{"id":11158,"date":"2025-05-20T21:03:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T21:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11158"},"modified":"2025-05-20T21:05:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T21:05:40","slug":"the-anti-greed-gospel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/20\/the-anti-greed-gospel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anti-Greed Gospel"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Blessed Rage Against Mammon<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Malcolm Foley calls readers to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, and\u00a0imagines a material world upended by obedience to the radical call of Christ.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Andy Stager<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Violence continues to be the least creative way to respond to violence.\u201d This is the central provocation of The Anti-Greed Gospel<\/em>. In one clause, Foley renounces the devil and all his works and ways, and invites readers to make or renew these classic baptismal vows along with him.<\/p>

A diabolical political platform of lie, steal, kill, and destroy<\/em> is adopted, Foley believes, when the love of money lures us into all manner of spurious machinations. Race is chief among them. In their 2012 socio-historical book Racecraft<\/em>, Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields demonstrate that it is not difference that generates race. Rather race is the creation of racism<\/em>. Foley goes further: before either racism or race, there was greed. Greed will find and deploy any handy justification for its exploitative means. The entire ugly procession from greed to racism to race to violence is, for Foley, pathetically and tragically unimaginative. Under Mammon, we cannot envision our neighbors as anything but means or obstacles between ourselves and greedy ends.<\/p>

I followed Foley on Twitter when he was writing his dissertation on lynching a few years back. His regular threads recounting American racial violence were almost too much to take in. But in this book, he brings a keen moral imagination to bear on the history of lynching in America. Foley makes plain that the nation\u2019s racist violence has less to do with hate than with greed. Both the rise as well as the decline of lynching, he argues, are results of social calculus. White supremacy and its violent enforcement was (and is) at bottom an ideology in service of economic dominance. When lynching helped whites to maintain economic hegemony, it was wielded as a socio-economic weapon; when overt racial violence lost strategic efficacy, more expedient tools (like redlining) were wielded instead.<\/p>

If a proper Christian imagination must resist violence and greed, then it must resist the delineation of our neighbors along racial lines that comes from allowing violence in the name of greed. And while lynching is (mostly) history, violence, racism, and greed are still very much with us. \u201cThe past is not dead,\u201d Faulkner said. \u201cIt\u2019s not even past.\u201d<\/p>

But Foley\u2019s vision is truly revolutionary. He insists that the greedy and violent past is for the Christian definitively pass\u00e9 by virtue of the Christ event. So long as there are genuine followers of Jesus living in beloved community, there ought to be a palpable resistance to these diabolical forces.<\/p>

As I have grown more anti-capitalist and antiracist, I\u2019ve come to view slavery in America as Exhibit A for what happens when capitalism is king. But Foley takes things further. For him, slavery is not just an extreme example of what he calls racial capitalism; slavery and its ugly cousins are all but inevitable when a culture serves the god Mammon.<\/p>

I\u2019m prepared to go even further than Foley in marshaling Marx\u2019s criticism of capitalism. It costs me little to take radical stances from a safe theoretical distance. Yet, as a white man and pastor, I found myself brought up short by Foley\u2019s radical and absolute anti-violence commitments. My parents did not have to sit me down to explain the state-sanctioned violence to which my skin made me vulnerable. I have not stood before scores of Black congregants to call\u2014in God\u2019s name\u2014for love in the face of racism. But in Foley we have a Black man and pastor\u2013historian who might know more than anyone alive about the torture and killing of Black people in America. In spite of this, he insists, with Dr. King and Ida B. Wells and James Cone, that there is no Christian way to use worldly force. It is always the insufficiently baptized imagination that resorts to retribution.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Answering greed and violence with love requires a revolutionary imagination.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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 \u201cformed by the gospel\u201d or \u201cthey will tend away from Christ\u2019s commands.\u201d I found my own insufficiently baptized imagination regularly exposed as I read The Anti-Greed Gospel<\/em>.<\/p>

There are some infelicities. Foley has a propensity to deploy the language of violence (\u201ccombat,\u201d \u201ccripple,\u201d \u201cbattle\u201d) 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\u2019s 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\u2019s return, all is made well. This might have afforded him a chance to further define the gospel positively; in this volume, it\u2019s mostly conceived by way of what it stands against. The gospel per se isn\u2019t taken up directly until the final pages of the book. Indeed, Foley\u2019s focus is much more squarely on obedience to Christ\u2019s commands to love tangibly than on the divine loving action at the heart of the gospel itself.<\/p>

Yet Foley shows that the New Testament gospel is a gospel of the kingdom<\/em>. One\u2019s 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\u2019 expense. In the gospel of the kingdom, such tools are set aside in favor of the rule of love. As Audre Lorde says, \u201cyou cannot dismantle the master\u2019s house by using the master\u2019s tools.\u201d 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.<\/p>

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\u2014those perhaps more predisposed to mount a serious resistance to Mammon\u2014are vulnerable to disenchantment, deconstruction, and deconversion. In this milieu, Foley\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Andy Stager<\/strong> (PhD, Aberdeen; DMin, Western Theological Seminary) is a pastor, writer, and fly-fishing guide in Denver, Colorado. He is currently studying counseling psychology. His poems \u201cThe Way Not (Yet) Taken\u201d<\/a> and \u201cTurrets and Telescopes\u201d<\/a> have appeared in Fare Forward. <\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward<\/strong> was published by Brazos Press on February 11, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Foley calls readers to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, and imagines a material world upended by obedience to the radical call of Christ. Review by Andy Stager<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-newsletter","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farefwd.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/The-Anti-Greed-Gospel-3D.jpg?fit=1500%2C1383&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11158"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11164,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11158\/revisions\/11164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v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