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

This is part II (and the final part) in my series on my critique of “Prosperity Theology.” Part I focused on the Rev. Creflo Dollar, who represents the micro aspects of prosperity theology. For this part, and my wrap-up, I will focus on neo-conservative Catholic theologian and classical economic proponent of the free market, Michael Novak. Who represents the macro aspects of prosperity theology.

Like Dollar, Novak subscribes to a Prosperity Theology, yet a different branch of Prosperity Theology. Instead of focusing too much on the accumulation of commodities through money and being a cheerleader, Novak uses his theology as a jumping off point for the justification of the system of capitalism and to justify laissez-fair free market capitalistic policies.

In Capital, Vol. III Marx states, “We have already shown in connection with the most simple categories of the capitalist mode of production and commodity production in general” the mystifying character of money and commodities and the fetishes that arise out of them. “In the capitalist mode of production, however, where capital is the dominant category and forms specific relation of production, this bewitched and distorted world develops much further.”(1) With an ever deepening capitalist system commodity and money relationships widen their scope to include means of production as well the working classes of society. “As money becomes capital,” Hinkelammert says, “it becomes obvious how commodity relationships in their very workings are in a position to decide not merely how much of what material goods shall be produced but even whether producers will live or not.”(2) Now everyone is affected by commodities and money through the accumulation of capital (surplus value). Those who work for corporations and manufacturers no longer control their own lives. Their livelihood is now based on the conditions of where they work and are determined by the way commodities interact with each other in the free market. Depending how commodities such as oil and high grade steel battle with each other, etc., this will affect the worker at her or his job. If one is an employee for American Airlines and the prices of oil skyrocket one will loose her or his job due to increased costs at American Airlines (for fueling the airliners) and if another is working at an Exxon-Mobil oil rig than that one will be able to keep her or his job, and maybe even make a little more money. Both of those workers jobs depend on how capital is built up and how commodities battle and interact with each other. “Unfitted by nature to make anything independently, the manufacturing worker develops his productive activity only as an appendage” of the corporation. “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign that they were the property of Jehovah,” says Marx, “so the division of labour brands the manufacturing worker the property of capital.”(3) Now, due to circumstances beyond a workers control, he or she must give their allegiances to the corporation and must submit to the interaction of commodities and capital. Miller states that the First Commandment not only applies to “other gods” but also “to multiple claims on your obedience.”(4) But this wouldn’t be the fault of the worker, the worker must work in order to live, if the worker chooses not to submit to commodities he or she will die. The fault doesn’t lie at the feet of the worker and the exploited but rather at the feet of the capitalist and those who justify capitalist oppression, such as Michael Novak. The prophet Jeremiah states that:

Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings. Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the right of the needy. (Italics mine, Jer. 5:25-29, NRSV)

For Novak the corporation is “the best secular analogue to the church.”(5) “Viewed in the long run of history, the business corporation is a fascinating institution. It is a social institution” and “[i]ts legal existence is transgenerational.” and it “is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the success of democracy” because the Founding Fathers “saw quite clearly that democracy would be safer if built upon the commercial and industrial classes.” Novak also writes that “[i]ts members come to it voluntarily. They do not give it all the commitment and all the energies of life.”(6) Finally, “the business corporation is, in its essence, a moral institution of a distinctive type” which imposes its “moral obligations that are inherent in its own ends, structure, and modes of operation.”(7) Hinkelammert argues that in order for capital and corporations “to live, the worker must be kept alive. Capital gets its life from the worker and therefore has to keep the worker alive in order to stay alive itself.”(8) Yet it seems that corporations (guided by capital), that is, capital, only care about the bare necessities in order for their worker to live. “In manufacture,” Marx says, “the social productive power of the collective worker, hence of capital, is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power.”(9) Corporations are vehicles meant to build up capital and it needs workers to consume to build up that capital. They are not seemingly guided by the welfare of human beings or of its workers but instead guided by one single force, to accumulate capital, to build wealth. This capital fetish, the wanting (needing) to build up capital is something that the prophet Amos criticizes when he chides the leaders and the rich of Yis’srael by stating:

Hear this, you that trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land saying: “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great...buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” Yhwh has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. (Italics mine, Amos 8:4-7, NRSV)

Novak’s capital fetish blinds him to the fact of this reality. In fact, it blinds him so much that he actually equates the corporation for the Body of Christ, the church, by stating it is “the best secular analogue to the church.” Instead of pledging his allegiance to God he is pledging his allegiance to an entity who’s sole purpose is to build up capital (money), which leads to a further intensification of idolatry by further delving into the commodity and money fetish and by putting one’s faith in money and by imbuing money and commodities with divine like qualities; this then leads to the ultimate heresy in claiming that a corporation is in essence a church, the Body of Christ. Which for those accepting those principles, makes sense, since they project divine characteristics onto commodities and money.

