Iran’s Theocracy: An Uneasy Fusion of Religion and Political Economy

As mass protests erupted in Iran during the second week of January, 2026, Iran’s theocracy was on edge. That the protests stemmed from the dire economic conditions facing the people amid staggering inflation, including on basic food staples, rather than from foreign affairs, raises the question of whether religious clergy, including the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are competent in making economic policy. Without the ongoing political pressure that can come from constituents in a representative democracy, or republic, it is no surprise that the protests in Iran quickly became mass riots. In other words, bad economic policy by religious clerics in power in an autocracy can easily result in popular protests abruptly erupting into rioting. The overreaching of functionaries based in the domain of religion into politics (including economic policy), such that the distinctiveness of the two domains is ignored or obfuscated, can be distinguished from the problems that go with autocracy.

The full essay is at "Iran's Theocracy."

Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway

Imagine, if you will, a crowded, standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious: an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them. Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.

John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm of their respective times.[2]

Much less problematic is the attribution by observing selfishness of someone not being among the elect saved by the shedding of blood by the Son of God, for, as Paul and Augustine both claimed, God is love and it emanates not only in a person’s love directed to God, but also to one’s neighbors in benevolentia universalis. Intentionally depriving another subway passenger on a crowded train of a seat by taking one up with one’s backpack is antipodal to benevolence, which manifests divine love according to Christianity.

In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Literally “rubbing shoulders” with another passenger on a subway car is much less inconvenient than being charitable towards adversaries. The root of the word charity is love rather than philanthropy.

In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passenger moved his backpack, who knows, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat? 

Nevertheless, Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences, which are in a person's self-interest, the root is still a sin. Needless to say, this point applies to the naked underlying narrow selfishness of the baker and the consumer in Adam Smith's theory of a competitive market, where not even moral sentiments can be assumed to be in the calculus of either participant. In relying on market-level unintended beneficial consequences of selfish economic pursuits by the crucially price-based impersonal mechanism of the proverbial "invisible hand," Smith does not even acknowledge or rely on intentional benefits for others from the enlightened or "compound" self-interest of market participants. Smith's view of human nature in the economic domain is thus relatively pessimistic. I submit that the business world empirically bears this out, as evinced, for example, by how corporations market their marketing under the subterfuge of "corporate social responsibility." Even attempts to reconcile organizational and societal norms are not ethical in nature, given Hume's notion of the naturalistic fallacy, which states that ethical principles are necessary to get from "is" to "ought." I submit that still another fallacy is instantiated by conflating the ethical and theological domains. In short, God transcends and thus is not limited to "ought." The profane world of business greed is oceans of time from the realm of godliness. 

As preferable as damning selfishness is to reckoning a rich person as being favored by God, distinguishing the ethical domain from that of salvation is important because the two domains are, I submit, qualitatively different even though they do interrelate. Hence Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and being saved or damned mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake as superimposes stuff of our realm onto God. It could be, for example, that the man on the subway suffers from PTSD and thus God has mercy on such a trifling thing as the man taking up an extra seat. Furthermore, it could be that the man was on his way to care for his sick grandmother and triggering his social anxiety on the train would compromise the care he could give.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.

2. Ibid.

3. Samuel Hopkins, An Eenquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).

Pope Leo: Poised against Plutocracy?

Poised as the “new Leonine era,” worded as if gilding the proverbial lily as if a golden ring, the installation of Pope Leo XIV reinvigorated Pope Francis’s preachments on the poor and economic inequality because Robert Prevost chose Leo in large part because of Pope Leo XIII of the late nineteenth century, whose “historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”[1] Due to “his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training, Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity among the faithful and the more secular world about the influence the Catholic Church could exert on the economic world during his pontificate.”[2] In the exuberance of a new pontificate, it is easy to get carried away with excitement as to possibilities. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s crime against humanity in Gaza, no one could be blamed for seeking out hope wherever it could be found. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind just how marginal the calls of conscience can be, given the onslaught of greed not only in the present day represented by powerful corporate (and related) governmental interests, but also in greed’s institutional accretions built up over time that have a force of their own in protecting the economic (and political) status quo.

