Capitalism, Poverty and Christian Charity

By no later than the thirteenth century, the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism—profits, property rights, credit, lending, and the like … Capitalism was fully and finally freed of all fetters of faith.
                                                    —Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity

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Rodney Stark is a fan of both Roman Catholicism and capitalism. He sees the former as being instrumental in the rise of the latter and much more profoundly so than Weber’s Protestant work ethic. Whether Catholicism or Protestantism was most responsible for spurring economic progress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond can be debated. What I believe to be true is that across all of its denominational variants, Christianity is bound together in a holy and secular alliance with capitalism. This is not universally appreciated. It should be, as I hope to explain.

Christianity views this life as…