Globalization and the Kingdom of God
Bob Goudzwaard
Edited by James W. Skillen
The Center for Public Justice, Washington, D.C.
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2001
123 pages

This publication by the Center for Public Justice contains a major essay by Bob Goudzwaard, professor emeritus, Free University of Amsterdam. Three others--Brian Fikkert, Larry Reed and Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra--provide responses to Goudzwaard's essay. James W. Skillen gives a useful and substantial summary of the arguments at the end of the book. Goudzwaard tackles his theme in two steps: description and evaluation. To avoid the temptation of talking about globalization in overly vague or prematurely theological terms, Goudzwaard grounds his evaluation of globalization in empirical description--"the leading factual processes of our day"; "the multiplicity of factual processes." His method is to move from this factual level to the underlying cultural level and finally penetrate to "religious drives."

Goudzwaard selects, among the current factual processes, international finance and its role in globalization. He observes that less than five percent of international money transfers are for buying and selling existing goods and services in the real sphere. The other 95 percent are purely financial transactions. There is a trillion-dollar circuit of international finance driven by speculation about currency rate changes, product price changes and share price shifts. This is a new development in our world.

Goudzwaard then observes how secular people tend to view these massive currency shifts as a morally neutral process in an autonomous mechanical system of supply and demand. This way of thinking masks, however, that these capital transfers are truly moral decisions by individual human beings and groups. These human decisions, in turn, have far-reaching moral consequences for the economic stability and health of particular nations and for the health of the physical environment. To view economic transactions, like global capital flow, in a mechanical way, in fact is a social mental habit resulting from a century-long process of moral distortion.

In a second step of analysis, Goudzwaard observes that the global economy can survive only by "demand management," that is by shaping people through information and images, to believe it is natural and right to want ever more and new products. A corrupt ideology has hypnotized modern people, Goudzwaard says. This ideology teaches that more and bigger, driven through competition, is always better, despite the increase of global poverty and environmental degradation. This ideology, like the ideologies of Communism and Fascism, have wreaked ruin in human culture in recent centuries.

The antidote Goodzwaard proposes to this destructive, hypnotic ideological condition in culture is a reawakening of Christian faith. Christians should awaken to the childishness of a worldview that wants unlimited consumption, that keeps people dissatisfied with sufficiency. Christian faith should push toward a more mature view of life that favors manysided development rather than a simple-minded, ceaseless increase in material things

Specific steps toward a more mature worldview would include government reform of international finance, government construction of global information exchange, and protection of the human environment. These are Goudzwaard's practical proposals in the second half of his essay. Brian Fikkert's response to Goodzwaard's article questions where the radical transformation of the heart, which Goodwaard's proposals presuppose, is going to come from. Fikkert points out that the churches need a Christian reawakening, not just national governments. As the level of practice, Fikkert recommends attention to the micro level to balance policies of working at the international and national governmental levels.

In his response, Mr. Larry Reed develops Fikkert's suggestion of working at the micro-level. Reed advocates micro credit organizations, which provide individuals sufficient low-cost capital to strengthen their own individual, family and village economic conditions. People living in Western nations can also work at the local level of families to raise consciousness about earning, spending and consumer habits that have impact all around the world.

In his response, Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra, an economist, stresses the need to challenge the standard mechanical and morally neutral model of economic transactions in favor of a moral model governed by God's norms for God's creation. In a separate note he offers, "A Note for Economists on Arrow's General Possibility Theorem."

Goudzwaard rightly says at the beginning of his essay that Christians should not condemn globalization. After all, globalization is about God's beloved creation, and Christians are obliged to care for and about what God created and cares about. Christians should be concerned with what the Bible refers to as "the fullness of life" for all people. Further, the Church is intended to be a global community; so globalization per se is not wrong. Thus, the Church should not demonize globalization from the start.

Goudzwaard also claims at the beginning of his essay that "the main frontier in the development of human society today is undoubtedly the international arena, particularly the economic and technological dimensions of that arena." However, a fuller account of today's international society would also have to include an account of a development that is opposite that of global communication and cooperation. This other trend is the on-going fragmentation of our world through the crystallization of very different cultural and civilization centers. Two volumes that describe and analyze this trend is Samuel P. Huntington's, The Clash of Civilizations: The New Shaping of World Politics in the 21st Century (1997) and Bassam Tibi's The Challenge of Fundmamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (1998). Both books underscore the role of religion, among other cultural factors, as a factor in dividing nations, ethnic groups and cultural communities. The world is experiencing religion, as the West did during the Thirty Years War, as a cause of division, conflict, distrust and aggression.

Therefore, people outside the churches, if not Christian themselves, are doubtful today that religion, including the churches (which at the deepest levels of belief and worship cannot find unity) can be a resource for international corporate action. Goodzwaard may be right that Christian analysis should move from the surface of global practices down through cultural attitudes to the deepest causal level--religious beliefs. But at the deepest level, many observers today think, the problems of international cooperation, justice and environmental protection really begin rather than find the bases for their solution.