Free Market Catholics Lose Faith

If I read the signs aright, many politically conservative Christians, Catholics and Evangelicals both, are now shifting in their attitude to the state, to a new assertion not just of the limits and dangers of the market but of the need for a welfare and regulatory government. They haven’t become old-fashioned socialists or even social democrats. They still believe in a capitalist economy, but want to restrict, temper, and even direct it in a way much more “liberal” than their movement has allowed since the 1970s.

That’s my argument in today’s column for Aleteia, Free-Market Catholics are Losing Their Faith (in Capitalism). In it I try to describe what I see among some hitherto politically and economically conservative Catholics, who have begun to take a much more skeptical view of the market than they had and hold a more positive view of the state.

It relates to the shift on racial issues and the attitude to the state and the marginalized I described in Conservatives v. the Police and Russell Moore on Race, Particularly Eric Garner.  How it relates, I’m not sure, since on one matter these conservatives are becoming more skeptical of the state and on the other more affirming.