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DURING HOLY WEEK OF 1947, in a smoky room of the Hotel du Parc overlooking Lake Geneva, Austrian economist Fredrich Hayek opened the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the invitation-only fraternity that formed the nucleus of the soi-disant international neoliberal thought collective.1 In his initial remarks to some forty collaborators from Europe and the United States, Hayek outlined the three critical topics that the group would consider in order to arrive at the Society's fundamental principles: "the relation between 'free enterprise' and a competitive order; the interpretation and teaching of history; and the relationship between liberalism and Christianity;"2 There could be no hope for a renovation of classical liberalism, no off-ramp from the road to serfdom, if the assembled could not reunite "true liberal and religious convictions" that had been torn asunder by the French Revolution.3 The guests spent Good Friday-the somber commemoration of Christ's agony on the cross- discussing the market order's dependence on religion. Then on Holy Saturday, the nascent neoliberals traveled together to the magnificent Benedictine abbey at Einsiedeln and stood vigil for the entombed Christ as they anticipated His glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday.4
At its very founding, then, the intellectual architects of the self-described neoliberal movement centered Christian theology and worship itself. Despite the rich body of scholarship on the origins and trajectory of neoliberalism, very little of it has cast light on the centrality of Christian theology or practice to that bundle of economic theories.5 The most common optic in the American academy, rather, has been the doctrines of the Chicago School economists. These thinkers-many the children of Eastern European Jews who had fled murderous antisemitism-were notably impervious to Christian claims of moral superiority, and exalted rational quantitative expertise as an allegedly value-free tool.6 More instrumentally, Frederich Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society's reigning intellect among much of its American wing, valued religion for its capacity to inculcate the key virtue demanded by the competitive market order. "It doesn't matter whether beliefs are true or false," wrote Hayek. "What really matters is that we should obey those beliefs. I am not religious myself, but I notice that religion has civilized people by making them obey"7 Both committed secularists and cynical pragmatists, in other words, have certainly flourished in...