The morals of Mammon

A deal President Obama struck with Republican leaders last week will extend tax cuts across the board including, controversially, to the richest Americans.

Some politicians argue that religious values should be reflected in the public square. Should this faith-based view of politics be applied to the economy? Jesus said, "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me."

In a time of economic turmoil and record poverty levels, are tax cuts for the wealthy moral?

The United States is a nation that worships Mammon. And, within the morals of Mammon, tax cuts for the rich make perfect sense.

Morals derive from the mores of a society, its customs, traditions and values. We value wealth in this country. The mores and morals of a society that worships Mammon is the righteousness of the acquisition of stuff. Mammon is close kin to Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, the god of the wealth that derives from minerals found under the earth, the god of the dead. Mammon is a god of material wealth, of greed, of avarice.

It is from Pluto that we get the concept of a plutocracy, government by the wealthy. Let us drop the pretense that the United States is a governed by a government of the people by the people and for the people. Let us just get real and understand that the United States is governed by a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy.

We all want to become rich. We worship the American mythology of Mammon that tells us that liberty and justice for all means that everyone in the United States has an equal opportunity to get rich, to become one of the ruling plutocrats. And, there are enough rags to riches stories to make the myth sound plausible. If only we can work hard enough to develop a talent, to get that MLB, NFL or NBA contract; if only we can get on American Idol and win; or start a business; or publish a best-selling book, we can get rich and be comfortable for the rest of our lives.

We tell our children to work hard in school so that they can go to college, get a good job and have nice things--a house in the suburbs an expensive car and vacations. We teach them to become good students so that they can become good worker bees so that they can become good consumers. We hear very little about the purpose of education as self knowledge, self development for the purpose of human innovation toward solving human problems so that we all may live in a better world.

Everything we do in this country is much too much about the money. Some of the longest lines one sees in the poorest communities in the nation are people lining up to play the lottery. State governments use the money from the lottery, the most regressive tax there is, to pay for services. And, my guess is, that many of these people would not support higher taxes on the rich because they expect to hit someday. Local leaders compete to give casino developers the best deal because their communities need the jobs. Manufacturing jobs are gone, so government officials become supplicants to these plutocrats.

A nation that worships Mammon is not only plutocratic, but is also necrophilic. We love dead stuff. We will sacrifice our children in perpetual wars for the sake of controlling the mineral wealth of the world, at the behest of the plutocracy. And, since the acquisition of dead stuff is a measure of success and or personal worth, we chase after it sometimes with a single- mindedness that disrupts or even destroys family life.

We hunt for the best bargain with a will, with a species memory of hunting food for our very survival. We go after this or that game or gadget just for the sake of having it. Thanksgiving Day becomes prelude to Black Friday. We line up in the cold, in the dead of night, or even camp out to be first in line for a pre-dawn sale.

Our necrophillic worship of Mammon is especially evident during the holiday season. We say that Jesus is the reason for the season while we spend time and money that we may or may not have to buy stuff that will soon be lost and forgotten if not exchanged the next day for something else. And the nation's economy turns on limitless consumerism that reaches its apex during December.

When Mammon becomes our god, the God of Creation becomes our 365-24-7 Santa Clause who exists to "prosper" us. We give him a list of requests in prayer. For those of us who are Christian, we pray these prayers in the name of Jesus as if the name were a necessary element of a magical incantation. We do not ask God how we may serve God, rather we expect God to serve us.

All too often we give our tithes and offerings with little or no regard for the poor and for the people who earn their living by working for the faith community. These are the people for whom the tithe is dedicated. Rather, we give so that God will bless us back.

Further, our worship of Mammon has brought us to the place where we live in a society with one of the largest disparities of wealth in the world. In a series titled "The United States of Inequality: The Great Diverence" for Slate.com, Timothy Noah says that the difference between the United States and countries that we would consider banana republics is that the size of the country allows the rich to live without ever seeing the poor at their door. (http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026)

In our public discourse, we speak of the rich and of the middle class. We rarely speak of the poor. For the most part, they are invisible. And so is Jesus, because this is who Jesus is and where Jesus lives. However, plutocracy and the morals that come with it is nothing new in human history. Writing in a footnote in the first volume of "The Story of Civilization", Will Durant says that inequality is a stage of growing civilizations: "the natural differences of human endowment unite with differences of opportunity to produce artificial differences of wealth and power; and where no laws or despots suppress these artificial inequalities they reach at last a boiling point when the poor have nothing to lose by violence, and the chaos of revolution levels men again into a community of distribution"(18)

There are signs of a death-dealing dangerous desperation in the land. There are communities in the United States where people steal manhole covers to sell for scrap metal. People steal bricks from vacant buildings to sell. A man's wife loses her job and he threatens to shoot the people who fired her, and ends up killing himself. And these are only the stories that make the news.

We cannot serve the God of radical divine love and Mammon. As a nation it is time to see that the worship and the morals of Mammon have not served us well. And cannot.

By Valerie Elverton Dixon  |  December 17, 2010; 11:22 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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