A Theological Challenge to Capitalism’s Imagination and Function

Capitalism. The word alone denotes a hierarchical movement. Capitalism orients us to ask the wrong first question as it seeks to monetize a thing or thought before learning of its usefulness to preserving life.

This is one of capitalism’s most dangerous spiritual achievements. It has organized an economy by catechizing people. It has shaped our desires, narrowed our moral imaginations, and convinced too many of us that the language of price is more reliable than the language of dignity.

Health care, housing, and higher education should never have been caught up in the net of capitalist ideals. Never ever. Conversely, no one should have to prove profitability in order to receive medical care or have to be economically useful in order to have a safe place to sleep, or should have to mortgage decades of their future in order to learn, study, think, teach, imagine, and contribute to the world. These are not luxury items or elite indulgences. These are simply conditions for human flourishing.

A society that treats health care as a commodity has already made up its mind that some people’s pain is more tolerable than others. In the same way, a society that uses housing primarily as an investment vehicle has already made up its mind that someone’s shelter can become someone else’s wealth strategy. Further, a society that turns higher education as a debt-producing industry has already made up its mind that wisdom, research, formation, and vocational preparation are acceptable sites for extraction.

The market may be useful for many things and holiness is not one of them. It is ungodly for any system to decide who deserves insulin, chemotherapy, prenatal care, therapy, surgery, shelter, clean water, breathable air, or an education. As such, it has no soul. It does not weep at funerals, sits beside hospital beds, kiss children goodnight, visits the prisoner, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, or welcomes the stranger. The market measures life in demand and it has no clue how to measure in mercy.

And yet, we have allowed market logic to reach into nearly every corner of human life. To this way of thinking, food becomes a commodity before it is recognized as nourishment. In the same way, land is seen as real estate long before it is remembered as God’s creation. Don’t get me started on labor. Labor is about cost and extraction before the workers are recognized as people with bodies, families, griefs, needs, gifts, and limits. I have been hearing that “time is money” ad nauseum because the designers and protectors of capitalism have made time all about productivity, and therefore, turned rest into laziness. It is also terrible that prisons have become opportunities for profit. Even grief gets packaged, branded, and sold back to us.

While capitalism keeps looking for more that can be extracted, the Gospel keeps calling us to see the people who are left wounded on the road. That is the great conflict, because Jesus did not teach us to ask whether the wounded man in the parable of the Samaritan had the right insurance, the right citizenship, the right employment status, the right religious identity, or the right moral history. Jesus simply asked us to see the wounded neighbor and respond with mercy.

Christian faith is not hostile to material life, so we must not attempt to ‘prayer-wash’ our apathy.  Faith is deeply concerned with material life. Human life and all that come with it - bodies, bread, shelter, water, wages, medicine, student loan debt – all of it matters. The point of the incarnation is that it will not allow us to spiritualize human need until it disappears into abstraction.

This is why oxygen and clean water should never have a price tag. Some things should be protected from the market because they belong to the sacred infrastructure of life. Breath should never be rationed by wealth. When did God attach a price tag to water? In the same breath, I posit that clean air should not depend on zip code. Nobody’s lungs should bear the cost of someone else’s profit margin. Certainly, no community should have to become sick so that another community can remain comfortable.

It is disgusting that the earth is treated as a warehouse of objects just waiting to be priced by greedy people. In Genesis, the waters, land, plants, animals, sky, and human beings are called good. They were meant to be mutually useful to each other and never for any to exploit the next.  In the same way, the sabbath command interrupts production and declares that rest is built into the moral order of creation. Even the land is to rest. Even animals are included in the rhythm. Even workers, servants, immigrants, and those without power are protected by the divine command from endless extraction. It is certain that this constant quest to conquer and control has made even the earth weary.

Scripture repeatedly interrupts economies that are built on hoarding. In Exodus, manna cannot be stored for private excess, except before Sabbath, when rest must be protected. In Leviticus, gleaning laws require landowners to leave food for the poor and the immigrant. The Jubilee tradition imagines debt release, land return, and social reset because God knows that without interruption, inequality calcifies across generations. The prophets condemn those who trample the poor, sell the needy for sandals, join house to house and field to field, and worship with hands stained by injustice. Mary sings of a God who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Jesus warns that one cannot serve God and wealth. James condemns the rich who withhold wages from workers. The book of Acts describes believers holding possessions in common so that there was not a needy person among them.

This is certainly not a divine endorsement of an economy where profit is treated as the highest good. This is God being suspicious and disapproving of any accumulation that requires someone else’s deprivation.

To be clear, the problem is not simply that some people have more than others do. The problem is that capitalism often depends on someone having less so that someone else can have more. Make no mistake, capitalism depends on underpaid, invisible, exploited, and displaced labor. I mean, what kind of deviance ends protections for children laborers?  Capitalism abandons communities when they are no longer profitable. Then, after creating the wounds, capitalism sells the bandages. Think about it: after creating ghettos, it sells gated communities as safety. Once it has poisoned the water and the soil, it sells medicine at prices that force people to choose between treatment and rent. It is obscene, the church must be willing to name that obscenity.

Sadly, too often, Christians have made peace with capitalism by baptizing its assumptions. Don’t get me started on the prosperity Gospel and preachers who fleece the communities they should be serving. Jesus overturned tables in a temple economy where worship and exploitation had become too comfortable together. If one pays attention to Jesus, it will be noticed that the gospel is not neutral about wealth, poverty, debt, hunger, exploitation, or greed.

I am United Methodist so of course, I will want to know what the Rev. John Wesley and our Wesleyan heritage have to say about this. Rev. John Wesley was not neutral about any of that either. Sadly, his instruction to “gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can” has too often been reduced to a slogan for respectable financial management. But he was deeply troubled by wealth that widened inequality. For Wesley, money was morally dangerous because it could so easily become a rival god. Thus, a Wesleyan critique of capitalism must ask about how money is earned, and what it does to the soul, to the community, and to life. Followers of Christ must not surrender our moral judgment to any economic order because in God’s economy, no ideology outranks the commandment to love God and neighbor.

Therefore, the church must recover the courage to stand on business and declare that some things are too sacred to be sold. The late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr in his book “Strength to Love” that “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.” That truth has not lost its value.

The market may have its place, but it must never be allowed to sit on the throne of life. That seat is already taken by holiness.

 #capitalism #greed #moralcompass