Mammon and the Church We Need
By Larry Chapp
What we need now is a discalced Church that has divested itself of all pretentions and which embraces the evangelical counsel to holy poverty. And that divestment will require more than ecclesial lip service to sorrow over past sins because little has been done to address the root cause of our current corruptions. For too long we have utterly ignored the Church’s long standing accommodation to the modern cult of wealth. Our favored icons ooze the oil of Laodicean mediocrity as we kick the can of sanctified conversion down the road.
The argument I am making in what follows is not a moral, theological, or even an economic or political one. Nor is it a blanket condemnation of wealth as such. It is possible to be both holy and wealthy. It is rather an argument grounded in the concept of spiritual danger. There are laws of the spiritual life that Christ, the Apostles, and many of the Church’s greatest saints have articulated clearly and repeatedly. And one of those laws is that given the moral entropy created by our fallen nature, there is a unique danger to the soul’s ascent to God in a life characterized by monetary largesse and a devotional pursuit of material comfort. That it is indeed the rare individual who can pull off the juxtaposition of wealth and holiness. Therefore, the Church must ever remind us that we are called to holiness and that we are called to live out the evangelical counsels (see CCC 915, Lumen Gentium 42). And, of course, one of those counsels is voluntary poverty, which, tailored to our station in life, can mean physical, monetary poverty or, given familial responsibilities, to live as simple a material life as one can within the boundaries of duty toward children.
There exists in America today a broad conceit—a conceit that is embedded in every level of our culture. Namely, that the prosperity we have enjoyed as a people for a little over a century, and the various “tools” our nation has employed to promote and preserve it, is inherently good on a moral and spiritual plane and, therefore, that the vast economic, political, technological, and military apparatus we have built up to sustain, secure, and impose this conceit is, in our eyes, all-together justified. We might balk at this or that “excess” or feel tinges of remorse over things like slavery and the subjugation of Native Americans, but the enterprise of generating vast sums of wealth and orienting an entire culture around a reductive homo economicusanthropology of “man as consumer,” goes largely unquestioned even by most orthodox Catholics.
Dr. Eugene McCarraher points out in his magisterial book The Enchantments of Mammon that somewhere along the line “Capitalism” became the religion of the modern world. The book really is a wonderful exposition of St. Augustine’s notion that the worldly world is animated by the libido dominandi. In a nutshell, that term connotes far more than the “will to dominate” and locates the essence of our sinful inclinations in our deep lust for acquisition and possession, which in turn necessitates a social structure of power relationships characterized by the strong dominating the weak, and the weak, in their turn, desiring to be strong so they too can acquire things and dominate others. Spiritually, one could contrast this as the conflict between a posture of “grasping” at existence versus a posture of the “reception of existence as gift.”
But Christianity introduced a revolution of the soul that overturned this mythos of wealth and power, as the young Church warned its new converts that those two realities (wealth and power) are seldom far from each other. Indeed, the first Christians so valorized a materially simple life and repudiated the natural human erosfor acquisition and the pleasures associated with it, that they were labeled by their contemporaries as anti-human. The well-off denizens of Rome viewed Christianity as the ultimate buzzkill, what with its constant finger-wagging at such wholesome pursuits as blood sport, sex with children, adultery, and infanticide. We forget, for example, that Mary’s Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel is, among other things, a celebration of social upheaval where the strong are brought low and the weak are raised up. In fact, the entire biblical narrative, from Genesis to Revelation, can be read as a tale of the ultimate vindication of the perpetual underclasses and the bringing to justice the fat and comfortable. I need not go over the steady stream of condemnations of wealth that come from the very lips of Jesus.
The sad truth is, however, that the Catholic defenders of American-style capitalism view it only in the abstract and thereby assert that it coincides with the Catholic defense of private property and the freedom of social relations, but ignore its concrete reality as a set of economic practices that encourage consumerism, rabid individualism, and the dissolution of human personhood in the corrosive acid of an artificially-inflamed concupiscence. This is an economic system geared toward the imperial, therapeutic self and its cacophony of competing desires. It is an entire collective of concupiscence that elevates the lowest kinds of eros to the highest pedestals of honor.
