The Worship of Mammon: The Fetishism of Capital in the Theological Thoughts of Creflo Dollar and Michael Novak, Part I

It has been a while since my last post that I fully authored myself. This essay is Part I of a two part series on my critique of "Prosperity Theology" which is a branch of Christian thought that states that God showers His blessings on people through money and that those who believe in the Bible and Jesus Christ (as well as tithing to a church) will also recieve finnancial blessings and have all their problems in life answered. Part I on this series will focus on the Rev. Creflo Dollar (his real name believe it or not) while Part II will focus on neo-conservative Catholic theologian and classical economic propent of the free market, Michael Novak.

“As a stake is driven firmly into a fissure between stones, so sin is wedged in between selling and buying.”

-Sirach 27:2(1)

Over the years the concept of “Prosperity Theology,” in where God shows his blessings to His people by showering them with riches, has obviously attracted many followers, and seems to be gaining more momentum by the day. The poster child of this movement, in all of his excessive and over the top glory, is the Rev. Creflo Dollar of Creflo Dollar Ministries and who is the reverend of the World Changers International World Dome church in southwest Atlanta. Dollar preaches all over the United States about how God wants to shower all of his faithful with money (of course, Dollar is quick to point out that he also means spiritual wealth) and one of his biggest selling points is the fact that he flaunts his own wealth to prove God is blessing him. He unabashedly shows his congregants, and anyone else for that matter, “his custom-tailored suits and alligator shoes, his Rolls-Royces, his private airplanes” and has no problems demanding from his congregation 10% of their income for tithes, and if they decide to give less they might as well not even bother and instead, “Go buy a Happy Meal.”(2) The concept of Prosperity Theology arose out of the capitalist system and indeed is the religious byproduct of the capitalist system. Without the unrestrained capitalist system and its forms of perversion there would more than likely be no Prosperity Theology to be preached upon. Prosperity Theology, as preached by Creflo Dollar, is the religious justification of capitalism and of capitalism’s systems. While Creflo Dollar speaks on a more simplistic level, stating that people who follow the Bible and follow God will soon become rich, or at least financially comfortable, neo-conservative Catholic Theologian Michael Novak takes a more nuanced approached to capitalism and the building of capital (wealth). Novak’s belief is that because everyone is affected by original sin and is in nature sinful and imperfect, the capitalist system is the most logical choice for human kind, in fact, he sees the capitalist system as practically ordained by God.(3) For Novak, the capitalist market system is the best vehicle for making sure that the common good of humanity is meet. Novak’s fetishistic trust in the “free” market I argue is just as flawed as Dollar’s fetishistic trust in God’s love through the form of money and that both are inherently wrong in their interpretation of the Bible on their views of money and capitalism. To show how their relationship between the Bible and the free market is inherently incorrect I will be using liberation theologian Franz J. Hinkelammert’s theological critique of capitalism and his use of Marx’s theory of fetishism in order to critique the microeconomic fallacies of Dollar and the macroeconomic fallacies of Novak and how their trust and Biblical justification in the free market and the capitalist system undermines their Biblical message.

