Is Liberalism a Secular Religion?

It's Not, and it is Important Why

The French daily newspaper Le Monde published a week ago a provocative article titled “Liberalism, a Kind of Theology in Which the Market Figures as an All-Mighty God.”[1] The article develops at-length considerations about the theological nature of core liberal beliefs, quoting economists but also theologians. Though addressing “liberalism” in general, the article actually more specifically targets beliefs regarding the property of market mechanisms. The general idea is that liberals, reduced to market believers, are basically not different than religious believers worshipping a cult who are unable or unwilling to consider any revision of their dogmas.

The article relies on an old piece published in The Atlantic by the theologian Robert Cox eloquently called “The Market as God.” Here is how Cox’s article starts (part of it is quoted in Le Monde’s piece):

“A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.

Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.”

Le Monde’s article elaborates on the analogy, quoting another theologian, David Loy, observing that “economics, as a scientific discipline, is less a science than a theology of the [religion of the economic system.]” Loy’s point is that human societies need systems of beliefs and values to interpret the world, and as the influence of traditional religions weakens, economics and its god (the market) have emerged as a substitute promising “to offer secular salvation.” The article notes that the religious nature of the market economy has been noted and criticized by Pope Francis, which in turn has triggered a backlash from a large range of political and economic actors in the U.S. According to the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, this is symptomatic of the fact that “market fundamentalism” is widely shared across the ideological spectrum in the U.S. and presumably elsewhere in the Western world.[2]

The article then goes on to argue that the theological nature of liberal beliefs in the superiority of market mechanisms explains why, facing the environmental crisis, liberal democracies are unable to depart from the idea that if any solution is possible at all, it must be based on market mechanisms… even though the latter are responsible for the environmental crisis. As one would have expected, we are told that market fundamentalists venerate Adam Smith, though they have completely misunderstood Smith’s concept of the invisible hand. The rest of the article is in the same vein.

I’ve been hesitating to write this post because, in a way, Le Monde’s article probably doesn’t deserve to be highlighted and commented on. It repeats old ideas (Cox’s article is from 1999) based on a completely superficial analogy that, ultimately, doesn’t help to explain how and why what is sometimes called “neoliberalism” has risen to dominance in the 1980s and 1990s.[3] Still, several aspects are worth addressing. First, the conflation of liberalism with “market fundamentalism,” though common (especially in France, despite the country’s long liberal history), is a red herring that needs to be corrected. Second, the implicit thesis is that the very fact that liberalism is a “theology” is enough to disqualify it. The problem is that the religion/liberalism analogy seems to equally apply to all ideological systems, whatever they are. What makes liberalism special? Third and relatedly, if we take seriously the analogy, then we might wonder if liberalism is what Raymond Aron’s famously called – in the case of communism – a “secular religion.”[4]     

Aron’s account of secular religions identifies a small set of properties that are necessary and sufficient for an ideology to count as such. Indeed, not all ideologies are secular religions. At the time Aron was writing on this topic (mostly in the 1950s), other ideologies than communism could be identified (Aron mentions nationalism and democracy). Commitment to ideas, beliefs, and values is the constitutive characteristic of what it is to adhere to an ideology. In a broad understanding, ideologies are frameworks to explain, interpret, and interact with the external world. In this sense, ideologies are necessary resources for men and societies to compose with their historical nature. You need ideologies to construct and interpret the past, to form a vision of the future, and to act in the present. We may expect that the various commitments that are constitutive of an adhesion to an ideology may vary in strength. Some of them can be easily changed, others are more essential in the sense that giving them up would shake the whole ideological edifice. The point however is that being strongly committed to a set of values or beliefs (e.g., that market mechanisms are in general superior to any other allocation mechanisms) is not enough to characterize a theological or religious phenomenon, because then all ideologies are religious in this sense.

What according to Aron set communism (and also Nazism) apart was a bunch of features coming on top of “normal” ideological commitments. Some of these features were “praxeological,” for instance the use of mass propaganda techniques. Others were related to the content of the ideological system based on the Manichean identification of enemies and friends. The last and fundamental feature is that secular religions are doctrines of temporal salvation based on deterministic and totalizing philosophies of history.[5] These philosophies of history identify a final goal and provide a complete justification to use all required means to reach this goal.

