Adam Smith's Quiet Christianity

THE SCOTTISH THINKER’S FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP WITH DAVID HUME DEMONSTRATES HIS LIBERALISM, NOT HIS ATHEISM.

- DEIRDRE NANSEN McCLOSKEY

AMONG ADAM SMITH’S scant surviving papers, one can’t find a flat statement such as “I attend every Sunday Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church on Jeffrey Street.” The phrase “the invisible hand” had some theological resonance at the time. Yet it is grossly overquoted by people who have not actually read Smith and instead want a bumper sticker. Smith used it only three times in all his surviving writings, once in each of his two published books and once in an unpublished treatise on astronomy. In each, it is used in diverging senses.

But the Australian economist and Christian theologian Paul Oslington, who has read Smith, argues persuasively that numerous words and phrases in Smith’s writings, such as “natural,” and such rotundities as “the Author of nature” or “the invisible hand,” stand for “the Christian doctrine of divine providential care for humanity.” Adam Smith, in short, was a Christian.

Smith was continuing in secular matters the project of “natural theology,” a theology dear to, say, Isaac Newton. In a phrase that goes back to Thomas Aquinas, God’s “other book” was physical nature. But, said Smith, it was social nature too. The word nature and its compounds are extraordinarily frequent in Smith. The term appears 670 times in Wealth of Nations and 520 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Seldom does it refer, as after Darwin we would suppose, merely to the natural physical world. Overwhelmingly it is used in Wealth of Nations in an economic-psychological sense and in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in a social-theological sense.