For an economist like me, 2026 is not only an occasion to remember the American Revolution but also a time to reflect on the economic revolution that has fueled our development as a nation. In the same year that the United States broke free from the British crown, the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book Thomas Jefferson called “the best book extant” on the subject of political economy. Smith’s concepts unfettered us from mercantilist economic ideas and laid the foundation for our reliance on free markets, labor specialization and individual property rights. 

Smith’s emphasis on efficient growth, however, has blinded us to our unequal income distribution. When economists consider this problem, they most often focus on ways to tune up our free market system with policies like progressive taxation, minimum wages and subsidies like those in the Affordable Care Act. But with these approaches, Smith’s characterization of our behavior endures: We are profit maximizers who calculate the cost and benefit of every economic decision we make and then choose the actions that most benefit us. 

Self-interest is so deeply embedded in secular free market thinking that it creates a powerful temptation to turn away from our Christian faith. Greed is then no longer considered a cardinal sin. Instead, we see it as essential to a well-functioning economy. 

Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have both taken a fundamentally different approach to income distribution, albeit one that does not say the problem is with the free market system per se. Rather, problems result from the values held by individuals as they make choices within that system. As Francis said in a pastoral visit to Trieste in 2024, we need to set aside our trust in “magical markets” and develop “a faith that disrupts the calculations of human selfishness, that denounces evil, that points out injustices, that disturbs the schemes of those who, in the shadow of power, play with the lives of the weak.”

Along those same lines, when Leo spoke to the faithful in Monaco during his visit this past spring, he said, “every good placed in our hands has a universal destination; it bears an intrinsic need not to be held back, but to be shared, so that everyone’s life may be better.” On that same trip, Leo also said the church should “offer new pathways capable of stemming the tide of secularism, which risks reducing humanity to individualism and basing social life on the production of wealth.”

In a Sunday Angelus address last year, the pope also asked us how we are investing the “treasure of our lives.” Investment, as he sees it, goes beyond our financial resources to include “our abilities, our time, our affection, our presence, our empathy.” This expanded concept moves us away from seeing the poor as abstract problems to be solved. As we draw into closer personal relationship with the poor, “the giver will be changed.” For example, we may begin to see the homeless more as fellow humans than stumbling blocks to downtown development. Or we may come to see immigrants as God’s children, not criminals and sources of cheap labor.

In an address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress in 2015, Pope Francis said: “Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”

To summarize, both Francis and Leo ask that we consider our faith in all matters, including those so often termed economic in nature. They ask us to read the words “In God We Trust” on our currency in a new light, to take seriously what they mean for people of faith. We are to act in ways that please God and trust that God will, in turn, provide us with the economic outcomes that best lead us to salvation. How we act are matters of individual conscience made in full light of scriptural teaching. We each have much to think about as we learn to live outside the world of secular economics. Two and a half centuries after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, we are fortunate to have had Francis, and now Leo, to help us navigate the ways of faith-based actions in a material world.

[Also read: “Pope Francis, not Adam Smith, is right: A belated apology to my Econ 101 students.”]

Richard A. Levins is a professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of Minnesota, in St. Paul.