Considering the function of secular religions, Aron makes a point that interestingly echoes at the same time Loy’s point mentioned above that they serve as a substitute in the context of a weakening of traditional religions but also the Hayekian claim that human societies and beings have a natural propensity to tribalism:

“In our epochs, political beliefs sometimes serve as substitutes for properly religious beliefs, or, put differently, religious sentiments that are unused when faith has disappeared are kept alive in and transfigure political convictions. Scientific knowledge of the world advances, the rational organization of society is perfected, but the ordinary man often understands social mechanisms less the more technically subtle they are, and the misfortunes that strike him – economic crisis, unemployment, war – remain just as mysterious to him as cosmic phenomena. Thus, political religions, with their sacred books, with their devils and their saints, their interpretations of history and their prophecies, are only paradoxical in appearance: they express revolt against a destiny that is not understood, they gather passions that have no object.”[6]

If we accept this characterization of the nature and the function of secular religion, we understand why liberalism, even in its neoliberal version, does not fully qualify. First, secular religions are essentially state religions. They are orchestrated by the state with all the coercive and non-coercive means at its disposal, including mass propaganda techniques. While it is true that the “neoliberal turn” of the 1980s has been largely impulse by state authorities, it has not relied on totalitarian means to do so. This leads to a second difference, which is that secular religions aim to convert the masses, while neoliberalism has essentially addressed the elites. That explains why the neoliberal turn tends to be perceived by critics as nondemocratic and technocratic, precisely because it builds on an ideology not addressed to the laymen. This leads to a third difference, namely that “market fundamentalism” is unlikely to solve the Hayekian concern that the Great Society is inimical to our tribalistic tendencies, while secular religions are directly designed to address this concern.

We may still argue that “neoliberalism” retains some features of secular religions. For instance, we may admit that there is a neoliberal philosophy of history that identifies at least two kinds of inevitabilities: the inevitable totalitarian slope if the state is permitted to interfere with human affairs at all and the inevitable development of markets once statist and collectivist barriers gave way. Both beliefs have been proven to be false may they continue to be held in some neoliberal circles.

Now, as I said, Le Monde’s article dishonestly reduces “liberalism” to “market fundamentalism” and whatever one thinks of what I’ve just written, this only applies to the latter but not the former. Liberalism is a complex ideology with strongly entrenched commitments to specific values and beliefs for sure, but it would be nonsensical (or uninformative) to interpret it as a secular religion. If anything, 20th-century liberalism has largely evolved as a response to the catastrophic consequences of quasi-religious beliefs in the inevitable fate of humanity and the practices that they justified. Referring again to Aron, liberalism is a philosophy of pluralism (or “plurality”) that rejects the very idea that history has an end and an overall meaning that transcends historical contingencies and the diversity of human values and interests.[7] All the ideological commitments constitutive of liberalism broadly speaking (value pluralism, the particular importance of negative freedom and individual autonomy, respect for persons and their moral equality) are conceived to make sure that there is no natural form of external authority justifying the coercion of people to adopt a particular way of life. The only legitimate forms of authority are those that individuals have reasons to accept in a context where they reciprocally treat everyone else as moral equals. This does not imply “market fundamentalism,” though that does imply that unless provided strong reasons to the contrary, we should leave people free to produce, consume, and use resources as they want. Liberalism is dogmatic in a way, as all ideologies are, but this is the only dogmatism that is compatible with the respect of persons.        

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[1] The original French title is “Le libéralisme, une forme de théologie où le marché est érigé en dieu tout puissant.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the article has been translated in the English version of the newspaper.

[2] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (New York London Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023).

[3] For that, it’s better to look for serious intellectual histories, e.g., Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012).; Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[4] Raymond Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 1955 [2010]).

[5] See Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 94.

[6] Quoted in Ibid, p. 100-1.

[7] Raymond Aron, Dimensions de la conscience historique, 1er édition (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011).