The Gods Or Money?

A new book, "The Almightier," pulls back the temple curtains and reveals what mankind really worships

“No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” – Matthew 6:24

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Two-thousand years ago, Jesus Christ offered mankind an unambiguous choice, God or mammon, and today our decision is about as clear as ever: We love money. We idolize money. We worship money.

It has always been this way, but we haven’t always noticed, despite centuries of unbridled greed and financial scandals within organized religions of every stripe.

My former colleague from The Wall Street Journal, and fellow Substacker, Paul Vigna, has done a remarkable job of chronicling one of mankind’s biggest blunders in a book released this week, “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin.”

As Vigna writes, we live in a world where everything is done for money.

If you doubt his thesis, maybe you should stop praying for financial blessings, ditch your beloved “prosperity gospel” preachers, and pick up your cross.

If God has a T-shirt under his Greco-Roman toga, this is what is says. (Illustration: AI generated.)

The acquiescent Fertile Crescent

Vigna’s exploration begins thousands of years before Christ in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk. At the dawn of civilization, citizens were expected to pay tributes to keep the gods, the priests and the rulers fat and happy, but how much?

The question led temple scribes to develop standardized units of weights and measurements. They devised history’s first recorded system of tallying commodities and listing possessions. They recorded land holdings. They invented the shekel – which likely came even before the written word.

Given the coin’s utility, it did not take long for the shekel to become an object of veneration. It was a ready-made source of wealth and power. It built cities and organized societies. It made kings. But it also had a dark side, serving as a precise record of debts and a tool of enslavement.

Money master or debt slave, everybody went along, ascribing profound meaning and immense power to the shekel. Thousands of gods came and went, but for more than 5,000 years, the almighty shekel has reigned supreme.

Prophets seek profits

It’s a hard truth for many followers to swallow, but to a large extent, religion has always been about who gets the money and the power that comes with it. Its history is replete with scandals that prove this point.

In the 1500s, the faithful had to buy forgiveness and a ticket to heaven from the church.

An outraged monk named Martin Luther led a rebellion that created Protestantism and countless schisms to come. But to this day, the Catholic church is still stacked with intractible financial scandals.

In just June, for instance, investors accused the second-oldest Catholic diocese in the U.S. of securities fraud in a $41 million bond offering.

And not to pick on Catholics because Protestants have been pulling the same stunts.

Just this week, a former Dallas mega-church pastor went to court demanding millions of dollars in retirement pay following his conviction on five counts of lewd or indecent acts to a child.

Robert Morris, 63, who founded Gateway Church, was reportedly among the most popular and politically influential pastors in the nation when he resigned from Gateway last year following accusations that he sexually abused a 12-year-old girl.

Who wants their tithes going to pedophiles?

These are just recent examples. The litany is longer than the stairway to heaven.

Every year, billions of dollars are literally stolen from donations that Christians give to U.S. churches, para-church organizations and secular organizations, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

In 2023, alone, the total came to $62 billion, according to a report from the Princeton Theological Seminary. Is it any wonder God always seems to be short on cash?

Not to pick on Christians, because scams abound in all other religions, even the enlightenment-seeking Buddhists.

Just this week, China’s renowned Shaolin Temple announced an investigation of its so-called “monk-CEO” Shi Yongxin. He faces allegations of embezzlement and multiple dalliances. Why seek zen when you can snatch yen?

Is it any wonder why temples all around the world are fraught with financial follies, not to mention disgusting sex scandals, when they were the birthplaces of the root of all evil?

Given our love of money, congregations have long proven to be the easiest places to run Ponzi schemes, from Bernie Madoff, who stole billions from his fellow Jews, to Earthlink co-founder Reed Slatkin, who scammed Scientologists out of nearly $600 million.

If the gods want you to be rich, why are they always taking your money?

Money isn’t real

Religious financial abuse is not Vigna’s point, though his book explores some forgotten historical examples.

Mostly, what Vigna argues is that money is no more real than the ancient gods that created it. It’s only power is the power we give it – and we’ve given it too much power.

Vigna argues that for all the good that money has done to build civilizations, it has also stoked mankind’s most misanthropic impulses.

Money leads to greed. Greed leads to debt. And debt has to be repaid or forgiven, just like sin, lest God’s green Earth becomes a planet of debt slaves spinning about in the meaningless vacuum of space.

We live in a nation with more than $37 trillion in debt. In November, Business Blunders opined that incoming President Donald J. Trump would only run up the balance even further, and indeed his “Big Beautiful Bill” is projected to add another $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

At the same time U.S.households have run up $18 trillion in debt of their own, according to the Federal Reserve.

How does it ever end?

The Great Reset

Here’s where many readers may part ways with Vigna’s thinking, but he offers an intriguing idea that’s worth pondering given the bleak alternatives.

In 2400 B.C., Mesopotamian king Enmetena simply cancelled all personal debts.

It was called amargi. People who’d sold themselves into debt slavery were freed, Enmetena restored power he’d lost to money lenders, and a sluggish, debt-bloated economy got a fresh slate.

The ancient Israelites continued this practice. Every 50 years, all debts were cancelled in a jubilee. (Read God’s jubilee commandment in Leviticus.)

Thousands of years later, when Jesus overturned the tables of the temple money changers, he may have been agitating for another round of debt forgiveness, Vigna speculates.

If only the world could declare another jubilee. At the blast of a trumpet, debt-burdened nations, companies and individuals could focus on serving people instead of debt.

It’s hard to imagine how such a plan could ever work in a modern global economy, but Vigna offers few suggestions in his final chapter, including a whole new global monetary system.

Sure, we’d probably still worship money and debts would pile up again, but in 50 years the world could just celebrate another jubilee.

We will eventually reset our unsustainable trillions in debt one way or the other. Defaults, bankruptcies, wars and maybe even the collapse of civilization.

The gods don’t care.

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