Faith and Scholarship

I recently read a great piece in the Biblical Archeology Review (a journal I subscribe to) on four scholars, two who lost their religious faith through scholarship and two who kept it. The author interviews them and asks them questions on their faith and loss of faith.

The article opens up with:

Several media stories recently reported that Bart Ehrman, a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS’s most popular lecturers, had lost his faith as a result of his scholarly research. This raised a question for us that is not often talked about, but seemed well worth a discussion: What effect does scholarship have on faith? We asked Bart to join three other scholars to talk about this: James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America’s best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he’s a non-believer.

Here are some highlights from the interviews:

Ehrman: First, I lost my fundamentalist faith because of my scholarship. Like Bill Dever, I have a fundamentalist background. I had a very high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God, no mistakes of any kind—geographical or historical. No contradictions. Inviolate.

...I started finding contradictions and finding other discrepancies and started finding problems with the Bible. What that ended up doing for me was showing me that the basis of my faith, which at that time was the Bible, was problematic.

...

Theodicy is the question of how God can be righteous, given the amount of suffering in the world. The issue as it’s usually put today is that if God is all-powerful and is able to prevent suffering, and is all-loving so that he wants to prevent suffering, why is there suffering? This problem isn’t ever expressed that way in the Bible, but Biblical authors do deal with the problem by asking: Why does the people of God suffer?

...I decided that I couldn’t believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things. So that’s why I ended up losing my faith.

...

Strange: ...I’m still a Baptist minister. I don’t have a pulpit. The only thing I do every now and then is a wedding for someone—or a funeral. Maybe now it’s more funerals. [Laughs] I bury more than I marry.

But to answer you more directly, I just don’t see the connection. My faith is not based upon anything like a propositional argument. When I indulge myself in all this scientific research and explication, I’m not doing anything about faith.

...

My faith is based on my own experience—a good old Protestant principle.

...

I love the existentialist philosophers. I love to read them, not because they’re giving me any testable facts. It’s because it’s like reading a really good poet. It does something to you that propositional truth never does.

...

Propositional truth is like: There is a loving God that intervenes upon the earth. That’s a proposition. It’s testable or it’s not. If it’s not testable, then you can’t falsify it; you can’t know if it’s true or not. If it really is testable, then the way you test it is to start checking out a list of experiences people have—and suffering is a prime one human beings have in common. So you end up saying, I’ve tested the hypothesis and it is now wanting. Suffering tends to disconfirm the hypothesis.

Shanks: You say your faith is not based on this proposition?

Strange: That’s correct.

Shanks: What is it based on?

Strange: Based on my own experience with God. For a lot of people, this makes me sort of a mystic in a cave or something. But I think it’s eminently practical and out there.

...

Shanks: Would you say that your scholarship, then, has had really no effect on your faith?

Strange: Virtually none. I mean I have a wonderful intellectual time with my scholarship. I get the same existentialist thrill out of touching the dirt when I’m excavating as I do holding my wife’s hand.

...

I grew up in east Texas, where the choices were you believed in the Bible literally or you didn’t believe in the Bible literally. That was it. I didn’t. So it’s my own experience with God that tipped me over on the other side. My best analogy is falling in love.

...

Ehrman: It seems to me that Christianity—Christian faith—has always been grounded in certain historical claims, for example, about Jesus. One thing that scholarship did for me: It led me to question historical claims that Christians have made about Jesus.

...

If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, if he grew up to be an old man and died and was buried in a family plot outside of Nazareth, then for me, when I was a Christian, that would’ve destroyed my faith.

In other words, the faith is rooted in certain historical claims. As historical claims, they can be shown as either probable or improbable. And I got to a point where the historical claims about Jesus seemed implausible, especially the resurrection.

...

Schiffman: One of the principles of the Jewish faith is not believing in Jesus. [Laughter] But, like Bart, I of course believe that he lived, preached and was crucified by the Romans.

From a Jewish point of view, these kinds of problems aren’t problems. First of all, the Bible was never taken literally in Judaism. It doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, but it is not taken literally in the Protestant sense. It’s not an issue in Judaism. Admittedly there is a literalist strain in a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers and a minority—maybe a growing minority—in modern Judaism, but it’s not classical Judaism. The Talmud doesn’t take the Bible literally in the Protestant sense.

...

