Is Greed Good? On God and Wealth

In the 1987 film, Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas, who won the academy award for best actor), amid illegal insider trading schemes, states that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Is that true?

William T. Sherman, after the Civil War, became a divisional commander in the West at the time of the Indian Wars. An 1868 Treaty with the Sioux Nation was negotiated by the Indian Peace Commission of which Sherman was a member. General Sherman is reported to have written the Department of War around that time that it would take longer to civilize the Indians than had been anticipated because the Indians “know no greed.”[1] Is greed essential for civilized life?

Although pride is commonly understood to be the root of all evil, one can readily argue that it is greed, covetousness, avarice—a lust for things, for money, for wealth. Each of the core vices causes harm, personally and collectively. At the core of them all is a craving for something that I do not have, whether that be recognition, power, influence, conveniences, or pleasure.

Scripture and Tradition

John Cassian (c. 360–435 AD), in his Institutes, considered avarice to be “the root of all evils”—a disease that grows “more vehement as more money piles up.” It is insatiable. “It is not so much the result of avarice that must be avoided as it is the disposition toward it that must be uprooted, since it is profitless not to have money if the desire to possess it exists.”[2]

Cassian’s contention with respect to the destructive power of greed is based on Scripture. The first letter of St. Paul to Timothy states: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith” (6:10). Cassian also refers to the Gospel of Matthew: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (6:24). The parallel in Luke 16:13 reads similarly. Is the choice between God and mammon either/or? Can one have wealth but not be avaricious? One could add to these texts the Sermon on the Mount, references to love of neighbor, and the temptations of Christ in the wilderness. St. Paul considers greed a form of idolatry (Ephesians 5:5) and St. James warns the rich about lives of luxury (5:1–6). There is the Old Testament commandment, “Thou shall not covet” (Exodus 20:17), not to mention the preaching of the Hebrew prophets against injustice.

Cassian was not the only one from the patristic period to speak out against the accumulation of wealth. Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and Ambrose of Milan were unwilling to compromise the demands of the Gospel. For St. Basil, the parable of the rich fool offers another biblical reference.

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.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 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. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But 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?’” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God. (Luke 12:15–21)

Basil does not spiritualize the demand to give to the poor, as the Gospel of Luke does not. “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20), is followed by, “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24). Matthew gives us a dramatic final judgment scene, “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat. . . . When, Lord, did I find you hungry? . . . Whatever you do to the least of these you do unto me” (25:31–46). Luke also gives us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (16:19–31).

In one of Basil’s homilies, during a time of severe famine in Cappadocia in 368, he appealed to the wealthy to let go of their wealth and open their hearts to the poor. Basil asked, “How can I make you see the suffering of the poor?”[3] The wealthy, for Basil, by ridding themselves of wealth to address the plight of the poor, imitate God’s generosity. As Christ has done for us, so we should do towards one another. For Basil, wealth does not really belong to the rich. “Resolve to treat the things in your possession as belonging to others.” Hoarding, as with the rich man who chose to build even bigger barns, or usury, or price gouging, or greed in any form were to be off limits for Christians. Basil encouraged: “Come now, distribute your wealth lavishly, becoming honorable and glorious in your expenditures for the needy.”

Basil, addressing those who object to his message, instructed them that their riches did not belong to them. Nor wait to distribute your wealth until death. Even those who leave their possessions to the poor in their wills are not to be thanked. Rather it is death that should be thanked! “What prevents you from giving? The hungry are perishing, the naked are freezing to death, the debtors are unable to breathe, and will you put off showing mercy until tomorrow?” Catholic social teaching did not begin with modern social encyclicals but has a history going back to the New Testament.

