The Crumbling Metaphysics of Mammon

Despite radically different starting points, both the secular and religious person are duty bound, by the very fundamentals of their worldview, to oppose the absolute claims of the Market Economy to rule the affairs of humanity. Furthermore, they are even more duty bound to harness the powers of the economy to bring abundant life to humans. For money is created to serve humans, and not humans to serve money. The wealth of a nation is the health of its people, and the health of an economy is the health and well-being of the people served by that economy. There is no other metric that is meaningful or worthwhile. Is the economy increasing the life and health and wellbeing of those who live within it? Then it is a good economy that needs to be strengthened. Is the economy decreasing the life and health and wellbeing of those who live within it? Then it is a bad economy that needs to be reformed.

The secular person cannot accept the value of money at "face value", nor tolerate the abuse of humans for the sake of money. Because money is merely a social construct of humans, and can be reconstructed any way humans choose to. So the same secular critique of the value of religion and tradition must be leveled at monetary value and economic systems as well. For they are every bit as much of a social creation, based in collective faith, as any religion or tradition ever has been. Therefore if monetary value is not serving to create full human flourishing, and if an economic system is failing to provide the basic needs of all, its illusory power must be broken.

We need to liberate humanity from the superstition that profit is more valuable than people, and the economy is “just the way it is”. The economy is not "the way it is". It is the way we, collectively, have made it to be. Until the idolatry of money is smashed alongside other unverifiable creeds and rituals, Secular Humanism is not worth its name. Because if money and the Market are accepted as real, a person is not truly secular: They are as religious as any fervent Catholic or Hindu or Confucian. And if monetary value is accepted as the highest value, a person is not humanist: They are making Mammon more important than humanity. 

Likewise the religious person cannot accept the goodness of money with a clean heart. Saint Paul tells us that the “love of money is a root of all evil” (1Timothy 6.10). And it is clear that when profits are valued over people, God’s children get used and abused and disposed for the sake of the bottom line. But Jesus goes a step beyond, telling us that money itself is imbued with a malign spiritual power. He says in Matthew 6.24: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other: You cannot serve both God and Mammon” referring to the Pagan god of greed and acquisition and wealth. Mammon is the personification of profit and avarice, the embodiment of the Market in the money we use to buy and sell the goods of the world. Jesus further counsels us to subvert Mammon to serve the Love of God: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest Mammon so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes” (Luke 16:9). And just as Jesus once said "The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath" (Mark 2.27), so also the Spirit of Jesus tells us now: "The Economy was made for people, not people for the Economy".

Religious people need to realize that The Market™ can be treated as a god. In fact, it seems we have constructed a religion around it complete with saints and sinners, laws and rituals, doctrines and debates, holy days and sacrificial rites. Stamping “In god we trust” on our money could be seen as a credal statement, conditioning us to associate money with a god, so we more easily subvert the Love of the Real God to obey the dictates of Filthy Lucre. Our endless news cycle reporting the ups and downs of Stock Markets can function as a constant catechesis on how to appease Mammon. It teaches us how to calm a volatile Market, just as ancient villagers would seek to calm a restless Volcano: By sacrifice! Some of our economic prophets proclaim in the name of Profit: Sacrifice workers! Sacrifice wages! Sacrifice benefits! Sacrifice quality! Sacrifice ecology! Sacrifice safety and security! Sacrifice core values! Sacrifice everything so the profits of the prophets may abound! 

Until the religious person recognizes Mammon as a crass idol masquerading as a god, they are not truly religious. Until they realize wealth and money are inherently malign spiritual forces, they are selling out the Kingdom of God for something infinitely less valuable. Until they yank wealth tight on a choke collar to make it obey the dictates of Divine Love and serve human flourishing, they are not truly pious. Like a guard dog the value of wealth lies in the predatory power it wields, which can have real but limited efficacy to effect change in society. But when let loose Mammon will maul and ravage everyone in sight. Religious people have a Divine Mandate to jerk that choke collar tight on the economy's neck as hard as is required, for as long as is required, to make the economy serve people instead of people serving the economy. 

Thus from the Secular and Sacred standpoints, the whole system of Consumerism needs to crumble to dust. We don't need it. We have the technology and infrastructure to provide everyone on the planet with enough to eat, ways to learn, and medical care, without people needing to work 60 hour weeks (or more!). Money is a social construct which more and more often does not represent the value of products and labor in the real world. If you don't believe me, just look at the ballooning of stock market value when compared to the stagnation of wages for most workers, or the production costs of most of the goods we rely on for daily living. Yet, we enslave people to meaningless jobs using electronic chains so they can harvest the digital ones and zeroes that represent monetary value on a spreadsheet somewhere. 

If I could ask one favor of Secular Humanism it would be this: Please create a movement that deconstructs the idolatry of the Market and the unreality of money in the same way that Religions and Ideologies have been deconstructed over the last 200 years. And if I could ask one favor of Religious Humanism it would be this: Imagine how to create a society where the Supreme Value of Divine Love and Compassion rules over all lesser values, especially monetary value. 

So let the Secular person and Religious person unite on the basis of their various first principles in opposition to Mammon. We may disagree on our Metaphysics and Cosmology, and our underlying explanations of WHY the world is the way it is. But we can largely agree on Ethics and Economics, and HOW we ought to treat each and every person with dignity and respect, compassion and empathy. And we can agree that the idolatry of the Market harms human wellbeing in ways that are physical, social, emotional, and even spiritual. And we can work together to replace our economic and monetary system with something that serves full human flourishing for all people, rather than using some people as means to enrich others.