James Fifield, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and others, succeeded so well at making capitalism a Christian virtue that we have trouble imagining that the barn builder in our story is doing anything wrong. In Jesus’ day people thought differently. They saw wealth as a fixed quantity. If you had more than your share, you were depriving someone else. Everyone understood that the Roman occupiers were robbing the Jews; that’s how the game was played. We can be assured the rich farmer in the story was a Roman citizen; nobody else could throw around that kind of capital.
At the risk of getting very counter-cultural, capitalism isn’t in the bible anywhere I can find. The traditional Jewish and Christian teaching about wealth is that all we have is God’s, on loan to us to use wisely and ethically, to serve God.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
August 4, 2019
Enough
Luke 12:13-21: Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14 But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15 And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
In 1934, Rev. James Fifield Jr., fresh out of seminary, became senior pastor of First Congregational Church, Los Angeles. Fifield looked like Jimmy Stewart. And he was quite the entrepreneur. Within a few years, membership at First Congregational went from 1500 people to 4500, the largest Congregational church in the world. A large building debt was paid off, and Fifield became known as pastor to millionaires: university presidents, business tycoons, and movie stars. Cecil B. DeMille made a promotional short film for him.
Fifield preached a gospel of unbridled capitalism without apology. He claimed that the social safety net of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression was immoral, in fact he claimed that the New Deal broke most of the ten commandments. Fifield founded an organization called “Spiritual Mobilization” to arouse ministers across the United States to defend “freedom under God in our country”– “the liberty and dignity of the individual, of which freedom of choice, of enterprise and of property is inherent.”
Boy was the National Association of Manufacturers happy to find Fifield. These heads of corporations had been running marketing campaigns promoting free enterprise as a virtue, but nobody was taking them seriously. Their self-interest was obvious, and after the Great Depression, big business was not trusted. But with Fifield’s help, freedom from taxation and regulation and unionization could become moral imperatives! These corporations gave Fifeld enough money to hire full time employees in major cities across the nation, to spread his gospel of unbridled capitalism. Membership in his organization “Spiritual Mobilization” rose to 10,000 clergy. They published a magazine, with contributors expressing a variety of opinions as long as they were anti-government and pro-business. They held sermon contests, with big cash prizes to the ministers who could most skillfully bash regulation and social safety nets with the language of freedom and biblical references.
Fifield’s work culminated in 1949 in a public service radio show called “The Freedom Story.” This 15-minute weekly show aired all over the country. Fifield started by bashing the freedom-hating Truman administration, but his lawyer quickly pointed out that a public service announcement could not be so openly partisan. That same lawyer advised Fifield that if he told horror stories of brutal oppression by governments in other countries, and warned people that our country was moving that direction, he would be non-partisan. And so the red scare apparently began as public service announcements by a Congregational minister.[1]
Fifield wasn’t the only Christian preaching the freedom to make money over every other virtue. He’s just the one in our neighborhood and on our religious family tree. (He also fought the merger that created the United Church of Christ. First Congregational L.A. only became UCC a couple of years ago.)
James Fifield, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and others, succeeded so well at making capitalism a Christian virtue that we have trouble imagining that the barn builder in our story is doing anything wrong. In Jesus’ day people thought differently. They saw wealth as a fixed quantity. If you had more than your share, you were depriving someone else. Everyone understood that the Roman occupiers were robbing the Jews; that’s how the game was played. We can be assured the rich farmer in the story was a Roman citizen; nobody else could throw around that kind of capital.
At the risk of getting very counter-cultural, capitalism isn’t in the bible anywhere I can find. The traditional Jewish and Christian teaching about wealth is that all we have is God’s, on loan to us to use wisely and ethically, to serve God.
Whether you use your money wisely is your business. Whether you use it ethically is everyone’s business, because money is power. We can argue over the details, but together, we, as a democracy, need to regulate predatory business practices, protect workers, steward our public lands rather than hand them over to companies to be stripped of resources, and tax those who can afford it more than those who can’t, for a start.
