The Catholic Church has been consistent regarding the evils of mammon. In medieval times, avarice was a deadly sin, wealth for its own sake was dangerous, and usury was immoral. And even as the world became increasingly monetized and consumeristic, the Church held on to its traditional notions.
Unfortunately, then as today, individual Catholics didn’t always practice the Church’s precepts, and disobedience regarding money matters was widespread among the laity—and worse, among the clergy, too. Indeed, in the lead-up to the Reformation, this was one of the major criticisms of the hierarchy. When Catholics appealed to the Scripture passage “avarice is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10), they were appealing to a teaching of the Church to which St. Paul and St. Timothy belonged, a Church that had received, developed, and presented a clear moral teaching on the evils of greed. Some may have ignored the message, but there was no dispute as to the authority on which it was based.
That changed at the Reformation. From Luther’s revolution onward, Protestants who wanted to confront sins such as avarice had to appeal to their personal interpretation of Scripture alone. And many did. The history of Protestantism, especially in the earlier years, is full of preachers strongly opposed to greed and acquisitiveness.
But within the sola scriptura framework, all doctrinal or moral claims become matters of personal opinion, and therefore are easy to dismiss. As historian George O’Brien explains,
The Catholic preacher had been the accredited agent of an authority that claimed to be infallible in matters of faith and morals, but the Protestant preacher had no claim to the attention of his audience beyond what he derived from his own education, eloquence, or piety. Moreover, the moral precepts urged by such preachers had none of the compulsory character of the old Catholic ethical code, but were merely invitations to act up to a standard which was approved by the preacher. The value of such preaching depended entirely on the preacher’s capacity to convince his listeners, who were at perfect liberty to reject all that he stated, if it in any way ran counter to their own private judgment, which was in many ways guided to a large degree by their passions and inclinations (48).
When private judgment is guided by everyone’s individual inclinations, everything is up for grabs, and the moral weight of all teaching collapses. That is what happened to the moral issues related to consumerism.
One of the major consequences of the rise of unchecked consumerism was the change in how society viewed the poor. In medieval Catholic culture, poverty was largely viewed with compassion and even seen as a badge of holiness in the case of those who had voluntarily given up everything for God. The emerging consumeristic worldview, however, did not allow for those categories. The poor were increasingly viewed with disdain, considered lazy and deserving of their lot in life.
The contempt for poverty only got worse as Protestant preachers started supporting that notion with Scripture. Theologians used 2 Thessalonians 3:10—“the one who is unwilling to work shall not eat”—and Proverbs 6:9, 19:24, and 26:14-15, which denounce laziness, to blame the poor for their condition. It didn’t matter that this was entirely contrary to how the Catholic Church had traditionally applied these passages. In the free-for-all that is sola scriptura, interpreters could say whatever they wanted.
In America, this practice was taken to a whole new level, where acquisitiveness was built into the foundation of the country. Being consumeristic, even at the very beginning the nation, was part of what it meant to be an American.
Not every preacher reflected this mindset, of course. John Wesley, for example, taught clearly and strongly against the evils of mammon and tried to build a Christian community that matched his view of the early Church. However, as David Hempton explains, his experimentation “did not long survive its encounter with basic human acquisitiveness, which, disappointingly for him, proved to be a stronger force in Methodist societies than the social expression of perfect love” (124). Wesley and fellow revivalist Whitefield were ultimately ignored with regard to their teaching on money and were even attacked with a charge of promoting an early form of Christian communism (25-50).
Instead, Methodist preachers, and those from every other denomination, used Scripture to preach about the value of storing up treasures on earth. For example, a prominent Philadelphia Presbyterian used the Eighth Commandment (“thou shalt not steal”) to pronounce that it was a Christian’s duty to increase his “worldly prosperity,” arguing that to not do so would be to rob God of the money-making gifts and talents he had given you.
Other preachers focused on the necessity of hard work, using the Bible as a self-help manual that contained principles for making disciplined, industrious, prosperous men. During the 1840s, for example, a Protestant tract titled “True Philosophy for the Mechanic” made its way through working-class America, telling the story of a man who found a “book of philosophy” and followed its principles to material success. He later realized that it was the Bible. Thomas Breveridge went so far as to present Jesus as the ideal man of this type, a carpenter who “ennobled labor” forever. “The scriptures give no tolerance to idleness to carelessness respecting our worldly concerns,” he sermonized, preaching that the “duty and happiness of man” lies in industry. Pastor Henry Boardman made the supposed link between faith and worldly success explicit in his popular sermon, “Piety Essential to Man’s Temporal Prosperity,” using as his text 1 Timothy 4:8: “Godliness is profitable unto all things.”
This became the accepted approach within Protestant American Christianity. As Richard Pointer summarizes, “Historians have long recognized the growing convergence of Protestant and American middle-class values in the mid-nineteenth century,” and they have demonstrated that Evangelical Protestants’ ascendancy was due in part “to their willingness to allow their message to be accommodated to the spirit of the culture.” An 1857 sermon stated it plainly: “Our object is to baptize the riches of men with the spirit of the gospel” (272).
A particularly eccentric interpretations of the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) shows just how far some were willing to take this goal. In the parable, Jesus compares the eternal fate of a beggar and a wealthy man. The poor man, Lazarus, ends up in heaven, while the rich man begs, to no avail, to be relieved of his misery in hell. In March of 1828, however, a Unitarian minister preached that this story wasn’t actually about wealth or poverty at all, and that there was “nothing said in this parable to implicate the character of the rich man, or in favor of Lazarus.” Rather, it was an allegory about Jews and Gentiles, so listeners could rest easy in their pursuit of worldly gain, because this parable didn’t apply to them.
The Catholic position, on the other hand, remained consistent, and presented, in the words of Mark Summers, “a theological challenge to prevailing American beliefs. Catholics challenged the Protestant notions that linked democracy and Christianity, capitalism and Christianity, and the individualism Protestants interpreted from Scripture” As Mark Noll explains, this “amounted to a fundamental assessment of prevailing beliefs and practices that American Protestants, whose main principles were so closely intertwined with the nation’s dominant ideologies, could not deliver” (126).
On this front, not much has changed today, with Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and many more standing as the ideological heirs of the nineteenth-century preachers we’ve discussed here. The bottom line is that a significant percentage of American Protestants live—thanks to sola scriptura—as if the plain-sense readings of Jesus’ admonition to be on guard against all kinds of greed and that teaching “life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15) are simply wrong.
This article is an excerpt from Don Johnson’s acclaimed new book, Twisted Unto Destruction: How Bible Alone Theology Made the World a Worse Place, from Catholic Answers Press. Buy a copy today at our shop.