I heard a recent lecture by a rabbi who is becoming a medical doctor. He talked about the problem of creation. And he said, well, evolution is obviously true. What do I do about it if evolution is obviously true? He said that we learn from Nachmanides that nothing in the Bible about creation is intended literally. What’s important to me is that I have the experience of God as the creator.

Let's take the problem of evil...We talk about the debate in Job and the various approaches explored there. We see the continuation of these debates in Midrash. But we know that we can’t explain evil, especially after the Holocaust. Any person who says that he can give an explanation for the Holocaust is crazy. So the bottom line is that we all go along living with the fact that this horrible thing happened and we can’t explain it. Judaism doesn’t claim that the individual will get all the answers to everything.

...

Dever: Well, my father was a fire-breathing fundamentalist. I grew up hearing him preach in tent meetings in the hills of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. He had a bigger voice than I do. I was ordained a minister at 17, put myself through undergraduate school and on through divinity school, through Harvard, then a congregation. I have 13 years’ experience as a parish minister and two theological degrees. For me, it was this typical Protestant conundrum: It’s all true or none of it is true. My sainted mother once said to me, If I can’t believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, I can’t believe any of it.

...

Living in the Holy Land, I became extremely cynical about religion. I began to think, more or less, maybe like all of you, that I had no talent for religion, that faith might be a matter of temperament as well as training. I never had a pious bone in my body. And I realized I was never really a believer, but it just took me 40 years to figure out that it was no longer meaningful. That’s when I converted to Judaism. [Laughs] I did it precisely because you don’t have to be religious to be a Jew. And I’m perfectly comfortable where I am.

...

Schiffman: You’ve got to decide: Do I believe there is a God? Do I believe that God communicated some kind of way of life to someone that became Judaism?

Dever: I think Judaism is about practices rather than a correct theology.

Strange: I think precisely that [about Judaism]. Christian tradition, on the other hand, made a mistake because we intellectualized it so much that Christian experience got submerged. Theology was bereft of any kind of experience.

...

Schiffman: But I think modern Judaism goes too far with the notion that you don’t have to believe anything to be Jewish. You don’t in the sense that you’re part of the community even if you don’t believe. But the question is, doesn’t Judaism really have in mind that a person will have certain types of faith commitments that are then acted out in certain ways?

Shanks: Larry, do you believe in God?

Schiffman: Yes.

...

I believe in a personal God, but I’m conditioned by the philosophical approach of Maimonides...I can say there’s a lot that I don’t know.

An Orthodox Jew can believe whatever he wants and be part of the community, but Orthodox Judaism assumes that a person does believe that there really is a God. There is a force that cannot physically be accounted for. There is a force, even if we don’t know how to present what it is in words. Somehow or other God reveals himself or his will to humanity. This revelation and its experience constitute in some mystical way, if not in a physical way, the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings. Otherwise, you could be a Jew...

Ehrman: It’s very interesting, because two of us have remained within our religious traditions and two of us have left our religious traditions. Bill and I have both left our original traditions. But there’s a difference between Bill and me. Bill adopted another tradition. It seems to me that, as somebody who has left his tradition, I have to decide if I’m going to believe something and what it is I’m going to believe. And even if that isn’t expressed propositionally, there still have to be reasons. Once one leaves one’s tradition, it isn’t an automatic move for me to go from Christianity to Judaism. There are ­hundreds of religions in the world. Why would I choose one over the other?

...

Schiffman: I don’t believe in pluralism. I believe in toleration and mutual respect. But I do believe that certain things are ultimately true or untrue. I believe that my religion is more correct than some other people’s religion. But I’m the first to admit that many other people’s religions make them better people and that many things taught in their religions are things that I agree with. We share a lot in common.

...

Ehrman: Larry thinks that at the end of the day you have to believe in God. And then your original question about “What kind of attributes does God have?” matters. Just believing in God is for me an amorphous idea. I think belief has content. Without content it’s simply some kind of feeling that you have inside. I think that faith has to have substance. But once you start putting some substance onto that, you get into trouble. Faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes...I don't see a God who intervenes.

Strange: What I can’t help but notice is that two people look at precisely the same event and one sees God intervening and the other does not. Apparently the one who has seen God is either fooling himself or there is something genuinely happening that’s going on.

...

Ehrman: I would actually like to be a believer.