The practical impact of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, promulgated in 1891, should not be overstated. To be sure, it “laid the foundations of the social doctrine of the Church that inspired Catholic trade unionism, and, some 30 years later, the creation of the Christian Democratic parties that contributed decisively to the civil and material reconstruction of Europe after World War II.”[3] Calling “for workers’ rights without resorting to the class struggle promoted by Marxist doctrine” by instead focusing on “the balance of fair wages and equal economic relations,” Rerum Novarum can be said to have been prudent and eminently practical.[4] Even so, a focus on microeconomics can only do so much when the macro political-economy structure is left intact, and that structure, specifically in its huge concentrations of private capital in modern corporations and their economic-turned-political power in the halls of government amid elected representatives seeking campaign-reelection donations and lucrative jobs in the future, plays a crucial role in perpetuating and even aggravating huge economic disparities and the corruption of democracy by plutocracy.

“Pope Leo XIII questioned the concentrations of economic industrial power and was immediately attacked,” says Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a banker and former president of the Institute for Religious Works, the corrupt Vatican financial institution.[5] Tedeschi attributed the anti-trust legislation in the United States to the encyclical, but he left out the ensuing fecklessness with which the U.S. Justice Department has used the Sherman Act to break up oligopolies and monopolies (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, General Motors, etc) undoubtedly because of “political pressure.” Even though the Sherman Act was passed “to curb the power of cartels that had created a near-monopoly regime with serious social repercussions” does not mean that much curbing actually took place.[6] Because “serious social repercussions” stem from anti-competitive economic industries, the staying power of the latter even decades into the twenty-first century means that even prior efforts to fortify labor unions fell short of the aims of Rerum Novarum. The proof, in order words, is in the pudding.

That Pope Leo XIV sought to build on established Catholic social teaching such as Rerum Novarum “to respond to another industrial revolution and to developments in artificial intelligence that bring new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and work” may have been putting the cart before the horse, given the social repercussions still occurring in 2025 from the gigantic economic and political power of the mega multinational corporations.[7] Indeed, “economic data” showed “growing crises and imbalances between average incomes and the cost of living” in the E.U. and U.S., which a focus on AI would not address.[8]

In the U.S., the pope’s home country, for example, the federal House of Representatives was in the midst of cutting the budget of Medicaid, which funds healthcare for the poor and disabled. Just days before the inaugural Mass of the new pope, a group of conservative Republican lawmakers blocked a bill with cuts to the program because they were not large enough, given the president’s proposed tax-cut (amid a federal budget debt at the time of $36.21 trillion). That any tax cut would even be proposed amid such a debt (with Moody’s recently having reduced the U.S.’s credit rating) defies fiscal logic and prudence. Cutting health-care for the poor without cutting military spending conjures up “social repercussions” in terms of values that presumably violate those of Rerum Novarum and thus Popes Leo XIII and XIV.

I submit that the Roman Catholic Church still had work to do on the question of human dignity, well-being, and justice in the context of human nature’s incompatibility with holding so much economic and political power in such concentrations that human nature itself may be warped as in the case of an addiction. The incarnation of billionaires who could not possibly spend such wealth in their respective lifetimes (and their survival from want is virtually assured) is something that Pope Leo XIII could not have dealt with, as businessmen such as JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were the millionaire “titans” of the Gilded Age. Having broken up Standard Oil in 1913 (without changing the ownership) does not mean much as the U.S. Justice Department stood by through the rest of the twentieth century as more and more American industries turned into oligopolies and even de facto monopolies. The practical impact of Rerum Novarum hardly justifies moving on the AI without taking another stab at the political-economic regime that has perpetuated and even extenuated massive economic inequality and price-setting “inflation” by companies.

Just days before Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate officially began, Walmart’s chief financial manager told the media that the company “had no choice” in raising prices due to new tariffs. Were Walmart’s industry competitive rather than oligopolistic, Walmart would be a price-taker, such that market discipline (i.e., choices by consumers) could mean that Walmart would “have no choice” but to accept lower profit by absorbing some of the supply-cost increases rather than passing them all on to the consumers. As U.S. President Trump said, Walmart had made billions of dollars in 2024, and thus could afford to absorb some of the impact of the tariffs. Put another way, we have no choice but pass on the increases onto the consumer is itself not only a lie, but also an indication of the company’s perception of its industry as less than subject to competitive forces wherein consumers can vote with their wallets and purses by buying elsewhere rather than being forced to pay more at Walmart.