The irony, of course, is that in our legitimate fears of a socialist inculcation of a “beehive” mentality we end up endorsing instead an ordo that results in the same outcome. It is an ordo oriented toward the competitive acquisition of wealth as the fundamental ethos of our culture, in a manner that ends up reducing us all to the same set of basic consumptive desires. There are only so many ways to sell us things we don’t need and therefore only so many ways to gin-up our desire for things like deodorant infused with Sri Lankan Green Tea. Thus does homo economicus end up in the equally reductive universe of the homo concupiscentia.
Returning to McCarraher, we see that this Christian revolution of the soul—always a precarious proposition—and the kind of economics that went with it, was blunted by the rise of modern capitalism and, finally, eclipsed by it. The American founding domesticated Protestant Christianity by turning it into a virtue factory for the bettering of our economic prosperity and the creation of good citizens of the Republic. The theology of the churches then dutifully created the required set of ad hoc justifications (as theology usually does) for why Christians need not listen to Jesus on the spiritual dangers of wealth.
But we were told to listen to Jesus on sexual matters. We had to have “family values” in the midst of this fetishizing of labor as wealth creation, so sexual morality stood out as almost the whole point of the Christian enterprise. Thus did the Church’s sexual morality devolve into a white-knuckled puritanism, having nothing to do with the Kingdom ethic of Jesus’ sexual teachings (teachings which were quite stringent in their own right), and everything to do instead with making sure that sexual license didn’t interfere with the engine of prosperity. No wonder then that once modern Americans figured out that you could actually have wealth and sexual license that the old-timey sexual ethic bit the dust. You just need to make sure you can kill your unplanned and unwanted offspring so that the wealth train keeps steaming down the tracks. And so we justified that too, with many sock-puppet theologians not far behind with their dulcet tones of tacit approval (“complex circumstances!”).
Along these lines, Catholics such as myself, rightly concerned with the preservation of orthodoxy for the sake of the truth of the Gospel, have often criticized the misuses of the pastoral notion of “accompaniment” as a backhanded way of giving a wink and a nod to sexual immorality as no big deal. And I stand by that criticism even if there is a very legitimate sense of accompaniment in the pastoral domain that needs to be accentuated. Nevertheless, the sad fact is that American Catholics, me included, are implicated, and have been so for decades, in a false accompaniment of wealth as a backhanded wink and a nod to materialistic worldliness. This worldliness goes well beyond garden-variety levels of over-attachment to “stuff I think I need but do not.” We Catholics are usually implicated via the path of cultivated silence about the militarism and imperial interventionism that have so characterized American history as we seek to “preserve our way of life.”
The American Gospel of wealth, with its overtly worldly and reductively naturalistic focus, also sits very easily with the Gospel of cheap grace. The latter has become a kind of therapeutic, parlor room of mercy that magically turns all of my vices into merit badges that scream to the world how “human” I am precisely in and through a very cultivated image of my agonistic “dark side” with the smoldering subterranean secrets of some bygone pain. Thus do we invert the path to holiness and celebrate the heroism of this allegedly agonistic path of moral darkness and inner conflict. Ascesis is bad for business, after all, and thus the valorization of vice leads to the falsification of the good in a grand reversal of values.
This is also why we love to expose the salacious failings of those who do strive for the traditional concept of holiness. We seek out the cracks in their armor of virtue in order to legitimate the notion that moral flaws are more real than moral solidity. It’s flawed armor all the way down, we tell ourselves, secretly celebrating this communion of sinners. The path to holiness is thus held up as a fraudulent posturing filled with the bile of self-righteousness, all in the service of spiritually dumbing (and numbing) everyone down to a regime of sentimentalized sensuality. It is the Gospel message now tailored to the world of Freud and Heffner.