Schiffman: I see the whole thing as a lifelong quest. It’s not that either a person believes or doesn’t believe. The life experiences of people are very difficult and very complex, and believing in God is itself a challenge. It’s not about whether I know the Exodus happened or didn’t happen. It has to do with understanding the difficult world that we’re in. Faith is a process.

...

Ehrman: I just think faith, in order to be intelligent, needs to have reasons behind it. I myself just don’t have sufficient reasons for believing in the Christian tradition. The same thing, I think, for the Jewish tradition.

...

Strange: I think I would say that faith/unfaith is sort of a false dichotomy. I think faith always contains elements of unfaith and vice versa. So in a way, we can’t avoid it. It’s just a matter of deciding what fits and what works. And also, where we get hope from.

Ehrman: Historical scholarship calls into question certain beliefs and can call into question faith. But it can’t resolve any faith issues. There are historians who agree with everything that I think about the historical Jesus, about the New Testament, about the development of Christian doctrine, and yet they’re professors in theological seminaries training pastors. If you ask them, they will say, “Yes, Jesus is God. Historical scholarship doesn’t determine what we believe.” So I think what’s important is that people engage in historical scholarship. It’s better to have a knowledgeable faith than an ignorant faith...

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The Age

The Christian Right and American History

By Jeff Sharlet

This was an article that was originally published in Harper's. This version can be found on the website The Revealer which is "a daily review of religion and the press." The article is about how the Christian right views, and uses, history.

Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor of Harper's as well as the editor for the web log The Revealer.

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.

We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.

Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call “kairos” and “chronos,” the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death anyway.

The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He chose, it could just as easily be five.

* * *

It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984>, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.

Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.

Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.

“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.

* * *

The first pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is history; and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from Heaven, first through the Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly intended—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins with “In Adam’s Fall/We sinned all”—and continues on to “Spiritual Milk for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments.” In 1836, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122 million copies of lessons such as “The Bible the Best of Classics” and “Religion the only Basis of Society” during the following century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that the nationalism of manifest destiny—itself thinly veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educational tradition. The movement now sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.

Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys more than half a billion dollars of educational materials annually. “Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of homeschooling. In addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume teacher’s edition of United States History for Christian Schools, appropriate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics for Christian Schools, and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series on America up to 1865 created for Christian college students by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a providential lens. [1]I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There were four officers inside.

“What are you writing?” the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the window.

“Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.

“Okay. Whatcha listening to?”

I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.

“This is a high-security area,” he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn.” Note-taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “So, I gotta ask again, whatcha listening to?”

How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was defiance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the “irresistible blessings” of biblical capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?

Like this: “American history.”

“Providence” would have been a better word...

Continue reading "Through a Glass, Darkly.”

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Father Dan

Fundamentalist Christianity as Proxy to Fundamentalist Islamic Jihad, Part II

Because of all of these factors that I have stated in Part I Usama Bin Laden, and other like minded Jihadist leaders, have been able to create a popular following in the Middle East (and at the least, a tolerance to their actions and justifications).

Usama Bin Laden has stated:

These men [the September 11th hijackers] understood that jihad for the sake of God is the way to establish right and defeat falsehood. They understood that jihad for the sake of God is the way to deter the tyranny of the infidels...These men sought to prepare a response fo the Day of Reckoning. Faith in God and the Hereafter and emulating the traditions of Mohammed, may God’s peace be upon him, is what prompted them to leave their homes...So the case is easy, America will not be able to leave this ordeal unless it leaves the Arabian Peninsula, and stops involvement in Palestine, and all the Islamic world...[Because of] Bush’s actions the equation won’t be solved until the swords fall on their heads, with the permission of God.

Usama Bin Laden (in the eyes of the Jihadist Islamist) isn’t saying anything that is completely abhorrent to the society they are in and he isn’t saying something that couldn’t be justified by the Christian Bible if he was to use it for his spiritual and religious justifications. So coming from a Fundamentalist Christian perspective one would be able to wage a “Holy” war against a theoretical super power that was seen to commit atrocities against Christians every day and one could use the Bible to justify the means of violence (especially if one interpreted the Biblical passages above with a Fundamentalist slant). Hereupon we will now look at some quotes from Fundamentalist Christian preachers and from people who view the world in a Fundamentalist Christian slant. First we will look at the Baptist Reverend Jerry Falwell and his views of the world and of America:

The Bible is the inerrant...word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all manners pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science history, etc...We have never been so prosperous. Yet, we have never been so secular and pagan. We are becoming both amoral and immoral. We are making secularism our national religion. The government and the courts have become, not neutral to religion as the Founders intended, but openly hostile to Christianity. And as we look with sadness at our internal demise, we cannot any longer ignore that external enemies are growing. This administration has given our military and nuclear secretes to the Chinese and they to other American foes. We have been victimized by traitorous behavior on the part of our leaders.

