Greed rarely gets preached against because it rarely looks like a sin. Lust and drunkenness are easy to spot. Greed shows up as responsibility, ambition, providing for your family, or proof that God has blessed you. Dr. Malcolm Foley argues that this disguise is old, and that Christians helped build it. Jesus never accepted it. In Matthew 6:24 he says plainly, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
Foley calls greed the most significant obstacle Christians face. He describes the Christian life as a spiritual battle between God and mammon, a word he glosses simply as wealth. When he speaks to groups about his book The Anti-Greed Gospel, he asks them, “how often do you hear sermons about greed?” The usual answer, he says, is “not very often.” His reply: “that’s really interesting, because Jesus talks about it a lot.”
So the useful question goes beyond silent pulpits. How did a sin Jesus named so directly come to look like a virtue, and what keeps it hidden?
What makes greed so hard to see?
Foley’s answer begins with normalization. He says mammon works on believers “like a veil over people’s eyes,” and that “most Christians are not actually being equipped to deal with it.” Then he names what replaces resistance: “We’re trained to play games with it, or to act like it’s just normal.”
Once a desire is treated as normal, people stop examining it. A congregation that hears constant warnings about sexual sin and none about accumulation learns, without anyone saying so, that one desire is dangerous and the other is ordinary life.
Paul did not see it that way. First Timothy 6:9 reads, “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” The archaic phrase “will be rich” means those who want to be rich, and many modern translations render it that way. The warning targets a desire, so it applies to people with little as much as to people with plenty.
The next verse is the familiar one: “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Many translations say “all kinds of evil,” which fits Paul’s point that love of money grows in many directions. In verse 11 Paul tells Timothy to flee these things. Foley observes that “a lot of folks are not trained to flee from greed.” People rarely run from something they have been taught to call common sense.
How did greed learn to speak the church’s language?
Foley comes to this subject as a historian. His doctoral research asked how Black Protestants responded to lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how Black Christians survived and even thrived in a society bent on their death. That work left him asking why the violence was so brutal and so constant. His conclusion was that “these things have material roots. It’s not just a matter of hate and ignorance.” He goes further: “the category of race is created and maintained specifically so that some people can make a whole bunch of money.”
From there he describes what he calls a demonic cycle of self-interest. It starts with the desire for money and power. Getting them usually means putting other people in conditions they would not choose, and keeping them there takes violence. Conscience then gets in the way, because, as Foley puts it, “we don’t wake up in the morning and think, I’m really excited for a day of killing, exploiting, and dominating my neighbor.” So comes the third step: “So we create systems of lies in order to tell ourselves” that the system is something other than what it is.
His example is the Portuguese entry into the African slave trade. Foley argues they were not driven first by racism. “They get involved because they have markets they want to expand.” When they had to justify this to themselves and to the pope, he says, the language of Blackness and whiteness entered, alongside talk of Christianizing heathens and civilizing savages. In his telling, that vocabulary covered an economic exploitation.
This is the starkest case of greed passing as virtue. Foley’s claim goes beyond saying greedy people attended church. He argues that Christian mission language itself was borrowed to make profit sound like obedience. The people and institutions who did this used the faith’s words to cover the opposite of what Christ commands. That is a serious answer to anyone who rejects Christianity because of its complicity in oppression: the complicity was real, and Foley locates its root in mammon.
A fair reader will ask whether tracing racism to money excuses hatred. Foley’s wording guards against that. He says racial violence is “not just” a matter of hate and ignorance, so hatred stays part of the account while money supplies a deeper motive. His reading of the Portuguese and of what he calls racial capitalism is his historical argument, and readers who give more weight to ideology or prejudice should test it against the record. The moral point does not depend on every historical detail. If greed has ever needed religious lies to survive, a church that never names greed leaves those lies room to work.
Why did the rich young ruler stop sounding dangerous?
The disguise also has an interpretive history. Discussing the rich young ruler in Luke, Foley says that “a lot of western interpretation of the rich young ruler passage tries to kind of let us off the hook.” He names Clement of Alexandria and Augustine as readers who, in his view, made the man’s main problem his attitude toward wealth. On that reading, if he had thought about his money correctly, the issue would have been solved.
Basil of Caesarea, a fourth-century Greek church father, pressed a different reading. Foley sums up one of Basil’s lines this way: “the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.” For Basil, the young man failed to love his neighbor as himself, and having so much while others went hungry carried moral weight.
The choice between those readings has practical stakes. An inward reading suits comfortable readers, because it moves obedience out of the bank account and into feelings. Anyone can claim a corrected attitude without changing anything they own. Foley answers with 1 John 3:17: “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” In KJV English, “bowels of compassion” refers to the seat of deep feeling, and other translations say “heart.” John’s test is still concrete. He asks what you do with this world’s goods when you see a need. Foley’s conclusion: “love is always a material investment in your neighbor.”
Where does the modern disguise come from?