Greed is not only a vice that infects the wealthy, however. As John Cassian had said, “it is not so much the result of avarice that must be avoided as it is the disposition toward it that must be uprooted.”[4] It is the desire to have, to possess. Pope John Paul II, in his 1987 encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, wrote about the “cult of having” (§28). Earlier, in 1976, Erich Fromm, a social psychologist and democratic socialist, addressed the same topic in his book, To Have or To Be, in which he maintained that there are two basic modes of existence—having and being.[5] The difference is between a society centered around persons and one centered around things. The having mode creates insecurity. “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?”[6] If my goal is having, I become greedy, because “I am more, the more I have.”[7]

Here Fromm, as did Pope John Paul II, critiqued twentieth century capitalism as based on maximal consumption. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II wrote that “the Church’s social doctrine adopts a critical attitude toward both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism” (§21). Fromm wrote, “To sum up, to consume is one form of having, and perhaps the most important one for today’s affluent industrial societies.”[8]

For Fromm, the having modus vivendi and its attendant greed lead not only to strife among nations but also within interpersonal relations. Having-centered persons “want to have the person they like or admire.”[9] Fundamental to the having mode are competition, antagonism, fear. “In other words, greed is the natural outcome of the having orientation.”[10] Another example of the difference between the having mode and being mode of existence has to do with the exercise of authority. “The crucial point is expressed in the difference between having authority and being an authority.”[11] Being-authority is grounded not only in one’s competence but equally in the personality of someone who has achieved a high degree of personal integration, persons who radiate authority and do not have to threaten or bribe. Authoritarian structures correlate with the mode of having.

For Thomas Aquinas, avarice, or covetousness, an inordinate love of money or immoderate desire for possessions, whether in acquiring them or simply in having an excessive desire for them, although not the most grievous sin, is nevertheless a capital sin opposed to the virtue of liberality or generosity which is a freedom from attachment, especially to money (Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 117–118).

What are we to do with the biblical references that say, “I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Matt 19:24; Luke 18:25), or “No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt 6:24)? Some have maintained that in New Testament times there was a narrow gate into the city of Jerusalem called the Needle. A fully loaded camel would not be able to pass through the gate and the camel driver would have to unload the camel of its baggage to do so. Jesus is indicating that we need to let go of excess baggage, possessions, even our possessiveness, if we are to be aligned with the reign of God.

God and Mammon

With respect to God and/or mammon, there is no more thorough treatment than that by Eugene McCarraher in The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.[12] McCarraher traces the story of the rise of modern capitalism, its entanglement with evangelical Christian thought, and how it emerged to forge a new religion grounded in avarice.

For McCarraher, tracing the history of the “religion” of capitalism illuminates its gradual unfolding among apostles of the self-made person and the rise of corporate America. “The modern corporation marked a Copernican revolution in the cosmology of American capitalism, triggering a protracted conflict over the nature and destiny of American democracy.”[13] Evangelical preaching continued to proclaim a gospel of wealth: “money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, . . . money is power, money is force, money will do good.”[14] In the twenty-first century, department stores and malls became the new temples, churches, and cathedrals. Business schools proliferated. Advertising and marketing created a consumer culture. The hunger for markets looked for satisfaction beyond North America and became an imperialist venture. America had a divine mission.

I noticed years ago that Niketown on Michigan Avenue in Chicago had posted on a plaque as one entered:

In Europe, they say you can tell which city you are in by looking at the Church spires. Here in America, it is much the same, visitors need only look to our stadiums—our cathedrals of sports—to orient themselves. This is nowhere more true than in Chicago, where these venerable structures stand not only as landmarks but as stone and steel testimonials to the power of sports. Like those churches of Europe, each possesses its own recognizable characteristics, and like those churches, each is a place of worship.

For Henry Luce, who owned Time, Fortune, and Life, the twentieth century was “the American Century,” which would pave the way for a Civilization of Business.[15] Liberal Protestantism itself did not go so far as to wed itself to the gospel of wealth. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement in the twentieth century opposed “the cult of the dollar.”