Falwell is essentially taking the same view as Usama Bin Laden. Numerous times Bin Laden has stated the inerrant word of God is infallible in all things and he has used Islam as a focal point in his political attacks against the Saudi government. Bin Laden has stated that the Saudi government has become hostile to Islam and that it’s internal demise is due to the fact that it’s leaders opened up it’s borders to Western (i.e. infidel) occupation by allowing Western oil companies and an American military presence within it’s borders and by lending out it’s help to the “Zionist” American enemy and that faithful Muslims must take action. Essentially, Falwell, with his views as such, he is just as justified in using violence and war for his agenda as Bin Laden is in the Fundamentalist Christian perspective (of coarse, the way American history has worked itself out and in part with the way Europe brought itself from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to Enlightenment, Falwell doesn’t take a stance for violence, but the way his theology works, and from the Biblical examples I’ve used above, he would be justified). Now we will look at the Virginia based televangelist Pat Robertson.

In 1992 Pat Robertson was quoted in the Washington Post saying:

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.

In many Islamic countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia women are not treated as equals to their male counterparts, mainly because of pre-Islamic traditions and because of Islamic Sharia law. And in many of those countries when woman have tried to demand equal rights (such as in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan) they have been called heretics who are against the word of God and have been punished. Like Robertson, many fundamentalist Muslims believe that feminist are a menace to society and that they are against their value system. Robertson also uses the socialist accusation against feminists because socialists are seen as atheistic anarchists whom are against capitalism (capitalism being the perceived shining moral system of Christianity). Usama Bin Laden and many Jihadists Islamists have also spoken out against socialists and have sought their ouster from power in Egypt during the 1950s and 60s and when they fought to drive out the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Not incidentally, the CIA conducted operations in Egypt and Afghanistan which was meant to agitate the public and seek the overthrow of the two governments.

During a taping of his show the 700 Club on CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a head of state and a constant critic of America:

He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent. You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war...this man is a terrific danger...

Here, instead of a quote that can lead to an abstract argument that states it’s on par with Jihadist Islam, we have a quote from a mainstream evangelical (who ran for president in 1988) who is openly calling for the killing of an enemy of America (which in turn means an enemy of Christianity and God). Since Chavez is a critic of American foreign policy (and since America, in the eyes of the Fundamentalist Christian, is the sovereign nation of God, Chavez has attacked God) and has set up socialist programs in the government (since socialism is considered a Godless ideology which God finds an affront to him)he needs to be taken care of by any means necessary, in this case, assassination.

What we have seen is that a Fundamentalist Christian perspective supplanted into Jihadist Islamic doctrine can yield the same results, with the same justifications, as the actions of an Jihadist Islamist. So what does this mean for the Fundamentalist Christian American who subscribes to the unequivocal view that the Bible, the Holy Bible, is the word of God which supersedes all other wisdom and law? It means: [1] that the Fundamentalist Christian must look within his or herself to see if there indeed is a difference between any form of fundamentalism, [2] look at the Bible with a critical eye to see its contradictions to find out what it means to be a “true” Christian, and [3] it means that in order to live in a rational modern world(1) one must accept certain truths about the Bible, about religion and fundamentalism, and modernity.

For the Fundamentalist Christian to look within one’s self to see that all forms of fundamentalism are the same he or she must acknowledge the paradox of being a Fundamentalist Christian.(2) Even though the Fundamentalist Christian claims that the Bible is the word of God and that God never changes over time the Fundamentalist Christian essentially chooses and discards certain Biblical precepts based on how he or she wants to see the world. For one, this explains why there are numerous Fundamentalist Christian sects (i.e. United Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Jehova’s Witness, and numerous non-denominational churches) because not everyone agrees which precepts to follow and which to discard. Yet this also highlights the paradox, because, essentially, almost all churches with certain rules and regulations are Biblically correct (if one takes a fundamentalist look at the Bible) in having those rules and regulations; the dividing line between certain Fundamentalist Christian churches is what those churches leave out instead of keep in.

