The theology of capitalism
We have mostly forgotten to be surprised that a street preacher’s followers discovered, several hundred years after his death, how to be a regimented multinational corporate enterprise. (Pagans, James J. O’Donnell)
In All About Love, bell hooks (via Erich Fromm) says the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible. This poses an interesting dilemma for a religion that purports to be, indeed, all about love.
Unfortunately, when that dilemma rears its head, we’ve seen the church support colonialism, industrial capitalism, greed, abuse and exploitation over the opposite.
In Pantheologies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein posits that the Protestant Reformation laid the groundwork for our mechanistic science—and vice versa. The Protestant iconoclasm and denial of transubstantiation drained spirit out of the material world, so it was perfectly poised to pair up with early capitalism, which had to exploit to survive.
In other words, the recoding of animal, mineral, vegetable, and nonwhite human lives as machinery conditioned their unrestrained exploitation—an exploitation that would have been impossible without the rigorously anti-pantheological operations of imperial Christianity. (Pantheologies)
I like the term imperial Christianity… basically Paul + everything after? This leads to a totalitarian theology, ironically professing to love all while only operating in service of those who are worthy. But lest we lay all the blame on the Protestants, Christianity long before then had become rooted in exploitation and violence:
Hence, it was Christian for the Saxons to submit to “Holy Roman” imperial violence, to be crucified like Christ. The Carolingians constructed a Christian piety that used violence to convert pagans and then taught its victims to regard their violation as justified and sanctified.1
This is the very same concept was perpetuated via Manifest Destiny. Once the colonies were settled, it became America’s founding myth. They had already inherited this legacy of violence, us vs. them, and either had to renounce their beliefs (so difficult!) or see themselves as superior and entitled to conquer this land.
Puritan religious piety could not teach the equilibrium and equanimity needed to heal from horror, to relinquish fear, to forgive their enemies or themselves, and to repair harm. They lacked the spiritual disciplines that taught them to observe the world carefully, to trust the senses, and to wonder at the beauty of the land.2
Thus the groundwork was laid, and all around us we see a blind, unquestioned belief in those principles. “Just because a myth is old doesn’t mean it’s healthy.”3 What can our new myths be?