Today the disguise goes by names like grind culture and hustle. Foley reads these through the order of Jesus’ words in Matthew 6. Right after the warning about two masters comes the instruction not to be anxious about food and clothing: “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life” (Matthew 6:25). Foley sees the link as deliberate: “there’s this close link between mammon, worship of mammon and anxiety and fear.” In his reading, hustle culture runs largely on the fear of poverty, and that fear finally comes down to the fear of death. Piling up wealth becomes an attempt to secure your own future without God.
He connects this to Hebrews 2:15, which describes the Son coming to “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” If one purpose of the incarnation is freedom from that fear, then frantic accumulation keeps people in the very bondage Christ came to break, even when it feels like discipline.
Foley names other respectable disguises. One is the goal of self-sufficiency, the sense that, as he describes it, “I need to get to a spot where I don’t need anybody else.” Another is the habit of seeing possessions as personal achievement. Sharing, he argues, “immediately cuts against this understanding of everything that we have as achievements” to be hoarded. A third is “the temptation toward lifestyle inflation, where just the more that I get, the more I tell myself I need.”
Paul’s alternative is quieter: “But godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6). Foley explains why contentment is so hard to preach: “we’re in a broader economy that does not encourage contentment. It encourages constant accumulation.”
Isn’t building wealth just wisdom for people who started with nothing?
This is the strongest objection, and Foley’s own history sharpens it. He studied Black Christians who lived under lynching. The cycle he describes took land, wages and safety from real families. For people who come from that history, or any history of being shut out of wealth, building security can look like justice. A sermon telling them to stop pursuing money could sound like one more way to keep them poor. Ambition that grows out of deprivation deserves a careful answer.
Foley’s argument leaves room for it. He says directly that nothing he proposes cancels out wisely managing what you have. He also does not treat fear as a character flaw. He notes that people stay in toxic or exploitative jobs because they believe “the only person who cares about me and cares about my family is me.” He reads that belief as a symptom of isolation.
His reading of Jesus’ commands draws a line that answers the objection. Asked whether Jesus tells every believer what he told the rich young ruler, Foley says Jesus might, but he does not insist on it. At minimum, he points to Luke 12:33, where Jesus tells the crowd to sell what they have and give alms as treasure in heaven. The habit of solidarity with the poor, in Foley’s reading, sits at the core of Christian ethics. He passes on a principle he credits to Basil and John Chrysostom: “the only reason God sees fit to give us more than we need is in order to meet the needs of others.” The line falls at more than we need. Securing food, rent and a future for your children is need. Greed begins in the surplus, when “more” keeps getting redefined so that nothing ever counts as extra.
Foley’s remedy for fear is a community. He points to Acts 2 and Acts 4, where the believers devoted themselves to teaching, prayer, the breaking of bread and fellowship. Foley says the Greek word for fellowship, koinonia, can carry the sense of sharing and participation, and in context they shared material goods. Acts 4:34 records the result: “Neither was there any among them that lacked.” Foley stresses that this happened “not because they kick the needy out,” but because needs were voiced in a community committed to meeting them. In that kind of church, he says, a person can realize, “wait a minute, I’m not the only one who cares whether or not my children eat.”
Here the argument has a real limit. Foley offers the Acts community to people buried in debt, to the very rich and to those barely surviving alike. That answer only works if churches actually become that kind of community. Telling one anxious believer to stop guarding their future, in a congregation that shares nothing, asks that person to carry all the risk alone. Read fairly, Foley’s case puts most of its demand on congregations to make generosity safe.
How does prosperity teaching turn the warning upside down?
The most complete disguise turns Jesus’ warnings into investment advice. In Mark 10:29-30, Jesus promises that whoever leaves house, family or land for his sake will receive a hundredfold now, with persecutions, and eternal life in the world to come. Foley insists, “this is not some prosperity gospel thing.” He reads the hundredfold as access to the life and resources of the whole body of believers: you lose one household and gain many. A promise that arrives with persecution is hard to read as a guaranteed market return. Prosperity teachers read these verses differently, but the text ties the reward to a new family, not to a sown seed.
Foley treats Matthew 6:33 the same way: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” He notes what the verse leaves out: “Doesn’t say you’re gonna be rich. ’cause that’s not the goal.” The promise is that the Father knows what you need. Once it is rewritten as a promise of wealth, a passage meant to free people from mammon starts to serve it.
What changes once you see the disguise?
Foley describes the church as a people meant to handle money differently from the surrounding economy, “Not as a judgment on the rest of the world, but as an invitation to it.” That moves the question in the title somewhere more useful. Silent pulpits are part of the problem. Underneath them, greed has spent centuries borrowing the church’s own words: mission, blessing, stewardship, independence, reward. A sermon alone will not strip off a disguise that thorough. It comes off in a church where asking for help is normal, where having more than you need is treated as a way to meet someone else’s need, and where the families who started with nothing are the first to find that someone else cares whether their children eat.