Some churches, especially older Baptist and pre-Vatican II Catholic churches, don’t or didn’t allow women into the church unless they had something covering their head, adhering to what is said in 1st Corinthians 11:6-10:

For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair...she should wear a veil...For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.

Over the years though many fundamentalist churches have become laxed with this rule, yet they still adhere to a fundamentalist tilt. Many of these churches are on the forefront of the “culture war,” that the mainstream media loves to talk about, speaking out against “attacks” on Biblical principles. Yet many of these churches allow women to go into church unveiled and to even have women preachers, contrary to Biblical precepts. 1st Corinthians 14:34-35 states:

Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

Yet these same Fundamentalist Christians will speak out against homosexuality, abortion, secularism, and other religious faiths because of certain precepts in the Bible. When the Fundamentalist Christian truly acknowledges this paradox (hypothetically) of Fundamentalist Christianity he or she can see that deep down they don’t hold an all encompassing fundamentalist view of the Bible because of the certain absurdity that some of these precepts seem to the modern mind. So if certain Biblical precepts are indeed absurd in a modern day context, and in a Fundamentalist Christian view the Bible is the word of God, then there is something wrong with fundamentalism.

Many Fundamentalist Christians speak out against Islam(3) stating that it is based on a violent book and is based on violent, terrorist like, principles. Yet in this essay it is shown that the Bible is just as violent (if not more) then the Qu’ran, and that if a Jihadist Islamist wanted to use the Bible instead of the Qu’ran and other Muslim literature, to justify attacks against civilians, he or she could. Yet the Fundamentalist Christian speaks out against this Fundamentalist form of Islam. Since, essentially, all forms of fundamentalism are the same and fall apart after critical study, when the Fundamentalist Christian is attacking Fundamentalist Jihadist Islam he or she is, in actuality, attacking his or her own faith, the faith of fundamentalism with a Christian tilt.

Secondly, to look at the Bible with a critical eye in order to find out what it means to be a “true” Christian a Fundamentalist Christian must fully study what the Bible actually says in context to how it was created and in context to the history behind it. Modern day exegesis(4) has shown how the Bible was essentially created and edited over the centuries and has borrowed concepts and stories from many other religions in the area surrounding the land of the Israelites, such as the religion of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Mesopotamians, etc. Assuming that the Fundamentalist Christian accepted the fact of the Fundamentalist Christian paradox, and that all fundamentalism is essentially the same, he or she can now see how there are certain precepts to the Bible that do not make sense to the modern day mind. The Fundamentalist Christian, through modern day exegesis, can see and understand why certain Biblical precepts came about, such as woman not being allowed to be preachers or homosexuals being considered sinners. They came about because of the cultural beliefs at the time, and naturally, those cultural beliefs were written down into the religious texts. What the Fundamentalist Christian can do is look at the certain Biblical precepts as the products of past thought and culture, such as not allowing the consumption of pork and blood vengeance, and then try to find the precepts that transcend culture and time, such as a universal love for mankind and a compassion for the downtrodden, and use those as his or her corner stone for their own Christian thought.

Thirdly, and in conclusion to this long-winded seven paragraph wrap-up, the Fundamentalist Christian with the above stated truths of the Bible, can then accept certain facts about religion and fundamentalism in the modern day world. When a Fundamentalist Christian can see (after accepting the previous two steps) that a Jihadist Islamist can use precepts from the Christian Bible for purposes of terrorism and can justify those violent attacks Biblically (as the previous Christian Crusaders did during the Middle Ages) it should essentially give the Fundamentalist Christian pause to his or her fundamentalist religious beliefs in this modern day world and should give him or her pause to criticism of Islam and any other religion. Firstly, about religion and fundamentalism, the Fundamentalist Christian should see that all structured religions that purport to give the answers to all of life’s questions are always prone to fundamentalist perversions, whether the religion is Christian, Islamic, Hindu, etc. With structured religion there is always a hierarchy that naturally appears(5) and will try to mold the religion into a certain viewpoint, people such as a Pat Robertson or a James Dobson can affect many people with their religious rigidity and in turn they can mold their “flock” into their likening because structured religion forces the removal of critical thought from the Fundamentalist Christian who is apart of the “flock.” This is the essence of what fundamentalism is. With this newly attained view on fundamentalism the Fundamentalist Christian can then see the modern world with a clear view instead of through the prism of fundamentalist religiosity and can accept a more encompassing and critical view of his or her religion, the Bible, fundamentalism, and the world.

