evangelical roots of economics

From Black Electorate: Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics by Gordon Bigelow is an interesting piece which suggests the basis of economics as a discipline with a particular world-view can be credited (or blamed) on evangelical Christianity.

"Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. As mergers among media companies began to create monopolies on public information, ownership limits for these companies were not tightened but relaxed, because "the market" would provide its own natural limits to growth. When corporate accounting standards needed adjustment in the 1990s, such measures were cast aside because they would interfere with "market forces." Social Security may soon fall to the same inexorable argument.

"The problem is that the story told by economics simply does not conform to reality."