Neoliberalism has come, according to McCarraher, “closer than any previous regime of capitalism to transforming the world into a business.”[16] Margaret Thatcher maintained there was no alternative. Is that true? An alternative is not easy to find, but can we not even envision one (a democratically restrained capitalism? higher taxes for the wealthy?)?[17] Thomas Friedman insisted that, to avoid straying from the neoliberal culture, the United States must be militarily omnipotent as well. Ayn Rand’s atheistic libertarian individualism saw avarice as a virtue and greed as good. She denounced altruism, deplored charity as rewarding incompetent parasites, considered taxation in general to be theft, and denigrated Christianity.[18] For McCarraher, capitalism has had many faces and has re-invented itself many times: industrial, corporate, business, managerial, investor, the technological revolution, and the modern neo-liberal state.

Not all capitalism is bad, however; nor is all capitalism good. The more secular society has become, the more it has divorced itself from religion, the less moral agency there is to guide its unfolding. Various Christian groups continue to bless it. Self-restraint, self-improvement, self-fulfillment in and of themselves are good, but when they become ends in themselves, a primary focus of one’s life, they can easily develop into greed which comes in many forms. As critics of Christianity and religion, unregulated neoliberal free market economic theorists themselves saw the incompatibility between mammon and God, between a culture of greed and Christian values, between laissez-faire and the “screwy thinking” of the beatitudes.[19]

A Different Civilization

Can we imagine a different civilizational future? Is it too late to probe the depths of what the popes have called a civilization of love? Is a civilization of greed our only option? I have already referred to Pope John Paul II’s critique with respect to both neo-liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism. Many discount the popes’ social teachings, questioning what they know about economics. They are not economists. That is precisely it. They are not. They are moral teachers. Although distinguishable, there can be no separation between economics and morality.

Although Pope Paul VI was the first to use the expression “civilization of love,” it was used frequently by John Paul II.[20] In his early social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), he wrote,

An excessive availability of every kind of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups, easily makes people slaves of “possession” and of immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication of continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the so-called civilization of “consumption” or “consumerism,” which involves so much “throwing-away” and “waste” (§28).

Pope Francis has also spoken out against this “throwaway culture” (Fratelli Tutti §§18-21), “a culture of walls” (§27), that needs to be restrained by “a culture of encounter” (§30), and “social inclusion” (§31), that does not think in terms of “us” and “those” and “them” (§35), but rather is aware that we are all connected (§§32, 34). Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi (2007), asked,

How could the idea have developed that Jesus’ message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?” (§16).

The popes may not be economists, but they know the effects of an economic system when they see them.

Richard Levins is an economist, with decades of experience as a college professor and business consultant. He has confessed: “Far more than any economist I have studied, the writings of Pope Francis give meaning to the phrase, ‘In God We Trust.’”[21] In Levins’s book, God or Greed, The Market as Culture, “God and greed is not an option.”[22] Our market culture is more of a spiritual disease than it is an economic system. Prior to his change of heart, Levins had taught the economics of Milton Friedman, who had written, “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”[23] The market culture forces the question of what the relationship between the market and government ought to be. Levins: “Herein lies a fundamental conflict between market culture and the more traditional concept of government. In the latter, each person has one vote. In the former, each person has ‘dollar votes’ in wildly unequal shares.”[24] As Ann Garrido points out in her book, Redeeming Power, economic wealth is one form of “power over.”[25]

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beginning with Adam Smith, the birth of modern economics as a distinct discipline, and the unfolding of the Enlightenment, greed came to be understood not so much as a sin but as a good, economically speaking. Is greed then not good? Does it not undergird the road to prosperity?

