Christianity, Commerce, and Consumerism: The Last 1,000 Years

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How did the most capitalist and consumerist societies in the history of the world emerge from a religious culture that was deeply suspicious of commerce, regarded money as dangerous, and condemned avarice as a deadly sin? This lecture course seeks to answer this question by beginning in the Middle Ages c. 1000, before the emergence of a monetized, market economy, we will be able to see the effects of novel human behaviors on medieval Christians, and the ways in which they responded to them within the institutionalized worldview of Latin Christendom. By pursuing the impact of the changes wrought by the Reformation, from the sixteenth century down to the present, it explores how economics eventually came to be institutionalized and regarded by large numbers of Christians, and in the last century by increasing numbers of non-Christians, as a domain of human life separate from religion and ethics. All along the way it considers ideas, beliefs, practices, social relationships, the pursuit of knowledge, and institutions in their complex relationships to human desires, aspirations, and the exercise of power.