Books: Christian Worldview vs. Fatalistic Religions
Why Some Societies Rich, Others Poor?
By Robert Osburn
Udo Middelmann’s latest book, Christianity Versus Fatalistic Religions in the War Against Poverty, aims to clear away cobwebs of confusion about why some societies are prosperous and others are poor. Because, he argues, a biblical worldview corresponds to reality as it objectively is, human societies that live by its injunctions and its understanding of what it means to be human will fare better than others.
By contrast, fatalistic worldviews (whether found in animist, Islamist, Buddhist, or materialist societies) render the human person helpless before the environment, tyranny, genetics, or some other larger force, and thus poor. Fatalist religions are recipes for failure in struggling against all manner of individual and societal breakdown, including poverty.
Middelmann is president of the Swiss-based Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation, and he writes, of course, in the tradition of Max Weber, the great German sociologist of a century ago who examined the impact of Protestant ideas on Western economic growth.
Contemporaries in this tradition include Harvard’s David Landes and Lawrence Harrison, the late Roman Catholic scholar Christopher Dawson, and Protestant evangelicals of our era such as Indian social reformer Vishal Mangalwadi and Darrow Miller, who formerly served as vice president of Food for the Hungry and is a founder of the Disciple Nations Alliance.
The text reads more like an extended argument, but it reflects Middelmann’s characteristic phenomenological sensitivity and his desire to account for and relate to the experience of human persons. A similar approach is evident in previous works such as Pro-Existence, The Market-Driven Church, and The Innocence of God.
Interspersed throughout Christianity Versus Fatalistic Religions in the War Against Poverty are extended reflections on New Testament passages which are interpreted through the author’s biblically rooted worldview grid. What the book does not offer are hard statistics, moving testimonials, or a list of Scripture references on development. While the statistics would have brought additional validity to his already strong argument, evangelical literature is replete with testimonials and lists of Bible passages, often with little benefit.
How will the burgeoning world of development practitioners assess the book and its central message that a biblical worldview is the most important element in determining development outcomes?
Postmoderns perhaps will all-too-easily dismiss the book because Middelmann largely fails to address the structural and institutional dimension of poverty and injustice. Such critics are right that the poor often suffer serious disempowerment, as World Vision’s Jayakumar Christian argues in another book on the subject. But they are wrong when they fail to recognize that the responsibility to empower the poor is itself an ethical obligation that arises uniquely within the framework of a biblical worldview.
Mainstream development practitioners schooled in the materialist worldview are likely to fault Middelmann for seeming to ignore the way that physical, material inputs in fact make a real difference in development outcomes. Middelmann is not unaware of this concern, however, and agrees at various points in the text that immediate physical needs must be addressed before one discusses the question of a given culture’s complicity in suffering and poverty.
Precisely because he is not a utopian (Middelmann spends a whole chapter on this), I doubt that one can accuse Middelmann of monocausalism, that is, attributing poverty and suffering to one cause (bad worldviews) alone. As powerful and persuasive as Middelmann’s argument is, one wishes that he had provided illustrations of how one prods and encourages whole groups to turn from false worldviews to a biblically based worldview.
Implicitly, we are left to assume that Christian conversion is the primary means by which social groups experience a worldview transformation, but the Protestant evangelical focus on individual conversion (as opposed to group conversion) throws a fly into the transformational ointment: If only individuals change their worldviews, affecting only their “microculture,” as it were, how then will the larger social system be converted away from the fatalistic status quo that Middelmann rightly decries?
In one case with which I am familiar, individual converts were forced to leave the existing social system (community) and begin a new community where they are able to practice a biblical worldview rooted in Creator-given information. And, in the case of this new community, there has indeed been a dramatic decrease in poverty and a concomitant overall increase in development that is unmistakably correlated with the embrace of evangelical Christianity.
These concerns aside, Middelmann’s book is a strong and vital addition to the growing body of development literature which argues that, when it comes to development, culture matters more than anything else. His argument, as I began this review, is clear and compelling. Those who seek humane answers and reality-oriented principles to achieve substantial success in the war against poverty need this book on their bookshelves, in their minds, and in the trenches.
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Robert Osburn., Ph.D., is executive director of Wilberforce Academy. This article was published Aug. 28, 2009.
