Coca-Cola

(L to R) Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Coca-Cola Polar Bear, and Archbishop Demetrios

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Demetrios paid a visit to Coca-Cola world headquarters last week to meet with Muhtar Kent, president and chief executive officer of the company. It is a striking image here: Two hierarchs from the ancient see of Constantinople meeting with the mascot of a company that is the symbol par excellence of economic and cultural globalization.

One of the pleasant surprises in the Patriarch’s book “Encountering the Mystery” was his assertion that “the Orthodox Church is not opposed to an economic progress that serves humanity as a whole.” This is about 180 degrees from what you usually hear from Old World hierarchs, who so often condemn globalization and its chief architect, “the West.” In truth, there’s a bit of that in Bartholomew’s views, but more balance. Unfortunately, like other Orthodox hierarchs, he continues to view economic activity as a zero sum game — whoever gains does so by taking from someone else. There’s no real understanding of how wealth is created or how the market economy, despite its uneven benefits, is the most effective means of eliminating dire poverty. (See “Socialism Kills: The Human Cost of Delayed Economic Reform in India” by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar at the Cato Institute).

Case in point. In the year 2000, SCOBA issued the A Pastoral Letter on the Occasion of the Third Christian Millennium, a statement which acknowledged how the faithful suffered under communism but, in the next breath, said this:

We acknowledge that our capitalist system is no less predicated on purely materialist principles, which also do not engender faith in God. There is no place in the calculus of our economics to account for the “intangibles” of human existence. Reflect on how the simple accounting phrase “the bottom line” has shaped our whole culture. We use it to force the summarization of an analysis devoid of any externals or irrelevancies to the “heart of the matter.” This usually means the monetary outcome.

This is a deplorable bit of moral relativizing, on the economic plane, which trivializes the great catastrophe that afflicted Orthodox Christian churches under the communists, and is blind to the ways that the bishops’ American flock — with its glittering, air-conditioned neo-Byzantine churches dotting the landscape — has flourished in a market economy. This is not incidental to the American Orthodox experience; the vast majority of Orthodox Christians who immigrated to this country did so in pursuit of the “American dream,” another way to say “economic liberty.” Continue reading →