Capitalism Won't Save Us

Tyler Johnson, MDiv

Tyler is a pastor, a teacher, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light

About 12 years ago I was smack dab in the middle of my first semester of seminary. I had taken too many classes, not fully realizing what the work load would be like, but I was surviving. One of my classes was in Youth Ministry, which is odd because I never considered going into youth ministry at all. But it fulfilled one of my area electives so I took it. It was a good class. But honestly the most potent idea I took away from that class had very little to do with youth at all. It had to do with the nature of capitalism.

I’m pretty sure that the topic of capitalism came up in a book I was reading that explored the cultural milieu that today’s youth are growing up in. (Considering that this was over a decade ago, I suppose the subjects of that book aren’t really youths anymore.) A large part of that milieu is under the influence of capitalism, so the book spent a couple paragraphs explaining and critiquing this intrinsic aspect of the modern western world.

What struck me most, and what has stuck with me, is the fact that capitalism requires demand. Capitalism only works when things are needed. It requires that things be created and produced and sold. Without demand capitalism fails. Which means that if there is not an inherent demand in the system already, capitalism must first create the demand and then produce the answer to that demand. Capitalism can’t function in a world that isn’t constantly growing. “More, more, more” is capitalism’s mantra. Contentment is its biggest threat.

Consider then what assumptions and implications are implicit in capitalism. There is the obvious assumption that the market can never be content with the status quo. Which means we as people in the system must never be allowed to feel content with the present state of things. We must be made to always feel a need for more. A deeper assumption would be what I like to call “the myth of infinite progress” which suggests that we can just keep moving forward, growing, developing, and consuming without limits. This myth carries with it the assumption of infinite resources. Because if perpetual growth and development is the goal, this can only be realized with an unlimited amount of resources. It seems abundantly clear to me that this assumption is being demonstrated as faulty in today’s world in a myriad of ways.

Case Study: Climate Change

The climate crisis seems to me to be an excellent case study in the limits of capitalism to solve a problem. Without getting into the rhetoric and debate about climate change, I simply want to point out that there seems to be a sharp disconnect between the dangers we face according to those who prognosticate such things, and the actions we are asked to take in response. I have yet to see any politician or scientist suggest that what we really need to do to abate the coming crisis is stop buying so much crap. (This article is close.) I can’t imagine that our modern lifestyle, focused on comfort and convenience where just about anything we could ever want can be delivered to our door in just a couple of days, can become an environmentally positive lifestyle if we just make sure we are buying “green” products. Yet this is the line we are fed daily from multiple sources.

If the fundamental problem behind the climate crisis is humanity living in disequilibrium with the rest of nature, as I take it to be, then I don’t see how shifting from extracting oil from the ground to extracting lithium (a rare metal essential to every battery being produced these days) from the ground is really moving us in the right direction. I don’t see how creating more products that will soon be discarded (like the annual rollout of a new iPhone) is really helping. I don’t see why it is better to purchase a new electric vehicle rather than just maintaining an old gas-burner. This is especially true considering all the resources that go into the production of a new EV and the resources necessary to creating the requisite technology and infrastructure for extracting and transporting lithium around the world. We humans have an acute inability to foresee the unintended consequences of our actions; hence a climate in crisis.

Capitalism won’t save our environment. But guess what, it won’t save our churches either.

Capitalism & The Church

At some level we probably know this to be true. Yet it seems to me that often the church operates with some of the same capitalistic assumptions listed above: the need to grow perpetually, the constant desire for the next new ministry “product”, the blindness to the reality of limited resources.

I have worked as a pastor for the past seven years, and off and on as a teacher. It is amazing how many new products I have seen over those years that have promised to grow my church, engage my students, deepen my faith, explode my missional reach, make my sermons captivating and compelling, etc. You get the idea. There are even popular discipleship programs that essentially act as a pyramid scheme. Ten years ago I used the second edition of a certain Greek text book and learned the language well enough to be able to teach it at a seminary level. Four years ago my wife used the third edition. Today the students I work with use the fourth. Very little has changed between these editions. The most notable differences are in the ordering of the homework questions in the workbook. But the publisher doesn’t make money off of used books. They’re creating demand for a product that doesn’t need to exist.

This type of behavior is ubiquitous in the world we live in. It is so normal to us that we don’t really even think about it or notice it at all until someone points it out to us, perhaps in the middle of a book about youth ministry. Often times when it is pointed out, someone raises to capitalism’s defense claiming that our economy demands a capitalistic system to function. Maybe. Or that the only alternatives are socialistic or communistic systems. Maybe. I don’t believe that capitalism itself is evil. It has positives and negatives. But I do believe that a church that is blind to the effects that our capitalistic culture has on it, will end up serving the goals of capitalism, rather than the goals of the Kingdom of God.

