Faith can restore values to marketplace, says Costa

|PIC1|Speaking at a seminar on faith in the marketplace last night, Ken Costa said the single most important factor in the economic crisis was a breakdown in trust between the public, corporations and their shareholders, regulators and the government. Any recovery of the global economy, he said, would require the rebuilding of trust.

“Our values have shifted from a culture of trust to a culture of self first,” he said. “Religious faith can help us articulate values and provide a motivating spirit to generate and to sustain a culture of trust that needs to be recovered in the marketplace if it is to be effective.

“Thus faith is not only compatible with globalisation. It has a vital role to play in ensuring the very possibility of globalisation.”

While banking chiefs should apologise for their role in the crisis, Mr Costa said forgiveness was also needed in order to bring closure and allow society to move on.

Faith, he continued, could not be separated from the marketplace because companies were hiring increasing numbers of people with a faith.

“Since faith matters to people it matters to markets,” he said.

Mr Costa said people of faith had failed to apply their faith to the marketplace, being encouraged instead to leave it at home.

“The reality is that religious believers possess tremendous resources to promote exactly the sort of values that are required to build solid foundations for the global economy,” he said.

“Religious believers are well placed to building up a market place concerned not only with producing goods and services but to producing those things that really are good and of service.

“And this service ethic – the love of God and of neighbour – is central, albeit in different ways, to the world’s great religions.”

Also speaking at the seminar was Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University.

|QUOTE|He said that the issue of ethics and actions needed to be brought back into the discussion on politics and economics and that people of faith needed to become more competent in expressing their ideas about the economy.

“We come with values and we come with objectives but very often when it comes to the economy we don’t come with the competence,” he said. “It’s as if we are dreaming a world without having the means to change.

“This is where we need now to come not only with our religious traditions but also competence, knowledge of how we can change it within to reform the system.”

He said that the economy was one area in which people of different faiths and none could build an alliance based on their common ethics.

“We should not build walls around our traditions but open up the universal dimension of our principles in the name of our tradition and in the name of competence and this is where lots of people in the world of economics can help us. They may not talk about God but they may talk about the same values as us,” he said.

The Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, quoted a sermon by the present Archbishop of Canterbury who had asked people to consider for whom their money was good news.

Dr Fraser said that the wealth generated by capitalism was good news for “far too few”.

“You can tell what your values are by going home and taking out your bank statement and seeing what you spend it on,” he said. “That is where your values are revealed. For whom is your money good news?”

He went on to question economist Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand, whereby prospering oneself inadvertently prospers others.

He said: “Christianity has it almost the other way around. If you work for the prosperity of others there is some invisible hand that will, as it were, do for you.”

The seminar was the second in a series on faith and development being held jointly over the next month by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, DFID, World Vision, Islamic Relief, Oxfam and the RSA.