Novak also states that a corporations members come to it voluntarily. Yet Novak does not expound who its members are. Are the members the boardroom members, the janitors, cubicle workers, shareholders, sweatshop workers? Also, the idea of choice within a capitalists system,(10) as we have seen above, depends on one’s position in that system. But even if one is an owner of capital in the system he or she does not direct how capital should be used since it is commodities, made by human beings, that seem to direct the flow of capital (as we have seen above). Marx states that for the owner of capital one only hears:

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!...If, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value [the building of capital], the capitalist too is merely a machine for the transformation of this surplus value into surplus capital.(11)

We can also see how instead of being a beacon for freedom, as Novak states the corporation is, we now see that many Americans (and Europeans) are working longer hours for lesser pay (since inflation is rising faster than wages).(12) Novak’s main theological flaw is putting his trust in an institution of capitalism which its only goal is the consumption of human life in order to accumulate capital, the Anti-Christ, as Marx states. This then puts Novak on the opposite side of the theological divide between those whom fight for God and His people and on the side of those whom fight against God and for capital (all be it both sides claim to fight for God).

This trust in the corporation for Novak is only possible because of his trust in the capitalist free market which he views as the best vehicle for the common good of humanity. “I believe in sin,” stated Novak in a Washington Post column in March of 1976, “I am for capitalism, modified and made intelligent...It allows human beings to do pretty much what they will...Capitalism is a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is near always a smashing, scandalous success.”(13) What Novak is doing here is framing his argument for capitalism in a theological way which will “protect” him from the criticism of fellow Christians (mainly liberation theologians) by relying on old Mediaeval beliefs on the concept of sin. Yet through out much of the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible, known as the Old Testament to most) and the New Testament we see many of the prophets, evangelists, and Jesus, framing the concept of sin in economical terms of those exploiting the masses (Ex. 3:7-10; Neh. 5:1-5; Ps. 10:1-3; Is. 10:1-3b; Sir. 34:18-22; Matt. 6:19-21; Lk. 1:46-55; Jam. 5:1-6, etc.). To uplift the masses Novak sees the capitalist system, the free market, as the perfect means to do this. Speaking of the time period of Adam Smith Novak states, “If you face a world of 800 million people, most of them poor...and you can produce new wealth, then you must produce new wealth. If you can do it, you must, give the widespread poverty in the world.”(14) One shouldn’t focus on the poor whom are poor due to the free market’s constant obsession with amassing more capital since that is the “[w]rong question. I mean, supposing somebody figured out the causes of poverty. So now that you know how to make poverty who wants it? I mean it is absolutely the wrong question. It is just an insane question.”(15) Novak seems to be blinded by his fetish for capital to see the contradictory terms in his statement in a world where the pursuit for capital inevitably leaves many people in poverty due to the aftereffects of pursuing capital in the free market. This is where we can clearly see Novak’s apostasy in relation to his belief in God. To question the free market is to question the divine will of God (even though Novak has admitted that the free market is “capitalistic hell”(16) ). Novak sees the commodities and money (capital) built up in the capitalist system as divine objects of God, which is the same mistake that Dollar makes, and because of this, Novak sees the free market as being set up by God for common good purposes despite the fact that Novak states it is an imperfect system.(17) Using terms from Hinkelammert, Novak, instead of having a faith in the Christian God of the Bible, has:

faith in money, which is the Holy Spirit immanent in the commodity world...faith in the preestablished order of the relationships of production—faith that they will continue eternally...[and] faith that the agents of production are, and will continue to be personifications of capital.(18)

With this Novak has fallen into sin, which is what the author of 1st Tim. talks about when he states that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Tim. 6:9-10, NRSV). Not only is Novak wrong in the theological realm but his thinking in the secular realm is also off. Here, we see a circular justification for the oppression and grinding poverty of millions of people around the world due to free market and neoliberal policies. Since there are poor people in this world society must “produce more wealth” and because of the building up of capital this will adversely affect the poor, thus causing them to slip further into poverty,(19) which in turn, according to Novak, will require us to make more capital.

