Naming Love of Mammon in Society: the Focus of this Blog

"‘No one 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 (Mammon)." Gospel of Matthew 6.24.

MAMMON: Love of mammon (wealth) is in the understanding of this blogger a demonic spiritual force that infects human systems. It is an idolatrous false god because it leads people to distrust the living God of providential care. Love of mammon is the complex, schizoid interplay of fear and greed that works itself out in the desire to dominate others justified by appeals to security.  Mammon is the parent of Empire, and it operates through political, regulatory, and financial complexity, secrecy, and injustice. Mammon is not easy or simple to illustrate in or counter through story or moral narrative, as it works itself out systematically through complexity, secrecy, lack of transparency, lies and Machiavellian social rhetoric.  Mammon is perversely modeled by neo-liberal economics, which proposes a diminishing marginal utility of consumption that should relieve society of the sinful complex if it adequately described the commodity of money.. Instead, desire for mammon is never satisfied, never secure, and pathologically destroys the livelihood of community and the most vulnerable by mobilizing, commodifying, and regressively redistributing to the powerful ever more of social production and resources. Demonic Love of Mammon is the enemy of civilization, because it celebrates the animal, uncompassionate spirits of Social Darwinism: hedonism, freedom and domination for the well-off, death dealing denial of and deprivation for those born unprivileged or made "unfit" by systematic sin.

I am learning to hate the love of mammon as it operates systematically in abuses of power, economic rent seeking, and domination, but I continue my personal struggle with my own anxieties and attractions to commercial stimulation and hoarding.   I am not innocent, but I am increasingly aware.  My ministry in this blog, "Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon," includes my struggle for understanding by trying to name the love of mammon and hold mammon accountable according to the best of my abilities and ethical values I've learned from Jesus Christ, the Prophets, and Biblical and normative literature.  My ministry accepts that humankind is damaged, and  that accountability, shared and checked power, non-violence, and the personal and historical force of the Holy Spirit are necessary dimensions in the historical struggle against servants of mammon.



   Habakkuk 2. 4 (NRSV:)      Look at the proud! 
    Their spirit is not right in them, 
    but the righteous live by their faith.
    5      Moreover, wealth is treacherous; 
    the arrogant do not endure. 
    They open their throats wide as Sheol; 
    like Death they never have enough. 
    They gather all nations for themselves, 
    and collect all peoples as their own. 

In addition, though, I intend also to propose where I find hope and goodness in the announcement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God's loving power over the death dealing love of mammon.  Feel free to join me in discussion, and please give grace to those instances of absolutism that continue to seep into my blogging. I will try to let the absolutism be expressed by the scriptures.  

God be with you. Jesus is Lord.