The Anti-Greed Gospel: UrbanFaith x Dr. Malcolm Foley

Dr. Malcolm Foley reminds believers that Jesus told us we can’t serve God and Mammon. In his book The Anti Greed Gospel, he challenges believers to confront the greed that gave birth to racism in America and continues to perpetuate injustice in our nation today. The full interview is above, excerpts below have been edited for clarity and length. 

Allen

Absolutely. The first question I have for you, I mean, this subtitle, it kind of lays it out. Why the love of money is the root of racism and how the church created a new way forward. Can you talk about how is the love of money, the root of racism? This is not a thing that many people are talking about.

Malcolm

Which is so, and it’s so interesting to me that it’s not a popular account. So I, I thank the Brazos marketing people for giving me that title. It very easily explains kind of what the book is about. So, the argument of the book is that the history of race and racism is not a history fundamentally of identity or of hate or of ignorance, but that it’s a history of greed. That when, that when the Portuguese come to Africa, witness chattel slavery, decide to get involved, they don’t do so because they’re racist. They do so because they have markets they want to expand. And then as time goes on, and they have to justify that to themselves to the Pope, that’s when these narratives of blackness and whiteness pop up. It’s [that] these people are savages and heathens, and that’s why we enslaved them. It’s not, it’s not because we’re going to make a whole bunch of money, disregard that detail. It’s because of something about them. The argument that I want to make in the book is that especially this country’s history of race and racism is just a proxy battle of a cosmic war. And the combatants in that cosmic war were named by Christ in Matthew 6:24, where he says, you can’t serve two masters. You’ll either love one and hate the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. And you can’t serve both God and [Mammon]. Jesus could have chosen any of the numerous idols that we are tempted to serve. I spent a lot of time in reform circles. There’s a lot of talk about pride. I’ll talk about self, he could have said God and self. And I already said, he says God and mammon, the Aramaic word for money and riches. And I think Jesus was right 2000 years ago. I think he’s still still right today. And this history is, I think, just a series of examples that back that up.

Allen

I love that. And I think that again, you, you’re getting at something as you continue to work that not only does Christ lift it up, but one of the lines that you say really catches me, which is that Christ says that we have to love one another. And that love is about obedience.

Malcolm

Yes.

Allen

And that love must be material, right? I can’t just have an attitude of loving. I have to do something. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means for believers to love materially and not just an attitude as we confront racism and greed?

Malcolm

Yes. Yes. Okay. So, so my account of what kind of, especially what the, what the new, how the New Testament defines love in many ways comes back to 1st John 3:16 where we’re told, this is how we know what love is, that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. Therefore, we ought to lay down our lives for one another. And then the next verse John says, if anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need, and has no pity on them, how can you say that the love of God is in you? And what those verses then indicate is that, love is always a material relation. So like, people can think about, this is how we know what love is, that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And people can just think about that as just this like lofty, theological thing. And that’s not what John says. John’s saying that like Jesus did this very, very material thing for you. He died. Like that’s a very serious material act to do on behalf of someone. And then that has a bearing on the way that you love your neighbor. They said, therefore, we ought to give up our lives for one another. It’s a recognition that everything that we have been given, especially in excess of what we need, is for the service of others. And what that means, especially in our conversations about race is that we don’t address massive economic injustice through just like friendship and hanging out. We deal with it through redistribution. We deal with it through sharing. But these material acts that extend beyond just me being able to say, well, I have a bunch of multiracial friendships and we hang out and think well of each other. Like, well, that’s nice, but that’s not love according to the scriptures. And so one of the things I also want to do with our conversations about race is I want to make sure that they’re deeply material. Because the issue with race, and this is why I argue in the introduction, is that it lies, it steals, and it kills. And so, and so if we’re going to build communities that resist those lies, that theft, and that murder, it’s going to require communities that are shaped in certain material ways, material forms of, forms of solidarity, material ways that we resist, not only resist violence, but actively undermine the violence that our brothers, sisters and neighbors are subjected to, and that we like vocally tell the truth, as opposed to being captive to lies.

Allen

So, since you, you know, you raised how, you know, we want to be able to be truth tellers in this world, then how is, is filled with lies and you make this really, I mean, just really salient and graphic case about what racism history has been like in this country and it’s tied to economics. I, I want you to, to tease out just for me, how you see moving from slavery to lynching to what we’re seeing today with mass incarceration and even this other, this othering right, this, this violence that we’re seeing rising in our country that has economic motivators, right? Can you talk about how it’s important to not miss that there’s a profit motive or a greed motive instead of just a, oh, I don’t like these people. I hate these people that it’s underlying some of this.

Malcolm

It’s important to understand that I think when we look at the history of race, we are also looking at the history of capitalism. Hence why I use the language of racial capitalism, which I take from, which I take from the black radical tradition. Folks like folks like Cedric Robinson and others were very clear that the only capitalism that we know is a racial capitalism, that the capitalism that we know requires us to place people in categories of exploitable thing so that we can make money off them. And so, that history of slavery, of lynching, of mass incarceration…each of these are just instantiations of racial capitalism. Slavery is fundamentally a system of economic exploitation. Lynching, as I argue in the book, was precipitated by greed. It continued because of greed and it ended when it became bad for business. When we think about, when we think about mass incarceration, we can even think about this right now with the billions of dollars that’s now going to immigration detention centers and things like that. Like the reason why these things continue is because they make money for folks. It’s not just because you just got a whole bunch of just hateful people that just want to hurt people. And there is cruelty, but cruelty but even that cruelty is rarely done just for the sake of cruelty. It has some kind of material benefit for someone. That’s what then motivates them to continue to do it. And so, I want to continue to remind people of that fact. Because I’ve gotten this kind of in some responses from the book that a lot of people have been… like they look at the history of race and they’re confused because they’re like, wait a minute, this really just comes down to people not liking other people because they’re different? Like that just seems weird. Like it doesn’t seem like that’s a foundation strong enough to like have this continue for so long and with so much brutality. But when they’re made aware of the fact that it’s like…oh wait, money is behind it. All of the the dominoes start to fall and the gears start kind of clicking in place. That’s what that discovery did for me. And that’s why I wanted to write this book because I wanted to make sure as much as these conversations have been had in academic circles, the church broadly doesn’t see this. And so I’m like, let me, let me write a book so that people can see the way that this, the way that this actually works, but not only so that they can see the way this actually works, but that they could see the fact that Christ has actually given us the resources to be able to live in an alternative way, that we have an opportunity to show the world that this is not the only way to operate.