Novak always goes back to Adam Smith in his analysis of free market capitalism. He always states that free markets are the best system because they lead to democracy and free societies.(20) Yet his outlook either ignores (on purpose) or fails to realize that while “economies become more and more modernized, the direct association between production and use gets increasingly obscured for exchange.”(21) In early 19th and late 18th century America’s economies were more local and means of production more spread out which lead to a more “democratic” market since there was yet any national and transnational corporations and large businesses. If you were in a town you got your meat from a butcher who knew you, clothes from a tailor who knew you, and grain from a merchant who more than likely knew you. Yet when the distance between service and profit increased, and commodity and monetary relations became less personalized and more impersonal, the market became more and more “obsessed” with the accumulation of capital and less for the benefits of human beings.(22) We can see with the advancement of capitalism through neoliberal globalization the effects it has on those of the lower classes; such as an increase of suicides in India by local farmers(23) due to an increase in large scale industry farming. “For thousands of years, land in” areas such as India and Guatemala were “used for subsistence farming. As capitalism expands into the third world, however, land is seen as too commercially viable to remain outside the cycle of exchange.”(24) Capital has now reached a point where it is now consuming land in order to continue its massive growth, and with that growth it is consuming those who used to farm the land. Now these farmers have become “dependent on the money economy” instead of themselves for subsistence.(25) Novak, instead of condemning this action based on his faith actually applauds these policies and he justifies them religiously. The prophet Isaiah states, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? Says the Lord God of hosts” (Is. 3:14b-15, NRSV). And yet Novak seems to be ignoring this piece of scripture, and others, for the benefit of the capitalist. If Marx says that “[j]ust as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”(26) than we can also state the reverse for Novak: Just as in capitalist production human beings are enslaved by products of their own hands, they project this slavery onto a religious world, in which they are dominated by products emanating from their own brains. This gets to the heart of the matter of Novak’s true heresy and mistake. Novak’s religious thought is controlled by his capital fetish, in order to justify the accumulation of capital he twists the texts of the Bible to satisfy his own fetish instead of looking critically at the world around him and himself, to see if he is staying true to his professed Christian God. Also, criticizing Novak’s belief that the free market creates a common good, Thomas R. Rourke points out that how is the common good being meet when “Nike corporation...paid an average female worker in Indonesia approximately $.82 per day in 1991" and charged consumers more than 100 times that much for the shoe produced and “paid Michael Jordan $20,000,000.” Which was a figure higher than all of the workers who produced shoes in Indonesia combined.(27) This oversight by Novak can only be explained by his being guided by the capital fetish instead of being guided by the Holy Spirit (a being he believes in and professes to be guided by).

Ultimately people such as Novak, who justify free market systems by using the Bible, and Dollar, who justify wealth building by using the Bible and who states God shows his blessings through money, are blinded by their fetishes for capital, money, and commodities. It’s these fetishes which guide their theological perspectives, instead of the Bible guiding their theological perspectives. Because of this, no matter how much they justify their views, they will always be lead down the wrong path by their fetishes, and that path will lead them to idolatry by worshiping commodities, money, and the capitalist system. Instead of God being their concrete reality (which they proclaim God is), their concrete “reality” will be what they see (yet they will see it in a perverted sense), and what they see is commodities and money, which is one thing the Bible is very clear on and one thread of the Bible that connects the New Testament and the Tanakh. That thread is the condemnation of money and commodities which distract people from God, and since they are distracted from God they are ultimately distracted from each other and the common good of their fellow human beings.

“They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”
-Isaiah 65:21-22

Notes

1. Quoted in Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 27.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Marx, Capital, 482.
4. Miller, The God You Have, 21.
5. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 460, n. 42.
6. Michael Novak, Three in One, 233.
7. Ibid., 241.
8. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 30.
9. Marx, Capital, 483.
10. For more on choice and the setting up of the capitalist system and how people merely are only making choices based on what the free market dictates to them see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
11. Marx, Capital, 742.
12. On wages and working hours see Jeffrey E. Hill, et. al., “Finding an Extra Day a Week: The
Positive Influence of Perceived Job Flexibility on Work and Family Life Balance,” Family
Relations 50, no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 49-54; Lynne Lamberg, “Impact of Long Working Hours
Explored,” Journal of the American Medical Association 292, no. 1 (July 2004): 25-26; Jeremy Reynolds, “When Too Much Is Not Enough: Actual and Preferred Work Hours in the United States and Abroad,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 1 (March 2004): 89-120; Amy S. Wharton and Mary Blair-Loy, “Long Work Hours and Family Life: A Cross-National Study of Employees’ Concerns,” Journal of Family Issues 27, no. 3 (March 2006) 415-436.
13. Novak, Three in One, 4.
14. Ibid., 57.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Ibid., 56.
18. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 44.
19. For more on the adverse effects of neoliberal policies on the lower classes around the world see Edmund Amann and Werner Baer, “Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 4 (Nov. 2002): 945-959; Werner Baer and William Maloney,
“Neoliberalism and Income Distribution in Latin America,” World Development 25, no. 3 (March 1997): 311-327; Rubiana Chamarbagwala, “Economic Liberalization and Wage Inequality in India,” World Development 34, no. 12 (Dec. 2006): 1997-2015; and Warwick E. Murray, “Neoliberal Globalisation, ‘Exotic’ Agro-exports, and Local Chance in the Pacific Islands: A Study of the Fijian Kava Sector,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 3 (Nov. 2000): 355-373.
20. On the fallacy of capitalism leading to democracy in the 21st century see Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita and George Downs, “Development and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (Sept/Oct2005): 77-86.
21. Thomas R. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon on the Common Good and
Capitalism,” Review of Politics, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 249.
22. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 249.
23. Somini Sengupta, “On India’s Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide,” New York Times, 19
Sept., 2006, A1.
24. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 249.
25. Ibid., 250.
26. Marx, Capital, 772.
27. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 250.

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