In order to understand the theological perversities of Dollar’s preachings on money and the luxurious commodities people can acquire with money we must first look at Marx’s theory of the fetish which first comes to us in the form of the commodity fetish since the commodity fetish is “[t]he basis of the whole analysis of [Marx’s theory of] fetishism.”(4) Hinkelammert describes the capitalistic world as “a world that is bewitched” and that the analysis of the commodity fetish is a way to unveil this world of enchanted commodities.(5) Marx states, quite rightly, that wealth in societies that have a “capitalist mode of production...appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’”(6) In order to begin his investigation of “political economy” Marx begins his investigation with this mass of commodities.(7) Marx states that “[a] commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”(8) Its these subtleties and niceties that end up taking “‘metaphysical’ and ‘theological’ guises” because capitalist industry obscures and hides the fact that commodities are created by human labor.(9) This is do to the fact of capitalist production which separates the manufacturing process through the division of labor; which happens quite naturally under capitalism and nearly all forms of trade and commerce. Because people don’t see commodities for what they are, that is, products of human labor (all though they do “sense” what they are to a point, as Marx states(10) ), instead they ascribe to them human like traits. Commodities appear to come from nowhere and materialize themselves onto the market scene and act on their own. It is the commodity that is talked about, not the producers of the commodity, by market analysts. Hinkelammert states, “Commodities now set up social relationships among themselves. For example, artificial nitrate battles natural nitrate [on the market] and defeats it. Oil fights with coal, and wood with plastic. Coffee dances on world markets while iron and steel get married.” The producer of the commodity becomes controlled and dominated by the commodity itself, not the other way around. Depending on the fluctuations of the stock market during a day steel, silicone, and plastics will either become more valuable or less, and thus creating cheaper commodities or more expensive commodities, which in turn affects workers who will either keep their jobs or lose them depending on costs and expenditures. In essence, the workers life depends on the commodity. Today, there is much talk of oil prices and their continued rise in the marketplace, there seems to be little control over the price of oil by human beings, instead it is controlled by the supply and demand of it, which are not concrete sciences but rather philosophical and economical guesses based on either rational or irrational human behavior and the process of production.(11) For Hinkelammert “[t]he decision to continue to produce commodities is always at the same time the decision to accept being determined by the sum of commodities.” He goes on to say that “[c]ommodities begin to move although no one wanted or intended them to do so, and even though any movement on their part comes from some movement of human beings. The effects are completely beyond all human intention” and control.(12) This whole effect of commodities on the lives of human beings are “products of the human brain” which make commodities (commodities that Dollar tells his congregation to seek and which he seeks himself) “appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations” with human beings on the market system and their everyday lives. Marx calls “this...fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” the “fetishism of the world of commodities.”(13)

In order to better understand and illustrate the commodity (and money and capital) fetish Marx stated that, “we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.”(14) Because of their alienation from the products they make, human beings invest into commodities their own hopes and dreams, fears and longings. They don’t see a Nike shoe as a product made of rubber, phylon, and polyurethane which is wholly overpriced compared to its production value and labor expenses, they instead see a product which they must buy in order to obtain a certain “status” amongst their peers or to make themselves feel better about who they are. In this way they “enchant...commodities with hopes of gratification and justice”(15) that these commodities obviously can’t fulfill them with. This is the fundamental flaw of Creflo Dollar’s preaching and theology. He tells his congregation that God showers blessings onto His people through the forms of money and commodities. Dollar states he is blessed by God because of his wealth in commodities. “I own two Rolls-Royces and didn’t pay a dime for them,”( they were given to him through donors), “Why? Because while I’m pursuing the Lord those cars are pursuing me.”(16) Because Dollar has yet to demystify the commodities around him he sees commodities as blessings and as signs that he is doing the right thing. One could take the opposite view of his mind set that instead of gifts from God they were the gifts of a very generous congregation (his own) and a very generous group of his own workers through their own money. This is the commodity fetishism in a nutshell. Instead of using religion as an analogy Dollar actually really does see the commodities as having suprasensual qualities and having been enchanted with divine properties. And this is what leads Dollar away from the true God(17) and towards false gods, the gods of commodities. Max Weber wrote that despite being defeated by the proclamation of the Christian religion by being declared the official religion of the Roman Empire and the Christianization of the European world and of the Americas, the old polytheistic gods were resurrected in the form of capitalism and of commodities. Eugene McCarraher states, “Observing how ‘many old gods ascend from their graves’ to become the laws of nature of the market, [Weber] called upon his fellow modern intellectuals that ‘we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons’ [author’s italics] ‘only we...live in a different sense.’”(18)