If anything, the economic (and related political) regime that supports excessive economic rents being paid by consumers as large corporations continue to profit greatly has endured and even prospered as the status quo since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. Oligopolies came to populate even the high-tech industry, including social media, at the expense of competitive markets and thus consumers as well as workers. Restructuring the underlying political-economic regime lies beyond the purview of labor unions; even the voice of Catholic conscience may be insufficient, given how the regime is fed by and feeds greed. In shifting from a strict anti-wealth paradigm to a pro-wealth paradigm wherein wealth is decoupled from greed (i.e., liberality and munificence vindicating even fortunes as camels slip through narrow places), Christianity had arguably compromised itself with respect to being a normative obstacle to greed.[9]

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1. Sergio Cantone, “How the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIV Could Influence the World Economy,” Euronews.com, May 18, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

Spirituality as Distinctively Religious

To be at its fullest, the notion of spiritual leadership applied to business should not shirk the religious basis of spirituality to make it somehow more fitting to business-or a certain rendition of business. Many of Gilbert Fairholm’s descriptions of spirituality risk embalming spirituality in a secular tomb in keeping with the bias typically found in the business world against anything religious. Fortunately, some of his other characterizations of the term provide an alternative basis for an invigorated notion of spiritual leadership applied even in the business world.

Material from this essay has been incorporated into Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook. 

See The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook. Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles relevant to leadership comprise part two of the book. 

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1. Gilbert W. Fairholm, Capturing the Heart of Leadership: Spirituality and Community in the New American Workplace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

Being Partisan in the Pulpit: Going the Extra Mile

The Johnson Amendment, which became law in the U.S. in 1954 and was named for Lyndon Johnson, then a U.S. Senator, “is a provision in the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from openly supporting political candidates. In the words of the tax code, ‘all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”[1] I submit that it is in a cleric’s interest to expand this prohibition to include advocating for (or opposing) particular public policies. This general principle would of course be subject to exceptions in which a proposed or enacted policy is strongly anathema to the religious principles of the given religious organization or religion.

Generally speaking, it is in the medium- and long-term interest of both clerics and their religious organizations to resist the temptation to preach along partisan lines. That such preaching is a temptation should signal the presence of a bad odor, and yet it is almost always overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Besides turning off members who are good fits religiously speaking but do not agree with the particular political ideology being preached, the stain of partisan ideology can make the cleric seem self-obsessed. In other words, that such preachments are convenient to the speakers themselves can easily be translated into self-idolatry in religious terms.

One cleric, not of one of the Abrahamic religions, in my hometown once told me that according to his religion, certain social structures are sacred. In particular, only those sociological/economic/political systems that are egalitarian and thus just in this way can be sacred. The use of this overtly religious term takes human artifacts to have divine status. By implication, the social, economic, or political ideology in play is also divine. I submit that such a position counts as self-idolatry—the worship of the human as itself being sacred, or divine. Put another way, if the societal systems we design are sacred, then the makers themselves must also be sacred—essentially little gods admiring their handiwork. I submit that when the cleric preaches on socio-economic and political policies or systems thereof as sacred, he is engaging in self-idolatry. Religion for him has become too comfortable, too easy. Absent is the wholly other, or absolutely different, quality of the divine, which is transcendent as well as immanent. Declaring a human artifact to be sacred eclipses the transcendent.

Unfortunately, the temptation to make the preachment as fitting as possible to the preacher’s own ideology can easily exploit good exceptions, where the public policy is anathema to a major religious teaching. Roman Catholicism’s doctrine of humanae vitae (i.e., on the sanctity of human life) arguably justifies preaching in opposition to abortion and capital punishment. To be sure, the doctrine’s salience relative to the Incarnation and the Resurrection can be subject to critique, such that the political opposition may actually be ideological in nature. In other words, the doctrine of the sanctity of human life—which does not imply that human beings are sacred!—could be used as a subterfuge allowing for the true, subterranean motive: political influence in line with a particular moral/political ideology.

Even if the allowance of good exceptions has a tendency of being exploited, it is indeed possible that public policies run contrary to significant religious beliefs, and such opposition is legitimate in the pulpit.  The task for the conscientious cleric writing a sermon is to be on guard—like the disciples presumably on the night Jesus is handed over to the Roman guard—for the slithering motions of self-idolatry under the subterfuge of pious religion.

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[1] Randall Balmer, “The Peril of Being Partisan at the Pulpit,” Stars and Stripes, February 7, 2017.

A Pro-Wealth Buddhist Temple in Thailand and Pro-Wealth Christianity: Is Religion Inherently Weak?

