The faith of Mark Carney

A voice for value(s) at a fraught global moment?

Mark Carney’s ascension to be Canada’s 24th prime minister has been greeted by many who see him as a possible focal point for the diminished forces of liberal internationalism. At last, some think, a hero around whom we can rally to fight off the national populists who threaten all we hold dear!

Perhaps.

But I wonder if there is actually another coalition emerging that Carney can be an integral part of. I don’t have a name for it, but for the sake of this piece let’s call it the “put the market in its place because of our Christian beliefs” coalition.

Mark Carney is a Roman Catholic—and he’s the unusual kind of Canadian Roman Catholic who regularly attends church. Since this is Canada, this fact is occasionally reported but major media outlets rarely investigate what this means for him. Carney doesn’t help matters much. Like most Canadian politicians, he has some version of, “It’s my private faith and we’ll keep it that way.” Canadian voters don’t want to think we’re electing some religious zealot after all.

But let’s assemble some data points.

When Carney was governor of the Bank of England, The Tablet (the major Roman Catholic publication in England) declared him the country’s most influential Catholic.

Also when he was in England, Carney seems to have been friendly with Justin Welby, then the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s a picture of Carney on the Tube, reading a pre-publication edition of Welby’s book about Christianity and the market (and which I once reviewed). Welby and Carney also once did a joint interview on the BBC.

Reading Welby on the Tube.

The two had overlapping interests. Welby came to prominence serving on a post-financial crisis parliamentary task force and matters of economic justice were important to him during his time as archbishop. Welby not only wrote the book about money and grace that Carney was pictured reading, but he also wrote a book setting out a vision for a post-Brexit Britain, with a significant economic bent. Carney, of course, was a central banker in two countries through the financial crisis and then during and after Brexit.

Carney wrote his own book, Value(s), which is, he writes, influenced by Pope Francis’s pontificate, particularly Francis’s concerns for the inequities of the global economy and the environment. It also draws on the writings of the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel who has written extensively about the difference between having a market economy and being a market society. Carney uses this distinction in his book to distance himself from the market fundamentalism that one might associate with his recent predecessors as central bankers in western countries. The market—as Welby, Francis, and many others have long pointed out—doesn’t have all the answers. As Christians, we should be engaged in finding alternatives.

Welby is no longer in office and Francis has died. But in his place we now have Leo XIV, who takes his name from Leo XIII, the 19th century pope who is remembered for his encyclical Rerum Novarum which is one of the first and major works of theological commentary on the economy, in this case the economy of the Industrial Revolution and which is basically the foundation of the modern tradition of Catholic Social Teaching in which Carney seems to be swimming. I’m not aware that Leo XIV has yet spoken about Rerum Novarum but he has highlighted the influence of Francis’s first apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which has some very harsh words for the modern economy.

In my searching, the only place I can find Carney speaking in something like a church-related context is this interview he gave at the faith-based think tank Cardus last fall. It’s long, though worth a listen (just for how the prime minister speaks—not at all like a politician!) but frustratingly he has almost nothing to say about his faith.

I believe—and I think I am far from alone in this—that the central conversation that needs to happen in what I’ve called a “crisis-shaped world” is one about economics. What are the models of human economic relationship that work towards the flourishing of all life, human and non-human? To get to an acceptable answer to that question, we need to broaden our understanding of value so that it moves well beyond the rather narrow conception of value that is dominant in our current economic mindset that reduces value to price and wealth.

I would be delighted if Christians could find their way into a leading role in this conversation. The Christian tradition has much to say about money, business, capitalism, debt, and of course value and values. But it’s been muted, both because we have lost sight of it and because if and when the world wants to listen to Christians, it wants to hear us speak about different things.

But between Leo XIV and Mark Carney there is the possibility—however slender—that there are new leaders on the global stage with a deep grounding in this aspect of the Christian tradition and the platform to speak from that place to the whole world. I will be listening especially to Carney for how he brings this part of himself into his new role.