverse as they come. It is not obvious that Christian legal theory is any one thing — or even that it should be. Indeed, a recent gathering of Christian scholars that we co-organized alongside our colleague Jennifer Lee Koh at Pepperdine Law School demonstrates an amazing diversity of methodological and normative approaches to the study of legal doctrine and its application to what the Bible calls “the least of these” (Matthew 25:45–47). Over the previous decades and centuries, Christian legal thinkers have operated alongside the frameworks of natural law theory, the economic analysis of law, critical legal theory, critical race theory, and more. They may have other commitments and motivations, most of which do not relate directly to secular or pluralistic legal systems. That is because much of the Christian life is rooted not in high theory but in daily living. The same could be said about lawyering, as Professor Koh illustrates in her empirical analysis of Christian attorneys, Christian Lawyers in the Public Interest and Outside the Political Right. Indeed, many Christian thinkers are invested in exploring how virtue ethics might play into legal theories, especially after the resurgence of virtue ethics in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.
To be clear, we share Kapczynski’s concerns about the potential rise of a post-neoliberal, theocratic right. Yet our own response to American theocracy cannot be to abandon theological discourse to the theocrats, right-wing or otherwise. Indeed, if LPE scholars hope to reach the 63% of Americans who identify as Christians and theorize the work of Christians who engage in public interest work outside of the political right, then it is worthwhile for the LPE movement to welcome theological discourse and engage with it on its own terms. It is that belief that has motivated us to write this blog post making our foundational commitments and scholarly motivations plain. For example, several of Velazquez’s entries on this blog have been shaped by theological insights even when they are not explicitly made. This revelation may be surprising for some readers, but the reality is that the “history of the Christian left has often been genuinely intersectional,” in that it brought together groups that usually do not ally themselves with one another.
In that spirit, we urge LPE blog readers to be prepared for conversations across lines of religious or philosophical difference. We think it can only deepen the discussion over the nature of law and the economy.