And maybe we can question the idea that so many Americans take for granted that wealth is the natural reward for the virtues of hard work, initiative, cleverness. Therefore the wealthy are virtuous, and the poor have gotten what they deserve. The level of income inequality now is greater than it was before the Great Depression. Three American men own more wealth than twenty million Americans put together. Can we talk about the ethics of that?
There is a curious gap in Jesus’ story of the man who built barns. He is alone. He harvests alone. He talks to himself. He says to his soul, “Soul, what shall I do with all my money?” He builds barns alone. He eats, drinks, and is merry alone, so it appears. And he dies alone. Of course this cannot be. In the age before mechanical farm machinery, any decent size farm had dozens of workers, serfs or slaves, to do the actual work. The people who actually created his wealth are invisible to this wealthy man. He is the only one who matters. This is what wealth can do to us: invite us to treat the people who we pay as little as possible to serve us as non-people, invisible, beneath concern. You can bet that the subsistence farmers and fishermen who followed Jesus caught that part of the story loud and clear.
I do this all the time, value money over people. I do it when I see the country that my chosen purchase was made in, and I don’t want to know how little the person who made it was paid or under what conditions they worked. I do it when I look for the bargain vegetable instead of the food that was grown without exposing the farmworker to chemicals. I do it when I click on Amazon and try not to think of the mad rush that click just set into motion for a chain of warehouse workers and delivery people, or the brick-and-mortar stores that have gone bankrupt because Amazon took their customers. Me.
But more is better. Cheaper is better. Faster is better. That’s the American way, right? It’s hard, in our culture, to say, “I have enough.” There is something in us that is not satisfied, that always wants more, and our culture has turned that more into a virtue.
Change is hard, but awareness is the first step. I am happy to have a new congressperson serving me in Irvine, Katie Porter. She is trying to hold financial institutions accountable for their predatory practices, and she’s doing it in a very entertaining way, so late-night shows have broadcast her challenging corporate CEO’s in congressional hearings.
On a personal level, one thing that helps us use money ethically is gratitude. When we take the time to notice and appreciate what we have, and how we got it, to appreciate the people who helped make and deliver it, that “more” relaxes. When we truly take in the web of interconnection it takes to get that little widget to us, we can feel very rich indeed, rich in relationships and in people who go out of their way to provide for us. This way of thinking is the opposite of the “rugged individual entrepreneur creating wealth” mentality that Fifield cultivated, and that Jesus mocked.
It will take some attention to buck the culture that says more is better, but it can be done. Author AJ Jacobs took up a practice of gratitude. He didn’t do it to be virtuous; he did it to become a less grumpy person. (Studies have shown that works.) He started giving thanks at meals for his tomatoes, and the farmer who grew them, and the cashier who sold them, and so on. But his ten-year-old, in the brutally honest way of ten-year-olds, said, "You know, Dad, those people aren't in our apartment. They can't hear you. If you really cared, you would go and thank them in person." Jacobs took this as a challenge (and an opportunity to pitch his next book.) He decided to thank all the people who helped make possible something he truly valued: his morning cup of coffee, in person.[2]
To start, he took his local coffee shop barista… out for coffee. In the course of their conversation, she hugged AJ, and ten other customers she saw walking by. He met the store’s bean buyer, who initiated AJ into the nuances of coffee tasting. He visited his coffee bean growers in Colombia and thanked them in person. They said, “You’re welcome, but we couldn’t have done it without a hundred other people.” Everywhere he looked, there were more connections. The truck drivers. The truck mechanics. The people who fixed the roads. The boat crews. The exterminator who made sure bugs didn’t get into the beans in the warehouse. She was very appreciative; nobody had ever thanked her before for doing her job. Jacobs found one thousand people to thank for his cup of coffee. There were more, but he had to stop somewhere.
Rugged individualists don’t exist, only people blinded and made self-centered by wealth. Our faith invites us to open our eyes and see that the web that knits us together is enough. The relationships that sustain us are enough, if we do not let money turn those people invisible. The good earth that sustains us provides enough, if we nurture her like the living being she is. May we have enough, and know it, and be grateful. Amen.
[1] The information about Fifield is from One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Became Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, 2015.
[2] AJ Jacobs, TED talk, My journey to thank all the people responsible for my morning coffee.
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