In Thailand, Phra Dhammachayo, the head of the Wat Dhammakaya Buddhist Temple—Thailand’s largest—could be heard, as of 2016 at least, exhorting non-monk meditators, “Be rich, be rich, be rich!”[1] This pro-wealth message, with its “endorsement of worldly comforts,” has attracted worshippers even as it has “unsettled the government and the Buddhist hierarchy.”[2] Indeed, the top body of Buddhism accused him of heresy—a charge you don’t typically hear in that religion—and stripped him of his religious title. Yet his popularity at Wat Dhammakaya was undiminished. It is no wonder the Temple’s popularity continued to grow, with cash machines placed near a meditation room—the machines’ screens declaring, “Shortcut to making merit.” By giving money, and even credit-card points, to the temple, a Buddhist’s merit can be enhanced. Other things equal, the additional good karma results in a better reincarnation in the next life. The worshippers, or more strictly speaking, meditators, at the temple could presumably be rich in this life and be born into a better life next time around simply by practicing Buddhism.

Of course, the Buddha taught that desire is the source of suffering. Clinging to things, such as wealth, can thus be expected to lead to unhappiness. In Christianity, suffering itself is not necessarily to be avoided, as “picking up your Cross” in following Christ involves voluntary suffering. This in turn is based on agape, or self-emptying, love. Were Phra Dhammachayo a Christian rather than Buddhist priest, his vulnerability would be lapsing adherents into the sin of greed. Indeed, as the Christian attitude toward riches swung from anti-wealth to pro-wealth from the Commercial Revolution in the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the risk was precisely that the religion would redeem the sin of greed itself, essentially incorporating it as a virtue.[3] One priest and theologian in the Italian Renaissance explicitly wrote that love of gain is good. Lest that be thought to be the high-water mark of the pro-wealth position in Christianity, the Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that God rewards true belief (i.e., that Jesus Christ is the redeeming Son of God) with material wealth rather than salvation alone, became popular in pockets of evangelical Christianity in the twentieth century and into the next. Norman Vincent Peale and Joel Osteen are two cases in point; no hint of the camel that could not get through the eye of the needle.

Certainly religions must contend with external, worldly pressures to conform to the convenient in the here and now. Whether a religion’s life-cycle necessarily involves caving into the pressure is a question worthy of scholarly attention. In the case of Thailand’s largest temple, the “economic boom of the 1980s created a well-to-do middle class for whom moneymaking rivaled Buddhist tradition as a core value.”[4] Something was needed to bring the two together. However, the craving for money that moneymaking tends to involve is inimical to the Buddha’s diagnosis of suffering and his prescription—enlightenment. So bringing the proverbial oil and water together can be regarded as an oxymoron at best. Perhaps it can be said that holding a religion to its intrinsic otherness is fraught with human nature.

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[1] Seth Mydans, “Parsing Buddhism in a Shrine to Abundance,” The New York Times, December 21, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Skip Worden, God’s Gold (Seattle, WA: Amazon, 2016).

[4] Seth Mydans, “Parsing Buddhism in a Shrine to Abundance,” The New York Times, December 21, 2016.

Pope Francis on Youth Unemployment, War, and the Idolatry of Money

It is not often that the global economy’s military-industrial complex is tied to youth unemployment and, moreover, to the idolatry of money. Yet this is precisely the thread woven by the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. While the pope’s comments risk a certain overreach from the theological to the terrain of international political economy, which proffers its own body of knowledge, it can also be said that having a transcendent referent as one’s focus enables a person to make subtle taken-for-granted assumptions in our economic, social, and political systems transparent. In articulating an economic (and related political) center and giving it a distinctly theological interpretation stemming from the Biblical passage, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,”[1] the Roman pope provides the world with a way to do political economy from a distinctly religious vantage-point.

“At the center of all economic systems must be man, man and woman,” the pope asserts; “everything else must be in service to this man.[2] In itself, this claim is not religious in nature. Rather, the tone is philosophical, reminiscent perhaps of Kant’s “kingdom of ends” in which morality means respecting rational beings as objective ends in themselves, rather than only using them as means. For Kant, a lack of goodwill, due to pathology, lies behind the lack of adequate respect that would otherwise put people first—hence the need for public legal justice. This is not to say that Kant secularizes the matter completely; any rational creature is an end in itself “by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law, which is holy.”[3]  Using reason, the rational being is an assigner of value; such a being thus has absolute value (hence deserving to be treated as an end in itself, rather than merely a means to someone else’s agenda). Now a rational being is uniquely free to subject himself to his own law, which, given the necessity that lies in reason itself, binds him.  “The moral law is holy (inviolable),” Kant writes; “the humanity in his person must be holy to him.”[4] For Kant, the humanity is the rational nature, which makes the moral law sacred because reason cannot be bent out of sheer caprice. Put another way, rational beings have absolute value in that we use reason to hold ourselves as if by necessity (though freely) to that which we assign value to.