Now the Fundamentalist Christian who has (hypothetically) realized all three of these steps can get to the true essence of Christianity which had been kept out of his or her view because of the Fundamentalist Christian box they entrapped themselves in.(6) Realizing the context of the Bible and putting into perspective the teachings and miracles of Jesus and having them stand alone by themselves, the now ex-fundamentalist can realize the kernel of truth that is Christianity which was previously surrounded by a fundamentalist world view. He or she can now have a more compassionate Christianity that can allow for critical thought, self expression, true compassion for mankind, a genuine empathy for the oppressed, and a non-religious spiritual connect with God which couldn’t be previously realized before.

Notes

1. To not be divorced from the reality that is the world that surrounds him or her. To realize that turning into one’s self and using the Bible as a shield to “protect” one’s fundamentalist values is by no means healthy or the “answer” to the world.
2. Which is, being a Fundamentalist Christian (therefore adhering to all laws in the Bible) one must realize that he or she doesn’t actually live according to all of the Biblical principles. The Fundamentalist Christian lives by some principles that he or she (or his or her respective church) chooses and ignores others that he or she doesn’t deem important enough. This is the classic term for a paradox.
3. Not the Jihadist concept of Islam but of all of Islam. The whole religion of Islam.
4. Which I will not get into detail about because the subject of modern exegesis and critical study of the Bible would span a whole term paper, in fact, it could be a dissertation in itself.
5. One example of that is that the original ministry of Jesus turned, after Jesus’ death, from 12 apostles into a Catholic Church with a hierarchical system with a Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, and priests in charge of over 1 billion people (with similar systems in the Eastern Orthodox Church).
6. Similar to Plato’s Cave.

Fundamentalist Christianity as Proxy to Fundamentalist Islamic Jihad, Part I

“So the people flouted, when they had blowen trompets: for whé the people had heard the founde of the trompet, they flouted with a great fhoute: and the wall fel down flat: fo the people went vp into the citìe, euerie man fteight before him: and they toke the citie.

And they vtteily deftroyed all that was in the citie, bothe man and woman, yong, and olde, and oxe, and fhepe, and affe, with the edge of the fworde.”
-Iofúa 6:20-21 (Geneva Bible version 1560 AD)

America is a very unique country. It was founded by people who were fleeing religious persecution from Europe and, who in turn, founded colonies based on Fundamentalist Christian(1) religious precepts. Over the centuries America has created a unique Christian religious tradition that isn’t seen anywhere else in the Western world. Out of this religious tradition has come a Fundamentalist Christian tradition which holds the Bible as the inherent word of God and has morphed into a politically conservative social and world view. While America and the rest of the modern world has progressed this Fundamentalist Christian tradition has not(2) and has lead to a rigid religious system with a Christian tilt that is essentially harmful to the human mind and body, within this modern day world. At the same time, since the 1950s, there has been a rise in a fundamentalist form of Islam which uses Jihad as a political tool in reaction to the political realities surrounding the ones who hold a Jihadist Islamist(3) world view. Contrary to what many Fundamentalist Christians think and preach these two very distinct forms of religion are essentially very similar in their world, social, and religious views, and in order to understand Fundamentalist Christianity one has to also understand and juxtapose it with Jihadist Islam, and when one looks at Jihadist Islamic reasoning compared to the book of the Qu’ran and Muslim society one can see why Jihadist Islamists reason as they do, and if one contrasts Jihadist Islamic reasoning with Fundamentalist Christianity and it’s reasoning, the concept of Jihadist Islam isn’t as foreign as one might think. And by looking at Fundamentalist Christianity in this light it begs the question of whether such a brand of reasoning should even exist in an American form of Christianity in this day and age and how to answer the Fundamentalist Christian view.

