A Little Mammon Ruins the Whole Loaf

It only takes the slightest change to make a very, very large difference.

For example, there's the human genome.  My genetic material, the basic information written into our DNA?  It's what makes us human, and what makes each human being different from every other human being.  The tiniest tweak, and we're a different person.

Larger variances make us not human at all.

Eighty percent of our fundamental genetic makeup is identical to that of cattle.  Eighty five percent, we share with mice.  So only a fifteen percent variance, and we're scuttering around beneath the floorboards and leaving little rice-sized poop pellets on the kitchen counter.

We become something categorically different.  A cow is not a human is not a mouse, eh?

I've been meditating on difference and Christian faith lately, as I lead the adult ed class of my little church through reflections on race, difference, and what binds us together as Jesus folk.  One of the great strengths of Christian faith, as I see it, is its ability to exist polyculturally.  The Gospel speaks in every language, and can adapt to the forms and norms of every human culture.

Not that we haven't squabbled over everything and anything, including a single vowel in a single Greek word in one statement of faith.  But Christian unity is formed and shaped by the grace of the Spirit, and our willingness to care for one another despite our manifold differences.  I see Jesus in Methodist and Mennonite, in Catholic and Charismatic, in Orthodoxies both Slavic and Amhara.  We're progressive and conservative, plain and erudite, and all of it can be truly Christian.

Still, there are areas where I'll admit I have always struggled, particularly where the Gospel becomes focused on wealth and prosperity.  

That's kind of a problem right now.

The Prosperity Gospel is ascendant in our culture, the dominant form of the faith, to the point where it's really the closest thing America has to a state religion.  As acolytes of Kenneth Copeland's Word of Faith movement now sit at the heart of power, there's never been a moment when this movement has been as prominent as a form of Christian expression. 

The language of Prosperity Preachin', as I've noted numerous times over the years, about 80 percent comprised of recognizable Christian theology.  Read through the writings of Creflo A. Dollar, or endure one of Paula White's surprisingly listless sermons, and you'll find most of it almost kinda sorta works.  

But that twenty percent variance makes a difference, enough so that it is no longer reflective of the teachings of Jesus.

Money money money, gain gain gain, ever bigger ever more?  There's no version of Jesus who pointed us towards material wealth and social influence. There's no version of the Jesus we know from the Gospels that tolerated venality and indulgence as a marker of spiritual blessing.   You can bowlderize him into a shambling FrankenChrist golem that makes that case, sure, but a plain reading of the Nazarene's intent just won't get you there.  It's uncanny valley Jesus, Jesus shifted and warped to serve the demands of our endless capitalist avarices.

Wealth, as Jesus taught about it, is a dangerous thing for the soul.  The wealthier you are, the more likely it is that you're in some serious spiritual mess.  You have built your house on the sand of human imaginings.  Our material gain is, at best, a dishonorable thing that must be bent to the use of grace with cunning and intention.  

You cannot, said my Lord and Savior in a very declarative way, serve God and wealth. 

Anarcholibertarian and Anarchocapitalist

Anarcholibertarianism is a peculiar thing, I'll admit.  

It is not the same thing as anarchocapitalism, because anarchocapitalism is a raging oxymoron and conceptually self-annihilating.  

Corporations and corporate power structures are no less a threat to liberty than political power structures.  Because capital is social power, eh?  Capital exhibits all of the gravitic tendencies of human power to concentrate itself, creates all of the same wild imbalances and injustices, and is ultimately as much threat to freedom and human dignity as any other form of collective power.

Wealth has always worked this way, which is why my moral teacher spent a remarkably large amount of time challenging the ethics of capital in his day.  Profit maximization and the relentless focus on the accrual of capital were, for him, fundamentally suspect and dangerous to our integrity as persons.  

At best, wealth represented a system that needed to be subverted and used slyly against itself.  

At worst, Mammon was the heart of our failure.  It is the system that enslaves us.

Which, again, is why it is so peculiar seeing those who are nominally libertarian so enthralled by the power dynamics of capital.  It is no less a danger to liberty than concentrations of political power.  Assuming that the accrual of socially mediated proxies for ownership and control somehow makes one more "free" is absurd.

Freedom, for the libertarian, is an essential state of being, a fundamental aspect of sentience and personhood.  It is an inalienable right.  It will always stand independent from imagined structural frameworks, be they legal or economic.

The Naked Community

So the other day, I found myself wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were naked. Not stripped of clothing, mind you. That would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm also afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling. But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there when we woke up one morning.

The powers in question: mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, and it is wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So our bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one spring morning, and we hear it breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. There are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some trippy pictures on it. It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is an interesting measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on your local Best Buy, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge. But the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have. I can't imagine it having any meaningful impact within an Amish community, for instance.

How we react when we are truly, really, totally free is a good measure of where we stand relative to the Kingdom.