Born in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, in 1933, and dying 83 years later in Washington, D.C., the theologian Michael Novak lived a 20th-century life. The author of numerous books and countless essays and articles, Novak lived through some of that century’s most tumultuous events. These ranged from World War II and the Second Vatican Council to the fall of communism and the rapid expansion of free markets that followed the death of the Evil Empire.
But while all these upheavals shaped Novak’s thought, there were two constants that never changed: his devotion to the Catholic faith and deep commitment to the American Experiment in ordered liberty. These were the two lodestars that guided Novak throughout his long intellectual and personal journey.
In the 1980s Novak’s economic views received a great deal of negative attention from the religious left, primarily because he had once been one of them.
Today Novak is especially known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). A bestseller, Spirit remains widely read because it was the first book—and arguably still the best—by a theologian to make an explicit case for the market economy and the moral, cultural, and political foundations underpinning it. Many theologians had previously written about capitalism, more often than not in censorious tones. But Novak’s Spirit took the discussion to a new level.
When Spirit appeared, it was fiercely attacked by groups ranging from traditionalists to liberation theologians. With the passage of time, however, and when the flaws of socialism, social democracy, and even third-wayism became even more evident from the early 1980s onward, Novak was to experience a type of vindication, albeit often of the grudging sort.
Nevertheless, in the 1980s Novak’s economic views received a great deal of negative attention from the religious left, primarily because he had once been one of them. As a young man, Novak had trained to become a Catholic priest but left the seminary before ordination after deciding that the priesthood was not the vocation to which he was called. Upon “re-entering the world,” to use the phraseology common to the pre–Vatican II Catholic Church, Novak became a writer. Eventually he attracted widespread notice throughout the Catholic world owing to his coverage of the second session of the Second Vatican Council. This culminated in a book, The Open Church: Vatican II Act II. Published in 1964, it was read attentively by Catholics and other Christians, especially in the Anglosphere.
The Open Church attracted criticism from some Catholic clergy and theologians who were skeptical about Vatican II’s direction, even though Novak’s reflections about the council were, like those of future popes Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger, difficult to pigeonhole as “progressive” or “conservative.” That said, Novak’s political and economic views throughout the 1960s were those of someone for whom, like most American Catholics at the time, the Democratic Party of the period was understood to be their natural political home. Novak was heavily involved in Democratic presidential campaigns throughout that tumultuous decade. Moreover, over time his theology and teaching at institutions like Stanford and SUNY Old Westbury took on a more progressive tinge.
In the late-1960s, Novak’s thought began to change, first on economic questions and then about the path post–Vatican II Catholicism should follow in the modern world.
In the late-1960s, however, Novak’s thought began to change, first on economic questions and then about the path post–Vatican II Catholicism should follow in the modern world. As a child and young man, Novak had known the financial struggles of blue-collar working-class Americans; as an adult, he began to notice a gap between expectations of upward mobility for themselves and their children and the interventionist economic prescriptions of American policymakers that then prevailed across the American political spectrum. By the mid-1970s at the latest, Novak had concluded that, for all its imperfections, capitalism, especially the variety that had taken root in America, was the best economic system for any society that took freedom and the reduction of poverty seriously.
This stance and Novak’s willingness to critique the economic positions of the American left was to cost Novak many long-standing friendships. Novak’s developing thinking on the topic, however, coincided with a shift across the Western world, mostly on the political right, toward greater faith in free markets. For many people who were believing Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, this represented a significant leap insofar as many religious leaders of the time were wedded to a broadly center-left view of the economy and a standoffish position (at best) toward capitalism. Yet Novak’s Spiritshowed that it was possible to be a faithful Jew or Christian while also supporting the case for the market economy.
It should be noted that Novak was careful not to argue that a person of Jewish or Christian faith had to support capitalism. His position was that there were good economic and theological arguments to suggest it was entirely reasonable for religious people to prefer markets to the alternatives. This was accompanied by a belief that Jews and Christians should avail themselves of the classical liberal tradition of political economy, especially as expressed by Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek. For all his appreciation of the Catholic tradition, something that became ever deeper from the 1980s onward, Novak was never “anti-modern” in principle. Novak believed there was much in classical liberal thought and economics that was perfectly consistent with small “o” orthodox Christian faith, and that Jewish and Christian thought about economic questions would be enriched by engagement with classical liberal ideas.
In this regard, Novak’s approach to modernity closely tracked with that of someone who would become one of his heroes: St. John Paul II. Novak’s Slovakian origins naturally inclined him to the first Slavic pope, but he also recognized in Cardinal Wojtyła of Krakow a kindred spirit, someone who would be open to revisiting Catholic social teaching on economic issues. Given that Wojtyła had lived under communism for over three decades in postwar Poland, Novak knew he had no illusions about socialism at a time when more than a few Catholic bishops in Western Europe and Latin America thought that Christian-Marxist dialogue was the future.
Novak's position was that there were good economic and theological arguments to suggest it was entirely reasonable for religious people to prefer markets to the alternatives.
Eventually the two men came to know each other, and there is little question that Novak’s ideas shaped important sections of John Paul II’s third social encyclical, Centesimus Annus (1991), especially its sophisticated treatment of entrepreneurship, devastating critique of the welfare state, and the pope’s outline of the criteria by which one can judge the particular form taken by capitalism in varying cultural and political settings.
In the concluding decades of his life, Novak spent much of his time expanding on his Trinitarian vision of a dynamic market economy, a bustling democracy, and a rich moral culture that infused political and economic liberty with an orientation toward the true, the good, and the beautiful. Here Novak’s thought tracked closely with 19th-century Catholic classical liberal thinkers like Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville who were intensely interested in the relationship between Christianity and liberty. In this connection, Novak’s exploration of freedom drew richly on the American tradition, something reflected in books like Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (2006), coauthored with his daughter Jana Novak.
One of Novak’s enduring insights was that people’s attachment to freedom, especially economic liberty, could be fickle. Toward the end of his life, he worried about the revival of faith in interventionism on the American left and right. Novak’s conclusion, however, was not that the creature made in the imago Dei was doomed to self-imposed servitude. It was to remind his audiences through word and pen that the religious, political, and economic arguments for the free society needed to be made to every generation. In our time, few messages are as necessary.