First, on Jihadist Islam. To understand the reasoning of Jihadist Islamists and their hero like status to some in the Middle East one has to juxtapose that onto Fundamentalist Christianity and their reasoning for past actions, especially in the Old Testament, and in turn, this will make one understand Fundamentalist Christianity. What Jihadists Islamists sees in the Middle East is an American presence that has set itself up there since the 1950s when the American government overthrew President Mosaddeq of Iran and installed the American (and secular) friendly Shah in 1953, it also sees American support for what they consider an illegal Middle Eastern (non-Islamic) state that set itself up in 1948, Israel, un-Islamic presence of American troops in the Holy Land (Saudi Arabia, the site of Muhammad’s preaching of Islam and of the number one holy city in Islam, Mecca), and the twice invasion and now occupation of a Middle Eastern country that was the heart of civilization (Iraq). Of course, using violence as one’s driving force for change isn’t agreeable to the temporary Christian mind, but Fundamentalists Christians (if they dare so choose) could justify violence on their religious behalf. Fundamentalist Christians in the United States see the rise of a one world government in an ever secular Europe (the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Criminal Court), they see the destruction of God in public life,(4) they see a Middle East that is controlled by the Devil (Islam), etc. The Old Testament gives Fundamentalist Christians just as much right to attack as the Qu’ran gives Jihadists Islamists. And one step further, the Old Testament also gives Islamic Jihadists an excuse to attack as well. Both the Jihadists Islamists and the Fundamentalist Christians profess that their book is the true infallible word of God, and since it is, it must be acted upon with full fervor. And, hypothetically, if the only text the Jihadist Islamic had (instead of the Qu’ran) was the Christian Holy Bible, he or she too could justify attacks in the name of God, Islam, and Jihad.

Usama Bin Laden has argued that on their attacks of the United States mass civilian casualties are acceptable (despite the Qu’ran’s explanation that no innocent human life shall be killed [yet the Qu’ran isn’t without it’s loopholes]) and with an understanding of the Old Testament this argument can be justified. Looking at Joshua 6:20-21 Yehoshua (a servant and warrior of God) and his troops have surrounded the heathen (or by looking at it through the light of Islam or Fundamentalist Christianity, un-Islamic/un-Christian) city of Yericho and they shouted and their shouts caused the walls of the city to crumble and they then “devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys” They ended up killing everyone in the city whether they were children or old women (save the prostitute who had helped Yehoshua’s spies and her family) and they then burned the city down. Another story about genocide and the justification for the killing of mass innocence is from Numbers 31:7-11 and verses 14-18 when God told Moshe to make war with Midyan and when Moshe amassed an army of 12,000 the Old Testament said:

They did battle against Midyan, as YHWH had commanded Moshe, and killed every male. They killed the kings of Midyan: Evi, Rekem, Tzur, Hur, and Reva, the five kings of Midyan, in addition to others who were slain by them; and they also killed Bil’am son of Be’or with the sword. The children of Yisra’el took the women of Midyan and their little ones captive; and they took their cattle, their flakcs, and all their goods and booty. All their towns where they had settled, and all their encampments, they burned, but they took all the spoil and all the booty, both people and animal...Moshe became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come with service in the war. Moshe said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? These women here on Bil’am’s advice, made the children of Yisra’el act treacherously against YHWH in the affair of Pe’or, so that the plague came among the congregation of YHWH. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

With this understanding at hand one can see that the Jihadists Islamist perspective on the killing of innocent Americans isn’t out of line when it can be compared to a Fundamentalists Christian’s evangelical-infallible-word-of-God interpretation of the Holy Bible. Whether they are women or children, non-combatants or combatants, if they are in the nation that is sinning against God or hurting a nation of God they are the root causes of the problem. The Jihadist Islamist sees America as one of the root causes of the problems in the Middle East, he or she sees that America is propping up dictatorial despots or elected officials whom are viewed as harming Islam(5) so the appropriate action of Jihad almost requires one (or gives cover of innocence for) to kill the innocents of a nation that is your enemy and the enemy of your religion. So mass killing and genocide through the use of unconventional weapons (hijacked airplanes and suicide bombers) and possibly conventional (a nuclear devise) by Jihadists Islamists has a precedent and a justification within Fundamentalist Christianity.