Pope Francis can be read as substituting love for reason—that men and women are made out of love, and thus inherently to be loved rather than used as mere means. Here we can discern glimpses of Leibniz’s claim that human beings are due love as a matter of justice as per the extent of being or existence that we have, and Augustine’s emphasis on caritas, or human love that can be sublimated to love of God.

Whereas Kant points to pathological self-love as thwarting the respect due beings of love, Pope Francis argues in terms similar to Aquina’s misordered concupiscence—placing a lower good above a higher one. “(W)e have put money at the center, the god of money,” the pope claims. “We have fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money.”[5] Where your treasure is, there may be found your heart. In this case, money, which Aristotle calls barren metal, has come to be loved rather than other people, not to mention God, which as Augustine stresses, is love itself. The basic problem, in other words, is warped priorities.

Not surprisingly, greed is not far away, lying behind money as a god at the center of all. “The economy is moved by the ambition of having more.”[6] That ambition is an end in itself, so no amount of money is ever enough. Interestingly, we can distinguish ever-lasting here from the eternal; whereas love cuts through time in having value, greed is of infinite, or unlimited, desire. Value that cuts through time, such as holds with love, gets expunged by the all-consuming god of money. Put in Kantian terms, people are treated as mere means rather than also as ends in themselves.

It is no wonder that the young and old are tossed to the wayside because of their relatively low utility. Regarding youth unemployment, the pope had this to say. “(W)e are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that to survive must make war, as the great empires have always done.”[7] The system, being designed to funnel money, must be protected, and it is no accident that the people-as-means, or human resources, attribute so easily translates into an economy of war. Rather than being at the center, the human being is reduced to collateral damage, or targeted outright.

Because “a Third World War can’t be done, they make [regional] wars,” the pope explains.[8] This involves the production and sale of weapons, which sorts out “the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money.”[9] Here the pope explicitly relates making money an idol of inviolable worth and sacrificing people as if they are worthless. Barren metal, in other words, is put over beings capable of holding themselves to a moral law and of loving themselves and others—even those who would sacrifice them on an altar of gold. Not unexpectedly, an international political economy oriented to sustaining an arms trade divides economies—even sorting them reductively along the lines of weapons production and consumption. The United States is a “superpower,” whereas Africa has value only in as much as it has the wherewithal to purchase weapons and sustain its intestine squabbles.

Once held up as a coming cacophony of diversity “like a polyhedron, all united but each preserving its particularity, its wealth, its identity,” globalization has become impoverished, “a sphere in which all points are equidistant from the center” whose sheer gravity “takes away the wealth of diversity of thought and therefore the wealth of a dialogue between peoples.”[10] That is to say, the reductionistic, weapons-oriented organizing principle of the global military-industrial complex saps globalization of its many differences, essentially nullifying this sort of wealth in favor of a more banal form in which the dark hole of a bank vault functions as a god with a suffocating embrace.

Beware the military industrial complex. U.S. President Eisenhower delivered this starkly public warning as he embraced some free speech in his farewell address in 1960. It is dangerous to have so much financial and related political interest lined up on the side of war. This is hardly unknown, yet we tolerate it because the interests of capital have beguiled us into supposing that they have labor’s back. In other words, we have been made to fear the onslaught of mass unemployment that would ensue from a structural realignment off the weapons trade. 

In his interview in 2014, Pope Francis takes a more subtler look at what is really at stake. Whereas historically religion and then morality operated as viable constraints on the profit motive, the god of money seems to have a relatively free hand as of the early twenty-first century at least; correspondingly, people are secondary, and thus expendable, in the system designed and inhabited by the same. Money has come to be regarded as an absolute, with the worth of persons being defined exclusively according to its measure. Put another way, the unit of measurement has become an end in itself—inviolable, and thus an idol—while the measurers—the assigners of value—have come to accept their place as mere means, or human resources. 

