In the standard taxonomy of macroeconomic inputs, economists spend an enormous amount of time modeling the things we can neatly quantify: the depreciation of physical plant, the shifting elasticity of labor supply, and the velocity of broad money. We are, by trade, considerably less adept at measuring social capital—that fragile, non-rival reserve of civic and institutional trust that quietly reduces friction across an entire economy. Yet every so often, a minor political embarrassment provides a remarkably sharp demonstration of how rapidly that capital can be extracted, liquidated, and spent by a political operator with an exceptionally high discount rate.
Consider the recent, rather sheepish spectacle of two Catholic bishops issuing formal apologies after photographs of them laying hands on Donald Trump were released to the public. The prelates had arrived under the impression that their meeting was an exercise in private pastoral care, an off-the-record spiritual consultation of the sort churchmen have conducted with sovereign figures for centuries. Instead, they discovered upon departure that their presence had been converted into campaign collateral. Their piety was neatly monetized into digital content for an electoral coalition that views every interaction through the cold calculus of transaction.
It is worth lingering for a moment on a counterfactual. Suppose the American institutional landscape still possessed the robust structural firewalls of the mid-twentieth century, wherein intermediary civic organizations—trade unions, professional associations, and mainline ecclesiastical bodies—maintained strict independence from partisan figureheads. In such a world, a pastoral visit would remain strictly pastoral, precisely because the long-term institutional cost of being captured by an executive would wildly exceed any transient political favor gained. The bishops would not have been caught flat-footed, because the norms governing the boundary between the sacred and the political would have functioned as an effective regulatory barrier.
Instead, we observe an asymmetrical transaction. Donald Trump’s political economy has always relied on the deliberate erosion of institutional boundaries. For the better part of a decade, the broader conservative coalition has rested on a well-understood tripartite compact: traditional supply-side rentiers received corporate tax cuts and deregulation; disaffected working-class communities were promised protective tariffs and nationalist grievance; and socially conservative voters were offered federal judicial appointments and performative cultural deference. But within this coalition, the terms of trade are rarely balanced. While capital receives durable legislative codification, religious and cultural partners are frequently treated as raw inputs to be consumed during campaign cycles.
When the bishops express dismay that their private prayer was exploited, they are registering what economists would recognize as a classic problem of information asymmetry. They believed they were contributing to a mutual spiritual enterprise; their host recognized an unpriced asset that could be swiftly harvested to shore up turnout among religious demographics. The immediate yield went entirely to the former president’s ledger, while the resulting depreciation—a loss of pastoral credibility, alienated congregants, and diminished moral neutrality—was borne exclusively by the dioceses.
This dynamic matters far beyond the parochial confines of church governance. Market economies do not function in a vacuum of formal contracts; they require an underlying matrix of shared faith in institutions to operate efficiently. When every neutral civic space is aggressively drawn into the partisan output gap, the broader system suffers from what amounts to a quiet, compounding tax on cooperation. It becomes harder to build consensus around redistributive fiscal policy, harder to coordinate on public health, and significantly harder to execute large-scale, long-horizon public investments. A society where even a quiet prayer is presumed to be a covert television advertisement is a society where the cost of doing business has structurally risen.
The bishops’ subsequent apology is, in essence, an ex-post realization that they were on the losing end of an arbitrage play. In trying to exercise conventional pastoral duty without accounting for the predatory mechanics of modern populist politics, they allowed their institutional balance sheet to be tapped to subsidize someone else’s political campaign. It is an unhurried, familiar lesson in political economy: when an institution fails to assign a clear value to its own independence, it should not be surprised when an opportunistic political entrepreneur steps in to strip it for parts.