One of the unmistakable, yet slighted, tropes in the Bible is the warning against the perils of money and affluence. Jesus himself cautioned that the love of money is the root of all evil and that a rich person has about as much chance gaining entry into the kingdom of heaven as a camel successfully negotiating the aperture of a needle.
I wonder how many sermons over the centuries have been devoted to scaling back those declarations, explaining them away so that the affluent in the pews would not feel uncomfortable — and would not suspend their contributions. More to the point, I’d love to know how many such sermons have been preached (or the texts avoided altogether) in the past several decades. I recall many sermons about camels and the eyes of needles during my evangelical childhood. I haven’t heard such a sermon in years. Since 1980, to be exact.
Now, finally, the bills are coming due. Two of the largest and most influential religious movements in American history — the Roman Catholic Church and evangelicalism — are facing their own crises over the corrosive effects of money.
The cover story in the current issue of Sojourners magazine is titled “How Right-Wing Billionaires Are Attempting a Hostile Takeover of the Catholic Church.” Reported and written by my longtime friend and former colleague Tom Roberts, the story explores the intricate tangle of money, politics, organizations and billionaires seeking to push Catholicism away from its venerable tradition of Catholic social teaching, with its concern for the poor and the rights of workers, toward a fulsome embrace of free-market capitalism.
Such views contradict Catholic doctrine. “God blesses those who come to the aid of the poor and rebukes those who turn away from them,” according to the catechism of the Catholic Church. “A theory that makes profit the exclusive norm and ultimate end of economic activity is morally unacceptable; the disordered desire for money cannot but produce perverse effects.”
A growing number of Catholic individuals, however, don’t see it that way. Timothy Busch, founder of the Napa Institute, which aspires to “equip Catholic leaders to defend and advance the Catholic faith in the next America,” favors libertarian economics and has endowed the Busch School of Business at Catholic University of America. The Napa Institute in turn sponsored an event at the school called Good Profit, honoring a book by the same name written by Charles Koch, who may represent the embodiment of what the catechism calls “disordered desire for money.”
The monied web of right-wing influence in the Catholic Church extends to Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza; Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former adviser; and the “supreme knight” of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson, who began his career working for the late Jesse Helms, the far-right senator from North Carolina. The Knight of Columbus expends millions of dollars on charity, but it also funds such hard-right organizations as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Federalist Society and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which battled the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act, even though most Catholic entities, including the Catholic Health Association, said the accommodations offered by the Obama administration were sufficient.
This Catholic right network extends into the College of Cardinals, especially James Harvey and Raymond Burke, and to Carlo Maria Viganò, the archbishop who was removed by Francis as the papal ambassador to the United States. Viganò, with the support of Busch and other conservatives, has called on Francis to resign, essentially because he’s too “liberal” on matters like poverty, sexuality and climate change.
As Roberts writes in the Sojourners article, “While pendulum swings are common between conservative and progressive tendencies in Catholicism, the 35-year traditionalist reign of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI allowed the Far Right to flourish.” Paradoxically, Francis may have given the right an opening with his timid and belated response to clerical sexual abuse.
If billionaire resources fuel the efforts on the part of the Catholic right to force the church away from its own social teachings, the corrosive influence of money on the religious right is more complicated. There, the situation isn’t so much the direct infusion of cash, although there’s some of that with DeVos (Amway) and Green (Hobby Lobby) money. In the case of the religious right, the betrayal of biblical principles and evangelical tradition goes back further.
American evangelicals in an earlier age took seriously the biblical injunctions to welcome the stranger, to care for the poor and to treat everyone, including women and people of color, with respect and dignity. Evangelical convictions animated many of the social reform movements of the 19th century: voting rights for women, the abolition of slavery (in the North), public education, peace crusades, prison reform. At the turn of the 20th century, evangelicals organized slum brigades in teeming, squalid tenements and supported the rights of workers to organize against predatory capitalists.
The evangelical social critique extended into the realm of economics. Charles Grandison Finney, by any measure the most influential evangelical of the 19th century, suggested that a “Christian businessman” was an oxymoron because commerce necessarily elevated avarice over altruism and therefore violated the teachings of Jesus. Finney allowed that “the business aims and practices of business men are almost universally an abomination in the sight of God.”
What happened? The precise historical record is not entirely clear (I’ve been trying for years to persuade doctoral students to explore this question), but by the time of the New Deal, some evangelicals were beginning to set aside biblical injunctions against wealth and to disregard earlier evangelical activism for those less fortunate. The Cold War together with evangelist Billy Graham’s cozy relationship with captains of industry nudged evangelicals further toward the right.
But the decisive event was the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and its embrace of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. Evangelicals abandoned Carter, one of their own, in favor of a candidate who espoused unwavering faith in capitalism and unmitigated scorn for mythical “welfare queens.” Evangelical voices of conscience fell silent as Reagan proceeded to lavish tax cuts on the affluent, thereby widening the chasm between rich and poor and laying waste to the noble tradition of 19th-century evangelical activism on behalf of those on the margins. Jerry Falwell famously declared that “capitalism is God’s way of doing things.”
All remaining evangelical claims to morality or fidelity to either the Bible or to evangelical tradition were demolished in the 2016 presidential election. Now, sadly, powerful forces in the Catholic Church are pushing in a similar direction, away from concern for those Jesus called “the least of these” and toward an uncritical embrace of free-market capitalism.
“The prosperity of the times in the business world threatens to endanger the piety of the church,” a writer in the New-York Evangelist declared back in 1836. “The desire to possess, though constitutional, is one of the most dangerous affections of the human heart.”
Judas Iscariot, let’s recall, betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Through some perverse combination of silence and denial, both the Catholic right and the religious right are perpetrating a similar betrayal.
Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth, is the author of more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.