Living in the “system”— an artifice entirely changeable even in its basic contours—many people just assume that the constantly-felt subterranean, subtly existential instability or uncertainty is a necessary part of life. Life means being expendable. Life means that money rules. From a transcendental referent point, a spiritual person can see the world differently—atypically—and thus make transparent our systems’ basic premises. Once recognized, they can be changed; the changers can take back their innate power to set the priorities for the systems, whether they are social, economic, or political in nature, and to see to it that the designs are in sync with those priorities. Where our treasures are, there too are our gods.

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[1] Luke 12:34; Matthew 6:21. Not being in Mark, the source is likely the book of Q (which stands for Quelle, or “source” in German), a book of Jesus sayings hypothesized to have been a source used by the writers of Luke and Matthew.

[2] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[3] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

Catholic Social Ethics:The Free Market as an Idol

In June of 2014, Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, a “prince” of the Roman Catholic Church, of the free-market system as “a new idol” that increases inequalities of wealth and excludes the poor.[1] Pope Francis had already claimed that personal charity is not sufficient as a remedy—that solidarity with the poor necessitates, in the Cardinal’s words, “dealing with the structural causes of poverty and injustice.”[2] As theorized by Thomas Piketty, that structure includes a tendency under typical circumstances for the rate of return on capital to exceed the growth rate in incomes (and GNP). Faith in the market’s invisible hand and people’s charitable giving do not suffice to counter this tilt. Indeed, Catholic social ethics would have it that faith in perfect competition as an ideal is tantamount to idolatry that operates at the expense particularly of the down-trodden and poor.

We might postulate more generally that idolatry is a faith that operates at the expense of compassion, or is impotent to amass any. If a faith that transcends the limits of human conception and perception sensitizes a person to existence itself, and thus to the plight of others who suffer, then a faith fixed on a phenomenon in the world we have created could be expected to come up short with respect to intensifying compassion.

It is only fair to ask, therefore, whether the insufficiency of the free market and charity risk turning government into a savior?  That is to say, might such a faith in government turn out to be yet another form of idolatry? If so, would not the promised compassion be illusionary in the end? Even in a theocracy, government is not transcendent; rather, it is quite of the earthly kingdom even if presumed to be informed from on high.

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[1] David Gibson, “Cartinal Maradiaga Slams Free Market Libertarianism: ‘This Economy Kills’,” The Huffington Post, June 4, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

Pope Francis Goes After the Idolatry of Money: A Theological Critique of Wall Street

How far must religion extend to retain its potency? Is religion like the law, having its fingers into everything? In Evangem Gaddium, Pope Francis formally puts his imprint on economic policy from a theological standpoint. The question is whether the connection is a bridge too far.

The Pope presents his intended nexus explicitly in the term, "idolatry of money.”[1]  With Wall Street and London undoubtedly in his sights, the Pope draws on the historical theological stance that the sin of greed is in turn based on idolatry. Lest it be presumed that treating money as an idol in the created realm is the bedrock, the decision to idolize money honors the idolizer. Therefore, greed is ultimately founded on self-idolatry: a creature vaunting itself above even its Creator. The question is whether the theological fix can be as specific as the Pope specifies in his first apostolic exhortation. Moreover, is even an ethically salubrious economic policy the answer to a sin or a category mistake?

In terms of policy, the Pope extolls politicians to guarantee all citizens "dignified work, education and healthcare."[2] In effect, he would have human rights applied on an economic basis. Additionally, he calls for an overhaul of the financial system and warns that unequal distribution of wealth inevitably leads to violence. "Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills."[3]  Before issuing his 84-page paper, the Pope had spoken out against the clergy and laity who obsess on abortion by pushing a particular partisan position. Severe economic inequality kills too. This is not to say that the Pope advocates “a simple welfare mentality.”[4] Even if the Pope obviates charges of partisanship along familiar ideological divisions, the question remains: Is the Pope implying in his writing that significantly reducing such inequality also restores the inequality between the self-idolater and God?

The Pope may indeed inadvertently reduce a fundamental (and enduring) theological problem to a policy solution in claiming, "As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems."[5] Presumably the cleric would not have excluded the theological variety. Hence, given all that rides on the economic prescription being advocated by the Pope, he asks for divine intervention capable of reaching down into the bowels of legislative business. "I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor."[6] Is this not akin to begging the Lord to take sides in a bloody war, and, moreover, is it not at least slightly presumptuous  to take it as a given that God is the sort of ultimacy wherein particular policies or positions matter? 

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1. Naomi O’Leary, “Pope Francis ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ Calls For Renewal Of Roman Catholic Church, Attacks ‘Idolatry Of Money,” Reuters, November 26, 2013.

2.Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.