Christian traditionalists have long lamented the West’s spiritual and cultural decline. And who can blame them? The signs of decay are everywhere: from widespread porn addiction to the opioid crisis, fertility decline to the collapse in church attendance across most of the developed world. But the same conservatives are almost fanatically determined to blinker themselves to the material and economic roots of this malaise. They believe that to link cultural decay to economic conditions is to give in to materialist reductionism—a Marxist sin.
Yet the very tradition conservatives revere points in a different direction. In fact, the classical and Christian tradition has long identified a nexus between law, understood to include political economy, and the moral and spiritual conditions of ordinary people. That recognition is, of course, at the heart of classical political and legal theory—and it was carried through the Middle Ages by numerous thinkers and churchmen, not least the 14th-century French bishop Nicolas Oresme.
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