While there are probably a number of ways that our capitalistic bent affects our theology, let us just consider one area: hope. What does hope look like in a capitalistic system? Well, first off, since success is dependent on growth, hope becomes tied to more butts in the pews, dollars in the offering, viewers on your livestream, volunteers, opportunities for volunteers, ministries, disciples, outreach events, etc. If these things are not steadily growing then that translates to a church not being faithful. Capitalism ties our hope to “winning” which then causes us to adopt a competitive posture towards those other groups that are also seeking to do things for God. Again the evidence for this is not hard to see.

Hope, in a capitalistic system, also gets tied to the myth of infinite progress. The goal of the Church, or sometimes even just a church, becomes to change the world, literally. We learn to read the Great Commission in a way that sanctifies our making of consumers, not disciples. After all, we need more and more numbers don’t we? We learn to turn people into the means by which we achieve the end, rather than ends in themselves. And we learn to speak of justice as if we know what a redeemed, sanctified and just world really looks like. In response to this goal James Davidson Hunter writes, “The presumption is both that one can know God’s specific plans in human history and that one possesses the power to realize those plan in human affairs….Such presumption nearly always has tragic consequences.” Perhaps most tragically, we cease to be a people who are participating in the mystery of Christ’s presence in this world and we become a people charging after some ideal, which quickly turns into an idol.

Finally, our hope gets placed, not in those who best exemplify the character of Christ, but in those men and women who most appear to be “winning.” We seek to emulate the mega church pastors rather than the quiet men and women of faith in our midst. We seek wisdom from the most popular podcasters rather than the spiritual mothers and fathers who came before us. We malign the humble and meek as ineffectual and turn to the proud and braggadocious as our exemplars. We even transform Jesus Christ into a warrior god, to try and sanctify our disordered desires.

Because capitalism requires us to purchase new solutions and new products, it must also convince us that the problems we face are new and unique to our time. There can be no recognition that humanity has faced anything like what we are facing today. Everything must be unprecedented. Everything requires a new answer, a new product, a new solution.

Jesus’ Non-Capitalistic Ministry

Jesus seems to counter all of these capitalistic motives. His ministry certainly didn’t succeed in any way that our modern society would recognize. He only had a handful of disciples and they all abandoned and betrayed him in his time of greatest need. Even after they witnessed the resurrection, they still didn’t understand what Jesus had been teaching them all along. Not to mention that Jesus was rejected by the religious establishment that should have recognized and celebrated him, and was killed by the dominant culture as common criminal. It is perhaps helpful to note here that Jesus didn’t raise himself from the dead. God raised him; that is the consistent language of the New Testament. Jesus only “won” through losing and trusting God to be faithful and to bring good out of it.

Remarkably also, Jesus didn’t seem to be concerned with changing the world. He was a strong advocate for justice; it was central to his ministry. Yet reading through the gospel makes it clear that he didn’t help everyone he could have. There were other people who needed healing lying around the pool of Bethesda (John 5). He rarely initiated a healing conversation, yet he must have walked by people in need constantly. There are even times when Jesus seems to ignore the cries of the needy, at least for a little while (e.g. Matthew 9:27-28). Jesus seems to have operated with the understanding that even he had limited resources. Even Jesus had to leave many things in the hands of God, again trusting that God was faithful and good.

Jesus never viewed any human he encountered as simply the means to an end. He even recognized the full humanity of those who killed him when he prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Tragically, our capitalistic impulse regularly seeks to make Jesus a means to an end. We use him to gain more for ourselves, more followers, more likes, more butts in seats, more dollars in the bank, more influence. We use him as a means to get into heaven, to feel less guilty, to feel more justified. We create him in our image to serve our purposes. We ignore his commands to forgive. But Jesus is not a means to an end, he is the end that we were created for, the Lord of all creation, in whom, through whom and for whom all things were made (Colossians 1:15-20). He is part of the Trinity, the source of all personhood. There is no reducing him to a means.

A Non-Capitalistic Church

The most disappointing thing about the church that I’ve witnessed over the past year or two, is its utter refusal to be humbled. When the chaos of the pandemic and the racial reckoning hit, the church almost universally doubled-down and dug in its heels on whatever stance it had already taken on whatever issue. This to me is a flagrant capitulation to capitalism. To not be humbled by chaos and disorder, to not acknowledge our dependence, our ignorance, or our idolatries in the face of a world turned upside down, may be the capitalistic way, but it is an affront to our assertion that Jesus is Lord.

I see no hope for the future for a church blindly operating within the framework of capitalism. I see no hope for a church that can’t be humbled, can’t repent, and can’t forgive. If the church is actually going to be a faithful expression of the Kingdom of God something has to change. The time has come for repentance. The time has come for the church to be humbled under the weight of Jesus’ words in Matthew 23. The time has come for the church to lead the way in losing by all this world’s standards, so that God might bring something good to life.