This phrase was used by Gillian Tett in a contribution to an episode of Word of Mouth (accessed 02.01.12). She described how she had had to acclimatize to the world of high finance, and how her original training as an anthropologist had come in handy when trying to demystify the pronouncements of economists and bankers:

What I did understand was that this group of bankers who were involved in complex credit and financial instruments spoke a language that set them apart from many other people, and that in a sense was the source of their power…

We tried to provide literally a travel guide to this land and an explanation for all the jargon, if you like almost a handbook or dictionary. … strong vested interest in keeping it that way because that is their source of power. … Certainly in the financial industry there have been periods when people who were engaged in complex finance preferred the fact that they alone spoke the language and understood it, because it meant there was less scrutiny from outside.

The parallel I sometimes use is with the medieval Catholic Church… when you had basically a priestly caste who spoke financial Latin but nobody else in the congregation actually understood. So you’d conduct these services in financial Latin and the priests would wave the incense about and the congregation would feel very grateful and they might sit there thinking, well I don’t understand what’s happening at all but it’s not really my place to challenge this, or else they just couldn’t be bothered to challenge that financial priestly class, because, guess what, they were getting the blessings in the form of incense or five years ago in the form of cheap mortgages. And of course the priests didn’t want to translate for everyone because the fact that they spoke financial Latin and no one else did gave them tremendous power.

In The Big Short (2010), Michael Lewis writes about environments like the bond market, where “it was still possible to make huge sums of money from the fear, and the ignorance, of customers” (62) and where “terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders” (126). Again and again while reading this book, I was struck by the theological character of the world of finance. Theologians, like bond traders, depend upon a “meaningless flow of words” (218) to keep their delusions alive; the Church, like Wall Street, employs smart people who are “basically wrong about everything” (229) and a little too keen on self-regulation. And, strangely, church and finance both cater in their own ways to personal greed. After all, what is credit but the promise of having what you can’t afford, and salvation the promise of what doesn’t exist, eternal bliss?

Try substituting “theology is” for “financial markets are” and the “Church” for “big Wall Street firms” in the following excerpt (79):

Financial markets are a collection of arguments. The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument.

The subtitle of Lewis’s book is Inside the Doomsday Machine — couldn’t that be another name for organized religion?

Remember that religion is big business all over the world, with billions flowing into the pockets of priests and other religious specialists. However, when the current archbishop of Canterbury got up to preach in the splendid setting of Canterbury Cathedral (accessed 02.01.12), Dr Rowan Williams did not acknowledge the deep fellowship he shares with the priests of high finance:

Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.

What’s he got against atoms? Certain atoms are actually very good at binding together to form strong materials, or “communities” of atoms, the kind that comprise the flying buttresses and tall columns that support the cathedrals he finds so congenial. Rowan Williams is also a poet, but in this instance he has demonstrated a hopeless instinct for metaphor.

There is a long history of the religious mind’s battle against the irresistible currents of scientific thought, some of which send shudders up and down the believer’s spine. Witness the wail that continues to be heard in some church circles:

“There must be a designer because otherwise chance alone would be responsible for design — which is manifestly absurd!”

Darwin solved that problem long ago. Together with discoveries like those of the atom and electromagnetism, for some of us our picture of the universe was changed forever. Helena Cronin (1991:21) continues:

These criticisms of the Epicurean view were revived in the seventeenth century, when providential design was felt to be in need of defence against the dangerous atheism that atomistic theory was thought to be fostering.

Ah, that’s why “atoms spinning apart in the dark” is such a sinister phrase for Rowan Williams. Knowledge of such things does indeed open the door for atheism to enter.