Yet the big selling point for Dollar isn’t the commodities per se, but the item that gets people those “luxurious” commodities: money. Dollar tells his congregants and viewers that they must “‘speak debt-canceling Scriptures’ every day, in order to help make God’s promise real” in order for them to get more money(19) to buy the commodities they want and need and in order to live a comfortable(and possibly a lavish) life. Which brings us to the next stage of Marx’s theory of fetishism, and another fundamental (and idolatress) flaw, the money fetish. Hinkelammert sums up Marx’s views on money by stating, “Money is a commodity. But it is not a commodity like the rest; it is the commodity that stands out above all the rest.”(20) Money is not meant to be consumed like other commodities such as sneakers that you wear and get old or cars you drive that must be scrapped after their “life span” exceeds its limit. Instead money is the common denominator between all commodities, with this “the process of [the] commodity [fetish] intensifies.”(21) For Marx, it is at this stage of the money fetish, an intensification of the commodity fetish, that money is “endowed with the attributes of a conscious subject,”(22) as Hinkelammert puts it. With commodities there was no hierarchy with one commodity representing an equivalent for another, but with money there is now a hierarchy, money is the “king”in the polytheistic commodity world. Marx states that through the actions of capitalists and consumers, money “ has been set apart to be the universal equivalent”(23) in where one commodity is brought “into an opposing relation with some other commodity.”(24) So now the human being, which is brought under the power of commodities of their own making, having their lives ruled by commodities, are now ruled by a universal equivalent to commodities that can transcend individual commodities and represent all commodities (i.e., $10 can buy a CD, a few snow cones, a movie ticket, etc.). This causes Marx to label money as the “Mark of the Beast” by quoting the Latin text of the Book of Revelations in the New Testament(25) which states: “These are united in yielding their power and authority to the beast...so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” (Rev. 17:13, 13:17, NRSV). Analyzing Marx’s use of this Christian image Hinkelammert goes on to say that “[t]he other reference to Christianity in the text links the commodity world, and specifically money, with the apocalyptic tradition of the beast, the Antichrist—that is, the antihuman.”(26) In Grundrisse (written a decade before Capital Volume I) Marx wrote that when money was first minted it was stored in the temples of antiquity, with this Marx took the analogy that money was “the god among commodities” and “the real community” of capitalist society.(27)

Patrick D. Miller puts it this way, “In the case of Jesus’ radical instruction...there seems to be no tension, only the assumption that property and wealth are another god, an alternative master in whom one is always at risk of putting one’s trust and finding a place of ultimate refuge.”(28) Dollar puts not only himself, but his congregants, at risk when he preaches about the gods of wealth and projects divine qualities onto money and onto commodities. We see that when he speaks of not only spiritual but “financial increase.” All one has to do is tithe to the church,(29) read their Bible, and be good Christians and they will become prosperous and rich. With this thinking being indoctrinated into oneself regularly one could not be held at fault for thinking that those whom are poor are not blessed by God while those who are rich are blessed by God. Quickly one begins to mix up the polytheistic world of commodities and the Anti-Christ of money with the realities of the true God. Money are blessings which give one precious commodities. Precious commodities are received because one is blessed by God. Money is now one’s god, the false god. In fact, Dollar and his ministry are seemingly mixing up the world of the fetish with God everyday. Kelefa Sanneh stated in a piece in the New Yorker that during his stay at the World Changers campus things started:

to get mixed up: the shareholders are the customers are the employees, and the corporate commitment to excellence comes to seem indistinguishable from the religious commitment to righteousness. It is a vision in which everyone will go on becoming more righteous and more excellent and more prosperous, forever and ever.(30)

The First Commandment states, “I am Yhwh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt...you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself an idol...You shall not bow down to them or worship them...” (Ex. 20:2-5, NRSV). For the world of the people of Yis’rael (Israel), to worship other gods did not just mean to worship a bunch of divine beings up in the sky or on a mountain, but to put ones trust in certain gods because they gave people certain things, or commodities. If one put trust in other gods they did so to receive money, property, commodities, etc. One of those gods, in the ancient Near East, was Ba’al, a Canaanite god who’s name in Aramaic was Mammon (which has also been translated as “Wealth”). The word Mammon has been seen by some etymologists as coming from the word ’āmana which means “that in which one trusts.”(31) This etymological root can help us better understand Jesus’ parable on serving two masters better, and put into context Dollar’s (such an apt name if I do say so myself) heresy. “‘No slave 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 God and Wealth.” Jesus then goes on to condemn the religious establishment “who were lovers of money” by saying, “‘You are those who justify yourself in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts, for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.’” (Luke 16:13-15, NRSV) This quote from Jesus, the man Dollar states he serves and speaks to on a regular basis, gets to the heart of the matter. Dollar misguidedly preaches a heretical message to his people based on his fetishistic view of commodities and money. Because his vision is so simplistic and narrow minded, instead of preaching about the true God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Christians state is their true god, he preaches a fetishistic gospel based on the perversities of the capitalist system. One no longer puts her or his trust in God but now one puts her or his trust in money, from which one has access to multiple gods, the gods of the commodities (money in the Hindu sense can almost be seen like a perversion of the god Ganesh, whom gives many Hindus access to the gods they want to pray too).

