Rowan Williams on capitalism, the financial crisis, and idolatry

Speaking of Archbishops and the global financial crisis, Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Cantebury) has written a short piece on the current financial crisis, in which he says that although Marx was wrong about almost everything, he was right in the way he perceived that capitalism could become a powerful mythology, and the way that it has currently taken on a life of its own (we talk about "the market" as if it were a conscious being, as opposed to something we actually created) is actually what the Scriptures call idolatry.

"Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a
kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that
had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little
else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made
yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters
should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the
biblical phrase."

Read the whole article here.