None of this is meant to imply that one cannot be both wealthy and virtuous. I have known many virtuous wealthy people in my life who are very generous with their money and are genuinely good people. Indeed, most of them are far better people, in terms of the natural virtues, than I am. Even Jesus seems to have had some wealthy friends (Joseph of Arimathea stands out) and he did not seem to demand anything more of them beyond the support they provided. But this latter point is an argument rooted in grand silences since we really do not know much about these individuals mentioned in the Gospels. What we do know is that Jesus explicitly condemned the accumulation of wealth as something contrary to the Kingdom (see Mt 19:24).
The key here is not to overthink the issue and blunt the force of Jesus’ words through a thousand paper cuts of caveats, distinctions, and casuistical excuse making. What Jesus is saying is that in order to be fit for the Kingdom, you have to place God first. You must have a singleness of vision and purpose. Your heart, as Jesus points out, follows your treasure, whatever that treasure might be (see Mt 6:21). And unless that treasure is the Kingdom, you are guilty of idolatry, in varying degrees of severity. Eventually, we all come to resemble that which we love the most, and Jesus is saying that it is exceedingly difficult not to love the wealth one has spent one’s entire life accumulating and maintaining.
In other words, Jesus understood that the marriage of wealth and power is a particularly virulent opiate that infiltrates our soul with a spiritual dopamine rush that few can resist. The fact is, the possession of large amounts of wealth binds us to the worldly world in a most potent and pungent way—potent because it provides access to every worldly enjoyment our heart desires, and thus, every idolatry we can imagine, and pungent because wealth attracts with its odor of false sanctity and blessing.
This path of the potent and pungent dopamine rush of wealth is ours as American Christians, whether we will admit it to ourselves or not. But it is not the path of Jesus. We have concocted a form of Christianity that baptized this ordo of the homo economicus in very sophisticated ways that allow us to convince ourselves that unlike all others before us, we alone can possess material comforts at a high level even as we remain magically “detached” from them. We then place the crucifix within the cleavage of our wealth as a kind of pious ornamentation, which has the net result of trivializing the kenotic descent of Christ into the form of the slave as just a superficial gloss on history rather than its deepest essence.
At one time this was standard Catholic fare and in no way controversial. One only need read the devotional literature of the patristic, medieval, and renaissance era to see this privileging of material simplicity in the spiritual life. Or the rise of the mendicant orders as an attempt to divest monastic wealth in an act of charitable immolation toward the poor. Or the history of the various reforms within religious orders almost all of which identified the accumulation of land and wealth as the chief corrupter of the charism of the order in question. The various “discalced” reforms speak loudly in this regard. And the time has come for a fully discalced Church, stripped bare of its pretentions, and embracing the Gospel message of material simplicity of life as an evangelical mandate for all rather than as a mere ideal for the few.
And that brings me back to Dr. McCarraher’s book. One of the governing ideas of the book, if not the governing idea, is that our culture, though in many ways post Christian, is not for all that simply secular and lacking in any mystical enchantments. Prescinding from the standard academic histories these days that view our secular age as an era marked by disenchantment with the divine, Dr. McCarraher gives us instead a detailed counternarrative of capitalist enchantment. This is deeply in tune with a proper anthropology that understands that human beings cannot live without gods. And so, if we kill the One God of our cultural tradition, the God of Jesus Christ, then it isn’t as if now we have no gods, it just means rather that now we will have different gods—gods that are often attenuated counterfeits of God, parasitically feeding on him as it invents new capitalist, technocratic, consumeristic gods.
For as Dr. McCarraher deftly demonstrates, money has now been invested with a whole range of mystifications and enchantments that is in every way a form of religion—complete with rituals, sacraments, and dogmas. The fact that these new gods do not, at a superficial glance, appear as gods, only underscores that they are poor gods. In other words, they are gods insofar as they define our reality, provide our values, and orient our entire civilization around a core set of non-negotiable dogmas, but they do not, for all that, give us contact with the transcendence that is our only true immanence. In short, modern American capitalism is an enchantment, but a very bad one.
