Bitter Bread by Curtis Smith

On being a capitalist in a covenanted community
Friends, I want to begin with a confession, because among Unitarian Universalists confession is less about guilt than about showing up honestly, and I would rather begin honestly than begin safely.

I am a capitalist. I am also a Black man, a business owner, and a UU who sits with this congregation's Finance Committee. I have been in these pews through sermons on economic injustice and felt the word "capitalism" land in the room like an accusation, and felt something in me flinch, and then felt tender about the flinch rather than ashamed of it. Because I know what this system has done. I have watched it hollow out neighborhoods twenty minutes from this building. I have watched it price the planet as though the planet were a line item on someone's quarterly report. I am not here to defend any of that, and I would not ask you to.

What I want to offer instead is something I have come to believe slowly, and which I offer in the spirit of our third principle, that free and responsible search for truth and meaning that keeps us from settling too early on any answer, including mine. I have come to believe that the thing many of us are grieving is not capitalism as it was conceived. It is capitalism after it was severed from the moral philosophy that once gave it its license. And I think going back for that severed root may serve us better, as a people trying to do justice together, than another round of arguing about a word.

So let me walk you through what I found. And let me say plainly that I may be wrong, and that this congregation has taught me to say that sentence and mean it.

The Adam Smith nobody quotes.

Adam Smith is invoked constantly and read almost never, which is a fate he shares with most of our own scripture.

He was, by profession, a moral philosopher. He wrote about ethics for seventeen years before he wrote about markets. The Theory of Moral Sentiments came in 1759. The Wealth of Nations did not arrive until 1776.

Here is the first sentence of the earlier book: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

I read that and thought: this man is describing the interdependent web. He does not have our language for it, but he is reaching for the same thing our seventh principle reaches for, the recognition that we are bound up in one another's flourishing whether or not we ever consented to be.

Smith's ethics turn on what he called the impartial spectator, an imagined observer through whose eyes we learn to see our own conduct. It is a kind of conscience, and it functions almost exactly the way covenant functions among us: not as a rule imposed from outside, but as a practice of holding ourselves accountable to a wider circle than our own wanting.

And when Smith did finally turn to commerce, he was nobody's cheerleader for the merchant class. He wrote that "the property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable," and that "the patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands." He noticed that in the bargain between masters and workers the power is never equal, and that it tilts toward the masters. When merchants came forward proposing new commercial laws, he warned that such proposals "ought always to be listened to with great precaution."

And he left behind a standard for measuring any economy, one I have not been able to shake loose: "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."

I do not want to make a saint of him. We are not a tradition that makes saints. Smith believed commercial society could relieve poverty better than the alternatives he could see, and there was a great deal he could not see. But he never imagined markets floating free of conscience. He thought they were morally conditional, permitted only insofar as they served the common good. Ours have forgotten the condition.

Where the turn happened
You can nearly date the forgetting.

In 1970 Milton Friedman argued that the one social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits, and across the following decades that claim hardened into something very like law. Researchers have traced what followed with some care: the financialization of the American economy, profit drifting loose from making anything at all, steady downward pressure on wages, work sent elsewhere, and a widening canyon between those who own and those who labor.

Then in August of 2019, one hundred eighty-one chief executives signed a Business Roundtable statement renouncing shareholder primacy, pledging themselves to customers and employees and suppliers and communities. I remember reading it and feeling something lift. I wanted it to be true.

Then scholars at Harvard read the fine print. Among the twenty board-member companies, ten went back and revised their corporate governance guidelines after signing. Nine of those ten changed nothing at all about their stated corporate purpose. The standing instruction to directors still read: act solely in the best interests of the shareholders. And in 2025, when the political weather turned, more than half of the largest American companies quietly rewrote how they described diversity and equity in their public filings.

I do not tell you this to be cynical. I tell you because it taught me something I now believe as a business owner more than as a critic: values that live only in a mission statement can be edited on a Tuesday afternoon. Values that live in a covenant, or in an ownership structure, or in where the money actually goes, are much harder to take back.

We know this about ourselves, don't we. It is why we say our covenant aloud, together, rather than framing it on a wall.

What this looks like from where I sit
The median white family in this country holds about $285,000 in wealth. The median Black family holds $44,900. Fifteen cents on the dollar.

Now let me bring it closer to home, closer than is comfortable. Researchers at the Urban Institute traced where investment dollars actually flowed in Chicago, block by block. Majority-white neighborhoods received 4.6 times as much market investment per household as majority-Black neighborhoods. Roughly $22,476 a year against $4,927. Not because of anything the residents did or failed to do. Because that is where capital chose to go, and where it chose, year after year, not to.
I have sat with that pair of numbers longer than with anything else I read while preparing this, and they have reframed the whole question for me. The wound on the South and West Sides was not inflicted by too much capitalism. It was inflicted by too little capital, withheld deliberately, across generations, by redlining and all its patient descendants.

