Faith and the Present Economy
A Trial of Allegiance
“You cannot serve both God and money.” Lk. 16:13
When our nation is called to give an account at the Last Judgment, surely this statement will be among those that stands against us. For ours is preeminently a commercial and financial society, one whose course is taken up with the making and spending of money, and the material comforts it affords. A citizen’s chief activities are production (if part of the workforce) and consumption, and government policy at all levels aims to provide for a citizen’s ability to do these two things. This shows in a thousand ways, from subsidizing vocational training to unemployment assistance to myriad welfare programs.
Whether these things are economically sensible is not our concern here. Our point is that this preoccupation with money tends to predominate all other things. Preoccupation with material concerns suffocates concern for things of the Spirit (Matt. 13:22). Preoccupation with the things of this life drives out thought of eternity (Lk. 12:16-21). And preoccupation with the kingdom of Mammon deprives one of allegiance to the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:24).
It is on this point that we stumble terribly at present. We panicked and did considerable harm to our economy by our initial response to the Chinese sickness outbreak, and we then panicked yet further and pursued a broad array of measures to ‘build back better’ and mitigate all the harm of our initial response. All of this has been immensely detrimental to the spiritual well-being of both the church and the nation.
For whatever their intention, all our economic measures have conditioned people to think in terms of finances. The nation is awash – not merely in the pronouncements of politicians or the reporting of the press, but in the everyday speech of the common people – with incessant and anxious talk of inflation, interest rates, housing costs, wages, the unemployment rate, and so forth. All this is connected with material prosperity; and while all of it has long featured in American life, the economic crisis occasioned by our initial panic seems to have raised its pitch and made it even more all-encompassing than previously. Now one can scarcely have a conversation without it devolving into a discussion of such things.
This has led to such things as ‘the Great Resignation,’ in which millions of people changed jobs seeking higher wages. Many believers have gone along with the underlying attitude and regard making as much money as possible as the point of employment. On such a view an occupation is not a privilege given by God by which we earn to provide our necessities and help those in need (Eph. 4:28), nor a calling in which we employ our talents to serve our neighbors. Under such a conception, money is not one of several concerns – it is the only concern.
Such selfish ambition hollows out the doctrine of vocation entirely and does wider harm to boot. The tendency to think always in terms of personal financial interests does not produce selfless, hospitable neighbors or kinfolk, nor citizens who place the wellbeing of the commonwealth ahead of their own. It makes people calculating and inward, and makes even the natural virtues of the pagan, like loyalty, doubtful.
Much more does it make war upon the soul. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils,” we are told, and by yielding to it “some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (1 Tim. 6:10). Christ says that it is better to give than to receive (Acts 20:25); that one must hate and lose his life to be his disciple (Lk. 9:24); that one’s life does not consist in possessions (Lk. 12:15); that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 19:24); and that blessed are the poor (Lk. 6:20). None of those can be reconciled to the contemporary obsession with money that never rests.
If it be rejoined that it is the advantage of commerce that it is free, peaceful, and mutually beneficial to its participants, we rejoin that the evil is not commerce as such, but its present form, the principle that animates it, and the sinful impulses which it inflames. For our commerce is not free but guided by the government, which by its actions distorts it and causes it to take a form it would not otherwise. Left to themselves, people would not handle money as they currently do.
But people are not left to themselves: regarded as cogs in the machine of the economy, a multitude of policies are sought to encourage them to act in some ways and not in others. Our monetary policies have caused inflation, which stimulates spending now rather than saving for the future. When this inflation got out of hand, the central power of the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to discourage such liberal spending and urge money to be put elsewhere. A citizen is not a free agent doing with his money as he deems best, but a part of a bigger system which largely determines his actions by the policies of its central authorities.
Again, this is not politics, and so our observations here are not part of a preferred political response. We simply note this to point out that under present circumstances our nation is pursuing a set of policies that has a definite, detrimental effect upon the virtue and spiritual-mindedness of the citizenry. Nothing so much bewitches the mind as the sight of abundant money and material wealth. Our whole government, spurred on by many private actors, gives its efforts to material prosperity, and by this concern with prosperity above all else has conditioned the citizenry to have similar priorities.
And that concern makes remorseless war upon the life of the Spirit. It is this which is ravaging the church and the nation at present, however little it is observed. And to it we reply with those words of our Lord: “be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Lk. 12:15).