David Grann, in Killers of the Flower Moon, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,[26] tells the true story of cold-blooded, premeditated, and systematic plots by William K. Hale and co-conspirators to rob the Osage Indian Nation of the wealth to which they had come after discovering oil on their land in Oklahoma to which they had been re-located. Mollie Burkhart’s three sisters, brother-in-law, mother, and first husband were among twenty-four murdered for their money. A 1926 handbill for a newsreel shown at cinemas about the murders said: “A Story of Love, Hatred and Man’s Greed for Gold.”[27] It was both greed and a sense of white superiority that led to widespread pre-meditated betrayals, deceit, murders, poisonings, and even more than twenty-four deaths, for Hale and his accomplices were not the only perpetrators of the quest for money not theirs. In a report by Tom White, prosecutor, to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, dated September 18, 1926, greed had created a culture of killings. A question asked by a member of the Osage tribe with respect to the trial of William Hale, as reported in the Tulsa Tribune (August 21, 1926): “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”[28] Martin Scorsese, director of the movie version of Killers of the Flower Moon, in an interview, commented, “I think the bottom line [in America] has always been the economic drive to make money. That’s the culture . . . to make more money—at anybody’s expense.” [29]

Revisiting Greed

The destructive power of greed is attested in all spiritual traditions. Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and inspiration for engaged Buddhism, in his mindfulness trainings, affirms: “Aware that true happiness is rooted in peace, solidity, freedom, and compassion, and not in wealth or fame, we are determined not to take as the aim of our life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure, nor to accumulate while millions are hungry and dying. We are committed to living simply and sharing our time, energy, and material resources with those in need.”[30]

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), perhaps the most profound, philosophical, prolific yogi of twentieth-century India, critiqued the materialistic ethos: “To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences” has become the standard.[31]

This critique was also voiced by prophetic Christians, not only from patristic and medieval times, but in twentieth century America. For Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, capitalism was not going to bring social justice.[32] Nor were Day and Maurin the only Christian voices in the twentieth century. There were of course the popes, but also G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain, and many others.

Since the early twentieth century, the greatest concentration of wealth has been among the top one percent of the population. In 1982 there were twenty-three billionaires in the United States; in 1996, fourteen years later, there were 132. As of April 2024, according to Forbes, there were 813. The wealthiest in the world is currently Elon Musk, worth more than 200 billion. Musk at one time was evidently surprised that there were negative attitudes towards billionaires, as if being a billionaire was “a bad thing.”[33] To be a billionaire, however, is not to be a bad person. Nor is being a billionaire a bad thing. Wealth in itself is not bad. But how does one use one’s wealth and why does one accumulate it?

Lest we begin to think that greed is only a problem for the rich, however, for “them,” not for us, Phyllis Tickle in her book [34] We are all infected and it is the responsibility of each of us to learn to control what seems uncontrollable. The struggle against the vice of avarice begins with me. We have become addicted to unnecessary comforts and conveniences. Once so addicted it is hard to salvage oneself on one’s own. Martin Schleske, a German master violinmaker, for whom making music and praying correlate in his artistry as a luthier with his Christian faith, in his spiritual book, The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, writes:

Lack of meaning in life turns into greed for material things. Lack of certainty makes us greedy for security. Lack of authority becomes greed for power. Lack of character becomes greed for competence. Lack of recognition turns into greed for applause. The list can go on and on. . . . People who do not have meaning within search for it in vain without![35]

The crisis of meaninglessness in our modern civilized world exacerbates what is and has been a challenge for our humanity. To return to my major thesis, that greed is the root of much evil, greed can hardly be considered good as Gordon Gekko in Wall Sreet maintained. It is not that we must teach greed to civilize people but that we must overcome greed if we are to become civilized.

Greed supplants the reign of God with a reign of money. It worships idols of our own making rather than the living God. Greed is not good for the soul, nor for society, nor for the planet. Whatever role it has played in the history of civilization, it is not civilizing. It is not how God envisions the goods of the earth to be reverenced. In the end, is it avarice or is it pride that is the root of all evil? If pride is the workings of a narcissistic ego and avarice the desire to have more to be more, they become two sides of the same coin. Neither is good. The insatiable desire within me for more must be curtailed by daily spiritual practices and a life of virtue. Civilization, in the end, must be grounded in love of God and care for each other. Inordinate attachment to things, which in themselves are not evil, must be set aside for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of humanity.

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