Norman O. Brown’s 1959 book Life Against Death “is perhaps the most searching psychoanalytical critique of capitalism ever written,” states McCarraher.(32) With capitalism, Brown writes, the “power over this world has passed from God to God’s ape, the Devil.” With money Brown sees “the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic.” Writing on Brown McCarraher states, “The ‘money complex,’” which Dollar falls under and what Marx “considered the animating spirit of commodity fetishism—is, in Brown’s words, ‘the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.’ Capitalism, we might add, was a new form of enchantment.”(33) As I have stated above for commodities, Dollar appears to be putting divine characteristics of enchainment into money, he’s trying to find God in commodities and money instead of trying to find God in the presence of human beings, which is a subject that Gustavo Gutiérrez talks at length about.(34) He’s putting money above all else, even commodities. This is Dollar’s downfall and his largest weakness. While he may be preaching a theology that many want to hear (especially the rich) he is preaching a false theology that only can exist under the pretenses of the commodity and money fetish. Yet these fetishes wouldn’t be as intense unless it had to do with the capitalistic market economy. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales write that:

With the advance of the capitalist system money is transformed into capital...In the transformation of money into capital it becomes obvious that commodity relationships in their very operation have the power of decision not only over the proportions of material goods to be produced but even over the life or death of the producer.(35)

With this we now enter the capital fetish and into the thoughts of the neo-conservative Catholic theologian, and neo-classical proponent of capitalism, Michael Novak, whom also uses religion and the Bible to justify capitalism and the building of capital (wealth). Which we will go over in Part II of this blog series.

Notes

1. All quotes from the Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant Bible are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation. The Bible in use is Michael D. Coogan ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2. Kelefa Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.” New Yorker 80, no. 30 (Oct. 11, 2004): 48-57,
http://0-web.ebscohost.com.opac.sfsu.edu/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=6&sid=ccbc98f3-5524-4684-9d
58-475fec862823%40SRCSM2 (accessed Oct. 5, 2006).
3. Michael Novak, Three in One: Essays on Democratic Capitalism, 1976-2000 (Lanham, Md:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 4.
4. Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of
Capitalism, trans. by Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1986), 5.
5. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 5.
6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican Books, 1976. Reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 125.
7. Mike Wayne, “Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios,” Historical
Materialism 13, no. 3 (2005): 201.
8. Marx, Capital,163.
9. Eugene McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of
Capitalism,” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 437.
10. The commodity, for Marx, “is a sensuous [thing] which...at the same time [is] suprasensible or social...the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing...is a physical relation between physical things...As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this.” (Marx, Capital, 163)
11. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 6.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Marx, Capital, 165.
14. Ibid.
15. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 438.
16. Quoted in Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
17. By “true” God I don’t mean to state that the Christian God is the only true God and all other
gods are false gods and that all other religions are demonic, false, and evil, etc. By “true God” I
mean the true God in the sense that Dollar sees, or thinks he sees, it. The god of the Christian
religion, which Dollar holds to be his god. I will argue that Dollar no longer worships the god he
sees as true but now worships a plethora of false gods in the forms of commodities and the ultimate false god, the anti-Christ, in the form of money, which is the unifier of commodities on the free market.
18. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 435.
19. Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
20. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 16.
21. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales, “Introduction,” ibid., xvii.
22. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 19.
23. Marx, Capital, 181.
24. Ibid., 180.
25. The text he quotes is: “Illi unum consilium habent et virutem et potestatem suam bestiae
tradunt...Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet charactereum aut nomen bestiae,
aut numerum nominis eius.” (Marx, Capital, 181).
26. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 19.
27. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 437.
28. Patrick D. Miller, The God You Have: Politics, Religion, and the First Commandment
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 31.
29. Members must tithe 10% of what they make and in order to become a member they have to meet numerous requirements, among which is to give the church their social security number (Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich).
30. Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
31. Miller, The God You Have, 25.
32. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 442.
33. Ibid., 443.
34. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, trans. by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988), 106-120, specifically 106-107.
35. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales, “Introduction,” The Ideological Weapons of Death, xviii.

Image From:
Wikipedia