Politics and Religion at the Dinner Table Part V

Adapted from Overturning Tables by Scott A. Bessenecker. Copyright (c) 2014 by Scott A. Bessenecker. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

From Prophets to Profits

Where did we get the conviction that if we just had more money we could begin a new poverty alleviation program or expand our church or nonprofit? As Protestantism grew up under the tutelage of the capitalist ethic, the critical role played by money in commercial enterprises was imprinted on Protestantism’s impressionable soul. And by extension, this fixation on finances was passed along to the nonprofit institutions that grew out of the Protestant church.

The Cost of Doing Church

The focus of English and American Protestant nonprofits at the turn of the twentieth century had turned to funding the machinery that undergirded their mission. Operations had become more and more elaborate and resource hungry. Like the trade companies they were patterned after, English and American missionary societies and the boards of large churches were chaired primarily by the businessmen who funded them, and their finance-oriented worldview influenced how they believed the church or nonprofit should operate.

The relationship between money and faith is described by some American Christians in the language of a business transaction. One expression of this theology says that God is under a contractual obligation to financially bless us when we give money to Christian ministries. Oral Roberts, one of the early prosperity teachers, claimed that God would return to the donor seven times the amount of their gift from unexpected sources. He even went so far as to offer a money-back guarantee if a donor giving $100 to his ministry did not receive that amount back from an unexpected source within one year.

For the Christians in the majority world who are poor, this sounds like good news, and like all good tapestries of deceit, there are threads of truth woven in. Poverty and suffering are not part of the Protestant American construct of the Christian faith, and so our theology around these topics is weak. As Christian leaders from around the world come to visit believers in the United States, they see a lifestyle of material gratification, lavish churches and ministry complexes, and a posture which assumes that following Jesus should be a materially comfortable journey.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that God hates poverty, sickness and oppression and longs for human flourishing in all areas, including financial sufficiency (aka daily bread). But the highly privatized aberration of this vision many have adopted does not line up with Scripture. We presume large amounts of wealth should be individually controlled and enjoyed. The American Dream of a large home, two cars and loads of disposable income is the syncretized American expression of the community-oriented, simple lifestyle, love-for-the-margins, kingdom of God.

Studies have suggested that in expanding economies, if wealth is unequally distributed, then social problems such as obesity, teen pregnancy, mental illness, murder, incarcerations and other social ills will increase proportionately to income disparity. Calibrating national health to economic growth apart from things like income disparity, environmental consequences or culture of materialism can actually accelerate various forms of national illness. When did the multiplication of capital become a panacea so disconnected from any critical evaluation of other aspects of social health?

In 1972 the University of Chicago dropped the requirement for a history of economics course for its graduate students in economics, believing that field of economics is a hard science and has little to do with the humanities. Many others followed suit. This shift marked the conclusion of hundreds of years of economic theory drifting away from its relationship to philosophy, sociology and ethics, and becoming what it is today—simple, mathematical utilitarianism: the multiplication of wealth without regard to what is just and good and fair for all. We must ask: by taking economics out of the school of the humanities, have we made the field less humane?

It is telling that there are two main classifications of organizations in America: for-profit and nonprofit, as if making profit is the only way to understand how we can organize, the only lens through which we can imagine human collaboration. An organization pursuing profit is a for-profit business. But if a group of people create an enterprise focused on any number of noble pursuits, it is identified not by what it is, but by what it is not.

The church needs to resume its prophetic role in living out a different vision for this world which does not revolve around individualistic economic increase. The church’s role in challenging money as lord has been largely abdicated. We have not only become silent while the idea of financial increase as the primary measure of health takes up more and more space in our media and in our minds, but we have actually welcomed the preeminence of privatized profit into our interpretation of the kingdom of God.

The church needs to become an incubator for prophets, not for profits.

In the next blog, we’ll examine how the architects of American corporate capitalism shaped our language and our vision around church and nonprofit “businesses.”