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- Peter Heslam reflects on JustShare’s May Day activities 2002

Businesses face new challenges in the 21st century. While capitalism is helping to produce opportunities for entrepreneurship, income generation and development, it's also contributing to the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the destruction of the environment. This presents a unique dilemma for Christians - on the one hand, from the story of creation, we believe that business and wealth creation are essentially good. On the other hand, we believe the love of money (not money itself) is a root of evil - and a major cause of human and environmental impoverishment today.

Christians must wrestle with the fact that God affirms both wealth creation and caring for the earth and its inhabitants. In fact, the two are inextricably linked. The biblical stories of incarnation and redemption remind us that the material and the spiritual are not diametrically opposed worlds. In assuming physical form, Jesus affirmed the value of the material world. In his death and resurrection he provided for the renewal of the material world and its liberation from the effects of sin.

From a concern to help Christians engage with these issues, LICC helped to spearhead JustShare, an initiative involving a series of events and lectures on May Day focusing global economic justice. Some might think that anti-capitalist demonstrations couldn't be a conducive context in which to celebrate the value of business and its task of wealth creation.

Actually, we believed that they could be.

It hinges on what wealth creation actually means. The word wealth is based on the Old English word weal, which conveys the idea of overall well-being, like the Hebrew word shalom. Creating wealth, then, is not merely about making a profit - though profit is obviously necessary for a business to stay in business. It's about increasing prosperity in the holistic sense of the word. It's about increasing the common weal (from which we derive our term commonwealth).

Here lies the reason Calvin regarded the market not as a means of sel-gratification but as a vehicle of human service. And why Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of modern capitalism, argued that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit but to increase general welfare.

Perhaps, then, today's so-called anti-capitalists have got a point when they allege that business often has insufficient regard for some of the things that contribute to the common good. Things like justice, equity, freedom, opportunity and the protection of the earth.

Such an allegation does not deny the value of business. Nor does it challenge the obvious benefits of globalisation. Rather, it draws attention to what few people today are prepared to deny - that under the impact of some contemporary business practice, the poor are denied opportunity, democracy is put in jeopardy, human rights are abused and the environment is ravaged.

On May Day, JustShare explored how we can find positive alternatives to this scenario by taking a fresh look at Scripture. The response has been heartening. Fifteen organizations responded to the intitiative, and the lectures and events we organized were well supported. We even got coverage on Radio 4 and a meeting with cabinet ministers! An informal trans-atlantic alliance is now in the pipeline - with the US-based coalition Call to Renewal, which has gained considerable influence in American churches and society. It is headed up by Jim Wallis, one of our JustShare lecturers.

JustShare is just one of the initiatives in which LICC's Capitalism Project is involved. But is shows us how well-researched and biblically-based material can forward the debate, whether you tend to right-wing or left-wing solutions.

Want to know more? Check out www.justshare.org.uk or contact Peter Heslam at peter.heslam@licc.org.uk or on 020-73999555.

Peter Heslam

This article first appeared in the July 2002 edition of Workwise (issue 8, p. 9).