Let me be careful here, and gentle, because the phrase "Black capitalism" carries a history. Nixon offered it in 1968 in part to take the sting out of more radical demands, and it delivered rhetoric where policy was owed. I am not asking us to repeat that. The tradition I am reaching toward is older and more communal, and it belongs to W. E. B. Du Bois, who spent years documenting cooperative economics among Black Americans and argued for ownership held together rather than uplift handed out one person at a time. Not entrepreneurship offered as a substitute for justice. Ownership as a form of it.

What our faith has already said
And here is the thing that humbled me most: we are not starting from nothing. We have been at this a long while, and I simply had not looked.

In 2017, after four full years of study and discernment, our General Assembly adopted a Statement of Conscience on Escalating Economic Inequity. It says that "money should be a tool to serve the collective good, not an end unto itself or a measure of success." It says that "we believe that our worth and dignity is inherent in our humanity, not dependent on economic status," which is our first principle applied directly to a paycheck. It says, beautifully, that "there is enough for everyone's need but not enough for greed."

And it says something that has been sitting with me every time I open a spreadsheet for this congregation: "People are prioritized over profits when the moral statements inherent in budgets implement Unitarian Universalist values."
A budget is a moral statement. Ours is one. That single line has changed how I sit in those meetings.

Our 2024 revision of Article II names generosity and interdependence among our shared values, all of them gathered around love. And our Association has practiced socially responsible investing for more than forty years through the UU Common Endowment Fund, which screens its holdings, presses companies as a shareholder, and puts money into communities that the market has passed over. We have been doing economic theology for four decades. We simply have not always called it that, and we might start.

Our living tradition also draws on the words and deeds of prophetic people. Which brings me to one of mine.

Work is love made visible
I suspect Gibran is the reason I could never quite set this question down.
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

Bitter bread. I know of no better description of what an economy organized around indifference sets on the table. It feeds people. Half of them. Halfway.

Gibran and Smith are separated by a century and a half and an ocean, and they are making one claim in two vocabularies. Economic life is relational before it is transactional. Smith called it sympathy. Gibran called it love made visible. Both were insisting that what passes between us when we work and hire and trade and buy is never merely a transaction, and that pretending otherwise puts something bitter in the bread and something poisonous in the wine.

In "On Giving," Gibran offers the piece I still needed. He distinguishes those who give of their possessions from those who give of themselves. And then he asks: "What is fear of need but need itself?" That is a diagnosis of an economy built on hoarding, and it is also, if I am honest, a diagnosis of me on my worst days. Scarcity we manufacture out of dread, and then move into, and then defend.
Generosity, our new values remind us, is not the overflow after we have secured ourselves. It is a way of being in the world.

So what might we do
I am wary of ending an essay like this in the clouds, so let me come down to the ground, and stay small, and stay local. Not a program. Just questions I think we are ready to hold together.

Where does our money sleep? Where is the endowment held, where do the operating reserves rest, where do we bank? A community development financial institution or a neighborhood bank puts those same dollars to work in the very communities our market has starved, and the evidence suggests they return more to the common good than to themselves.

Who do we buy from? Vendor selection is a values decision, and most congregations make it on price alone. We could make it differently.

What about employee ownership? Something like 2.34 million American businesses with employees are owned by retiring baby boomers, employing some 25 million people. Every single one of those is about to be a decision about whether the workers who built the value get to keep any of it. Employee-owned firms consistently pay as well or better and build real retirement wealth for ordinary people. That window will not stay open long.

And who do we buy from on the South and West Sides? Supporting Black-owned and community-rooted businesses is not charity. It is capital allocation, which is what it has always been.

Then Smith's question, which is finally a question of conscience, and which I have come to hear in the voice of covenant: how would this choice look to someone standing outside my own interest?

What I am still holding
I remain a capitalist. I have stopped flinching, and I want to tell you why, in case it is useful to anyone else who has felt caught between the pew and the ledger.

I no longer think being a capitalist puts me at odds with this congregation. I think it obligates me. It obligates me to hold the thing I believe in to its own founder's standard, and to Gibran's, and most of all to ours. An economy measured by whether the greater part of its members are flourishing. An economy that treats a person's labor as sacred and inviolable. An economy in which no one's worth waits on their net worth.

An economy that bakes with love.
The bread we are making right now is bitter, friends. But we are a people who believe in transformation, which is a hard word we chose on purpose. We know how to make it otherwise. And I would like very much to work on it with you.