ABSTRACT
Christian economists should […] read Munby […] for guidance and inspiration in the difficult intellectual and spiritual enterprise of relating economics to the faith.
(Waterman 1988)
In March 1962, Denys L. Munby gave the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King’s College, University of Durham. The lectures were published a year later, under the title The Idea of a Secular Society: And its Significance for Christians. Munby was an applied economist, a fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford, and a Christian (Waterman 1988). The latter was of particular importance for Munby’s lectures because they were designed as a response to T.S. Eliot’s famous lectures entitled The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). Schooled in the Christendom movement, which claimed Eliot as its own, Munby’s eventual training in economics brought him to a different understanding of the relation between social science, religion, and social policy. Where Eliot argued for a state that functioned according to Christian principles, Munby said that the church, had little to say about the functioning of the state, and made the case for specialized roles for religion and economics. Where Eliot believed that the church should comprehend the entire nation and that religious symbols and images were necessary for social unity, Munby argued that a secular society must accept religious diversity and reject unifying symbols that bore the stamp of particular religions. Where Eliot affirmed the permanence of traditional Christian values, and worried that the secular trend of social change would lead to a society that worshiped “gods that are not gods,” Munby believed that economic progress would lead to the enhanced satisfaction of many social values and could be pursued without necessarily threatening traditions and religious practices. In short, the differences between these two Christians’ understandings of society could not be more stark.
