[Rodney] Stark acknowledges the difficulty with the word capitalism, because it began as a pejorative term applied by leftist scribblers against wealth and privilege. But the thing capitalism had been around for a long time, as Stark shows. The first robust forms of it were recognizable as early as the ninth century — distinctively Christian through and through.

The reason this tickles me so much is that this is almost one thousand years before Adam Smith. One of the things that modern Christian defenders of capitalism have to contend with as we debate these issues with fellow Christians is the idea that our “capitalism” is a syncretistic compromise with the Scottish Enlightenment, or with economists of the Austrian school who don’t believe in God. Our zeal for freedom in economics must be a modernist adaptation, a departure from earlier Trinitarian categories. But, as Stark shows, this is “wouldn’t it be nice?” history.

The three pillars of “capitalism” are free markets, free labor, and secure property. All of that was there centuries before Adam Smith, developed, nurtured, and defended by a Christian civilization. And they were developed, nurtured, and defended in no other civilization. And then, when modernity did arrive, the modernists waltzed in and seized houses they did not build and wells they did not dig, and said, “Look what we did!” The tragedy is that many Christians believed them.

Douglas Wilson, reviewing Victory of Reason.