Finally, I would like to highlight Dr. McCarraher’s conviction that, in light of the above, our current politics, wedded as it is to this system, this “apparatus” as Simone Weil calls it, is moribund and terminal. We have reduced the classical notion of politics, which was a broad conception that included culture, religion, and the many intermediary institutions that were freighted with the task of preserving the cultural heritage, to the meager and paltry notion of voting and parties and legislative governing. We are, through these various pantomimes, lulled into a false and mendacious sense that all we need to do to fix things is to tinker with this or that legislative policy. But insofar as we are not allowed to question the gods of what Berdyaev called the “bourgeois cult of well-being” that are the archons of our pecuniary spirit, such an enterprise is doomed from the start as anything specifically Christian.
My point here is not to wax cynical about politics but to emphasize the peculiar corrupting agency of the confluence of wealth and power. We are fervent in our promotion of various causes and fevered in our opposition to others, but rarely do we, specifically as Christians, call into question the constitutive formational order that Mammon brings to the entire affair. We merely ignore the role it plays in grinding away the sharp edges of political differences into a political sculpture of an economic Venus that erotically appeals to all.
St. Paul implies in Acts 21:25 that there is a link between pagan idolatries and sexual immorality. But a truly robust retrieval by the modern Church of what is meant by idolatry in our contemporary context would go a long way toward demonstrating the direct linkages between the promotion of the homo economicus and the rise of the homo concupiscentia. There is probably no more urgent pastoral task than the need to highlight this linkage. Only then can we bring together the “social justice” wing of the Church and the “pro-life” wing and then perhaps, by the magic of some creative alchemy of the Holy Spirit, forge a new political vision not grounded in the regime of Mammon and its step child, Moloch.
The Church would do well in this regard to retrieve the teaching of St. Basil of Caesarea on the dangers of wealth. In his wonderful introduction to Basil’s teachings on wealth, Paul Schroeder points out that Basil proposed a new Christian counter anthropology to that of pagan wealth creation, which was characterized by the Greek term, Koinonikos Anthropos or “social human being.” Basil contrasted this with the “unsocial human being” who, through the acquisition of wealth, ignores the social requirements that charity imposes upon us.
Here is where Basil differs from some of his contemporaries who had softened Christ’s teachings on the dangers of wealth by either emphasizing that all Christ meant was the need for detachment from our possessions, even as they remain our possessions (Clement of Alexandria), or that his words are mere “counsels of perfection” meant for the monks and other celibates. Basil instead circumvents this game and cuts to the chase by emphasizing that charity demands the divestment of wealth to the poor as our default position with “carve out” exceptions grafted into that stance rather than the other way around. Voluntary poverty is indeed a counsel and not a commandment, but it is a counsel imposed upon us all and is the path to sanctity that the Church must highlight, foreground, and privilege through concrete actions. At the very least, its presence as a counsel of perfection stands as a barrier to any attempt to negotiate a modus vivendi with wealth via the path of a faux detachment from wealth. And it is a false detachment and a piece of ecclesial legerdemain, since the Church remains, via concrete action, deeply attached to wealth.
I, as a Catholic Worker, am convinced that what we need now, as Dorothy Day pointed out, is a grassroots revolution of the soul wherein we engage in the politics of resistance through a retrieval of a localist, communitarian culture grounded in an aboriginal ascesis of the soul born from the side of the crucified Christ. Wealth is fine if it flows from this aboriginal ascesis, which is nothing more than the soul’s attempt at imitating the kenosis of Christ. But absent a cultural grounding in the “poverty-wealth” circumincession of the trinitarian God, where glorification and kenosis coinhere and coincide, there can be no Christian sense of wealth that avoids the Dominical condemnations.
This translates loosely into the vision of Chesterton, Belloc, or the late economist E.F. Schumacher (“small is beautiful”), or the apolitical politics of our poet class of modern Catholic prophets. This is indeed a Romanticism, no doubt about it. But it is the Romantics who, in my view, will be our salvation as we try and figure out how a post-liberal political ordo can avoid the pitfalls of the nihilism inherent within the post-Christian Right as much as the post-Christian Left.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22.