Among Adam Smith's scant surviving papers, one can't find a flat statement such as "I attend every Sunday Old St. Paul's Scottish Episcopal Church on Jeffrey Street." The phrase "the invisible hand" had some theological resonance at the time. Yet it is grossly overquoted by people who have not actually read Smith and instead want a bumper sticker. Smith used it only three times in all his surviving writings, once in each of his two published books and once in an unpublished treatise on astronomy. In each, it is used in diverging senses.
But the Australian economist and Christian theologian Paul Oslington, who has read Smith, argues persuasively that numerous words and phrases in Smith's writings, such as "natural," and such rotundities as "the Author of nature" or "the invisible hand," stand for "the Christian doctrine of divine providential care for humanity." Adam Smith, in short, was a Christian.
