In perhaps the most moving passage in this text, Foley, the namesake of Malcolm X, definitively parts ways with him. Black Power, for Foley, ultimately depends on the same coercive resources as white supremacist violence. The love of God in Jesus Christ makes the love of neighbor core to any Christian manifesto. For Foley, this love must extend to those whose greed truncates their imaginations until they deploy violence. Under attack, our instincts take over. For Foley, Christian instincts had better be “formed by the gospel” or “they will tend away from Christ’s commands.” I found my own insufficiently baptized imagination regularly exposed as I read The Anti-Greed Gospel.

There are some infelicities. Foley has a propensity to deploy the language of violence (“combat,” “cripple,” “battle”) to advance a stridently anti-violent position. He notes that his heroine, Ida B. Wells, called for Black folks to arm themselves in self-defense. But, perhaps out of reverence, Foley does not say how this position coheres or clashes with his own anti-violent commitments. He also passes up some opportunities. He might have developed an analysis of the gendered experience of oppression and violence in the Black community (Intersectionality is only mentioned in passing.) With a thesis so focused on Christ’s words and actions as the pattern for an imaginative Christian life, I found myself wishing for a compelling articulation of what social and material healing awaits the world when, at Christ’s return, all is made well. This might have afforded him a chance to further define the gospel positively; in this volume, it’s mostly conceived by way of what it stands against. The gospel per se isn’t taken up directly until the final pages of the book. Indeed, Foley’s focus is much more squarely on obedience to Christ’s commands to love tangibly than on the divine loving action at the heart of the gospel itself.

Yet Foley shows that the New Testament gospel is a gospel of the kingdom. One’s loyalty, if one professes Christ as king, is to a radical, revolutionary, and otherworldly regime. Worldly regimes use coercive power to bring wealth to their constituents at others’ expense. In the gospel of the kingdom, such tools are set aside in favor of the rule of love. As Audre Lorde says, “you cannot dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools.” Nevertheless, this kingdom of love must be just as material as the greedy regimes it replaces. Generosity is not enough. Nothing short of the renunciation of Mammon and a concrete reorganization of the beloved community around the centrality of love suffices. For Foley, love means the readiness to divest oneself in order to ensure that no neighbor goes with needs unmet.

Ours is an age of economic anxiety. Scarcity is secular dogma, and greed is good. Racial capitalism is alive, if not completely well. Meanwhile in churchgoing America, numbers and fervor seem stable, if not surging, on the political right. Christians with socially and economically progressive sensibilities—those perhaps more predisposed to mount a serious resistance to Mammon—are vulnerable to disenchantment, deconstruction, and deconversion. In this milieu, Foley’s is a radical call to obedience. His research and argumentation are academically robust. But his appeal is not lacking in red-hot zeal. The summons is to Christian love, but for Foley, such love must go beyond good will and even charity and issue in materially countercultural practices, including redistribution of resources. This is a claim he knows will often be ridiculed as un-American or even communist. Foley can live with that. He is prepared to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil to attempt to follow Christ in concrete ways. He wants to undermine the love of money and thereby disarm the violent and racializing means by which we are tempted to serve Mammon. He opposes retributive justice, the worldly code of an eye for an eye, as a means of resistance. All of this will strike some as foolishness and others as weakness. It’s certainly upside-down, for it takes seriously the call to follow a figure whose kingdom is not of this world. Answering greed and violence with love requires a revolutionary imagination.