Of coarse, this isn’t the only account in the Bible on the killing of mass innocents, nor is it the only account of the killing of innocents to advance the cause of a people in which the death of innocent people is used as a massive cultural shock to the system they are trying to fight against. The attacks of September 11th against American innocents were supposed to be a huge cultural, and economic, shock to the American system that the Jihadists Islamists were trying to fight against. And it worked almost perfectly; Americans were appalled by the amount of innocent life that was lost and many lashed out not only against the attackers but also against the administration for not preventing the attacks from happening due to a lack of solid intelligence and the stock market took more than a year to fully recover. A perfect example of this in the Bible is in Exodus 12:29-32 during the killing of every innocent firstborn child in Egypt in order to shock the Egyptians and outrage them in order to move the Pharaoh to release the Jews from Egypt:

In the middle of the night YHWH struck down all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of the Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. And Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians-because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead. He summoned Moshe and Aharon in the night and said, “Up, depart from among my people, you and the children of Yisrael with you! Go, worship YHWH as you said! Take also your flocks and your herds, as you said, and begone! And may you bring a blessing upon me also!”

Looking at this passage with a Fundamentalist Christian perspective (which is that the Torah was written by Moshe and was dictated to by God and therefore it is the infallible word of God and that everything in the Bible is truth and should be heeded by all God fearing Christians) this can easily be interpreted by a Fundamentalist Christian that even though all life is precious, the killing of mass innocents in a country that oppresses you and affronts your Christian values and God can be justified in order to shock the whole cultural and political system to cave into your demands. So supplanting this Fundamentalist Christian perspective on this passage from the Torah onto the Jihadist Islamic who planned the September 11th attacks that killed over 3,000 innocent Americans you can see how the Jihadist Islamic could justify himself in the killing of innocent people. While Usama Bin Laden most definitely didn’t think that this would cause America to cave in to his demands just as the Pharaoh had to Moshe and Aharon he could have used that example in order to justify this political and cultural shock to America in order to catapult his Islamic ideals and demands onto the rest of the world, and most importantly, to the Muslim community.

The Jihadist Islamist perceives that his own fellow Muslims are being hurt by the United States through the actions of the United States in the region of the Middle East and of Muslim Africa. Because the Jihadist Islamist perceives the world as this way, with his people being oppressed and wronged, the Jihadist Islamist justifies that the only way to get results is to strike back, and this too, whether the Jihadist Islamist kills innocents or not can be justified with a Fundamentalist Christian’s perspective of the Bible, an example of this would be in Psalms 137: 6-9:

Remember, O YHWH, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall; how they cried, “Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!” Fair Babylon, you predator, blessing on him who repays you in kind, what you have inflicted on us; blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks!

As with all of the other scriptures of the Bible, in the hands of a Jihadist Islamist whom looks at the Bible with a Fundamentalist Christian perspective (and even a Fundamentalist Christian whom would want to justify such acts Biblically) the Jihadist would and could justify revenge against America for it’s actions in the United States and he could also justify the destroying of innocent children in the process as it inflicts pain upon the enemy and is payback for the death of his own Muslim children.

Notes:

1. I use the term “Fundamentalist Christian/Christianity” to denote a certain type of form of Christianity. I put the moniker “Fundamentalist” before the term “Christian/Christianity” in order to state that for someone who holds a Fundamentalist Christian view they actually practice Fundamentalism with a capital F before they practice Christianity. By Fundamentalist Christian I actually mean a much broader term of people then one might think: This is anyone who holds the view that the Bible is the inherent word of God written down verbatim and that all of its precepts must be followed and one who holds a conservative political outlook.
2. By that I mean it hasn’t progressed in a “progressive” fashion. It has progressed, but only internally, within the Fundamentalist Christian community in order to answer to the questions of the outside world.
3. I too use the term “Jihadist Islamist/Islam” to denote a certain type of form of Islam. I put the moniker “Jihadist” in front of “Islamist/Islam” in order to state that for someone who holds a Jihadist Islamist view they put the practice and thought of Jihad before the practice of Islam. As supposed to Fundamentalist Christian, Jihadist Islamist is a much narrower term: This is anyone who ascribes to the view that they must wage a “Holy War” or Jihad against an enemy in the view that God wants them to take innocent life in His name.
4. The ACLU suing city governments on the removal of nativity scenes near public buildings, no more prayer in public school, Roe v. Wade, an increase in religious tolerance in America with the rise of immigrants and therefore causing the worship of God to “backslide”, etc.
5. The House of al Saud which rules Saudi Arabia, President Mubarak of Egypt, President Karzai of Afghanistan, etc.

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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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.

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