How to Resist in a Plutocracy
This is a perfect day to introduce you to Malcolm Foley and The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward
It is such an honor to host my friend and colleague (and a former student!) Malcolm Foley today. Malcolm is a pastor, historian (PhD in Church History from Baylor University), and speaker who serves as special adviser to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor University. He has written for Christianity Today, The Anxious Bench, and Mere Orthodoxy. Foley copastors Mosaic Waco, a multicultural church in Waco, Texas, where he practices what he preaches. His debut book, The Anti-Greed Gospel, has the potential to change us and our churches if we will let it. Today of all days, I am grateful for his witness and historical truth-telling. You can find the full excerpt from his book, along with pre-order information, on the Baker site here.
How to Resist in a Plutocracy, by Malcolm Foley
It is a strange coincidence that Martin Luther King Day is the same day as this particular inauguration. Dr. King and Trump represent two diametrically opposed ways of operating in the world…and two diametrically opposed paradigms.
But not because one was an advocate for racial integration and the other represents white supremacy.
That kind of framing underestimates the stakes of our political life and it dilutes the tremendous strength of Dr. King’s witness.
By diametrically opposed, I mean that King represents a Christ-fueled resistance to racial capitalism and Trump represents the insatiable belly of Mammon.
This quote from a speech he gave in May of 1967 sums up King’s mature position on these things well: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power. This means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. You can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others.”
Those triple evils remain our most significant enemies today: racism in the form of white supremacy, economic exploitation in the form of rapacious capitalism, and militarism in the form of war. Put together, these form what I like to call a demonic cycle of self-interest that paralyzes many of us with fear. I want to give us some resources for the undoing of that cycle.
What follows is an excerpt from the introduction to my upcoming book, The Anti-Greed Gospel. I hope that the book can be a helpful piece of resistance literature as we consider how to build communities that sap Mammon of its strength and bear witness to the beauty of the Kingdom of God. It is only when we see the benefits of union with Christ and commit to the material flourishing of our neighbors that we will be able to live lives without fear.
The year 2020 came and went with perhaps the largest mobilization of people in protest since the civil rights movement (1954–68) and the Vietnam War (1955–75). Police brutality was in the news constantly. Videos of public murder circulated on social media. People, especially my white brothers and sisters, were reading book after book about racial justice. It appeared that eyes were being opened. Reconciliation was back in full force as the answer; animosity and ignorance had taken root, we were told in Christian circles. Education and relationships would be the most reliable ways forward, but they would not be enough. We were reminded that systems were at play as well, necessarily widening our purview. People who had never used the word systemic to describe racism suddenly figured out what that meant, which was that racism extended beyond individual hearts and minds.
Many who experienced this progression didn’t know that it mirrored the progression of the 1960s as well: the time when many took the term racist as an epithet synonymous with hater. Many were probably also unaware that we had done all of this before. Even during the civil rights movement, people who were exposed to the brutality of Jim Crow saw integration as the answer — rather than economically and politically restructuring the whole of American society, as Martin Luther King Jr. would argue in favor of in 1967. It was easier to view justice as the presence of nice multicolored faces rather than something requiring material sacrifice and solidarity.
As Christians reckoned with the violence around them, King’s speech at the March on Washington was rearticulated as the Christian ideal of racial reconciliation. But something was missing. What exactly?
The answer to that question lies in the full title of the march at which King articulated his dream, which he saw turn into a nightmare. In fact, the optimism of that speech was, for King, tempered by his growing understanding that America was deeply captive to Mammon. The march’s full title is the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King never conceived of racial justice apart from economic justice.
That fact has not changed, though our appetite for it has diminished. One of the purposes of this book is to reinvigorate our appetite and to remind us that love and justice are fundamentally material realities that require redistribution and solidarity.
The importance of this rather simple connection pressed me deeper into the pursuit of racial justice. And it provided the impetus and the foundation for the book you hold in your hands. At its center is the claim that hate and ignorance are not at the root of race; rather, that root is greed. Notably, King, especially in the last few years of his life, drew attention to the three- headed evil that has plagued Western civilization: racism, materialism, and militarism. More pointedly, however, he drew attention to them in their most violent and common instantiations: white supremacy, capitalism, and war.
These have been the inextricable evils of our day; we cannot address one of them apart from the two others. After revisiting King’s framework, I realized that self- interest binds these three evils together. This led me to recognize the three evils for what they really are: a demonic feedback loop of self- interest. This loop has three elements, as we will see in chapter 1: we use others for personal gain, we violently protect that gain when others protest, and we create ideas to justify our exploitation of one another and our violence. Put differently, the cycle begins with political and economic exploitation, continues by violently enforcing that exploitation, and is justified by the concept of race. This cycle explains why racism is both brutal and resilient: it is not fueled primarily by hatred but rather by material desires on our part and the spiritual power of those Paul calls “principalities” (Eph. 6:12 KJV). No wonder lasting peace is so far from reality.
This foundation in material desires provides the basis for this book: If racism is chiefly about greed rather than hate, what does that mean for our communities? This work focuses on the second arm of the cycle, which is violent enforcement that continually reaches back to exploit and repeatedly reaches forward for justification. Lynching is this enforcement’s historical springboard— that most disturbing element of American history we would like to think is far behind us. Yet if we recognize the roots of both that practice and racialized violence today, we can better invest in our health and life together. But a focus on the violent effects of greed reveals something else that ought to inform how we articulate the gospel: that we,particularly in the United States, believe we can ignore Christ’s declaration. We have tried for a long time to serve both God and Mammon, and millions have died as a result. What remains for us is to understand this history and to live in light of it. Thus, a reckoning with history requires robust theological and ethical work as well.
The Anti- Greed Gospel is just such a work of history, theology, and ethics. The history of racialized violence will (and ought to) sicken you. With this history is another history, that of economic exploitation as the root from which racism springs forth. Greed is racism’s fuel. Only when this history is understood can the proper theological and ethical interventions take place. Historically, racialized capitalism, wielding racial violence like a sword, has killed in two ways: it has taken human life, and it has blurred and distorted theological and ethical reasoning. In this book, I draw attention to role models who attempted to resist both of these death- dealing impulses.
But the book’s primary thrust is to imagine how we can build Christian communities that resist the death- dealing talons and tendrils of racialized capitalism. Such a project begins with this acknowledgment: an anti-racist community is an anti-greed community. An anti-racist community is a community in which the desire for more is excised and replaced with a robust embrace of the communion of the saints. Such a community follows the logic of the kingdom of God: authority and resources are to be shared rather than hoarded.
Only when our communities share rather than hoard will we be able to show the world what Jesus expresses as the ideal to his disciples in John 13: the world will know that we are his disciples by our love. Such love is not simply an emotion or even merely a series of actions. Love is also a political economy and a way of life that undermines the kingdoms of the world. By political economy, I mean a social arrangement with a particular account of power and resources and how they should be distributed. I invite you to walk with me on this thorny road. My prayer is that we come out on the other side of the journey as brothers and sisters deeply devoted to the love of God and a deep care for the material and spiritual needs of our neighbors.
