Worshiping Mammon instead of Jesus.

Matthew 6.24, Luke 16.13

Some years ago there was a meme going round social media, warning folks what might happen if society went cashless. Some of the memes claim Dave Ramsey wrote it; he didn’t. Like most memes which go viral quickly, it’s meant to frighten people—and this one played right into many a Christian’s fears about the End Times, so Christians helped spread it. That’s how I came to see it.

My comment after yet another friend posted it on Facebook: “Isn’t it funny? The first thing Christians worry about when the Beast comes… is Mammon.”

Jesus used the Aramaic word ܡܳܡܽܘܢܳܐ/mamoná once in his his Sermon on the Mount—and in its parallel verse in Luke—to describe wealth. It got transliterated into Greek as μαμωνᾷ/mamoná (and the Textus Receptus adds a letter μ/my, so “mammoná”); then into Latin as mamonæ. John Wycliffe translated it “riches,” as did the Geneva Bible, but the King James Version turned it back into “mammon.”

Matthew 6.24 KWL

“Nobody’s able to be a slave to two masters.

Either they’ll¹ hate one and love the other,

or look up to one and down on the other:

Can’t be a slave to God and Mammon.”

Luke 16.13 KWL

“No slave is able to be a slave to two masters.

Either they’ll¹ hate one and love the other,

or look up to one and down on the other:

Can’t be a slave to God and Mammon.”

Why’d the authors of the gospels go with “mammon” instead of the usual Greek words for wealth, πλοῦτος/plútos or χρῆμα/hríma or εὐπορία/evporía? Or, because this verse is so often translated, “You cannot serve both God and money” (GNB, NIV, NLT), why not the word for money (literally “silver”), ἀργύριον/argýrion?

Well, we don’t know. It’s likely because the ancient Christians first memorized this Jesus-saying with the Aramaic word deliberately kept in it. The original-language word was important to them, and if Jesus is the one who made ’em memorize the saying, it’s likely important to him too. He wants us Christians to pay more attention to this word.

So we did. In fact when the ancient Christians preached on mamoná, they Grecianized it—they tacked on a Greek noun-ending, turning into not just a Greek word, but a Greek name. That’s why so many Christians, myself included, capitalize it. They treated Mammon like a person, ’cause Jesus said you can’t serve Mammon as well as God—and it must therefore be a competitor god. Obviously a false god, but still.

And since mamoná is a cognate of the Hebrew word מַטְמוֹן/matmón, “secret riches,” people imagine Mammon is therefore be a god of riches, wealth, or money.

In Luke, Jesus speaks of Mammon right after his Shrewd Butler Story. Maybe you remember it; maybe not, ’cause pastors hesitate to teach on it, ’cause Jesus straight-up praises an embezzler. In it, a butler makes friends by undercharging his boss’s debtors. Lk 16.1-9 Jesus’s moral: “Make yourselves friends with your filthy lucre,” Lk 16.9 or as the KJV puts it, “the mammon of unrighteousness.” And the Pharisees in his audience responded by rejecting it—’cause they were φιλάργυροι/filárgyri, “silver-lovers.” Lk 16.14

So… is Mammon the pagan god of money? Or simply Jesus’s personification of money? Or a mistranslation?

Mammon’s a person?

First of all, there’s nothing in ancient literature about the god Mammon. Seriously, there isn’t. I’ve looked; other historians have looked even harder than I have; there’s nothing.

The Mishna is a collection of what second-century Pharisees taught—and this’d include some things first-century Pharisees taught, so it’s a useful insight into what Jesus dealt with whenever he interacted with Pharisees. Whenever mamón comes up in the Mishna, Pharisees meant money. When we’re taught to love the LORD with all our might, Dt 6.5 the Pharisees said this also means with all our mamón. Berakot 9.5 They equated might with wealth. Which isn’t wrong; it’s not the only kind of might, but as we see all the time in our culture, it’s extremely mighty. It’s not an insignificant power.

Archaeologists have dug up nothing about Mammon in Israel and ancient Aramaic-speaking territories. That’s not to say one of ’em won’t discover something someday. But till something gets found, all our talk about the god Mammon, all of it, is guesswork. The ancients may have never worshiped any such god as Mammon. We’re just extrapolating all of it from Jesus’s lesson.

But this sure hasn’t stopped us Christians from extrapolating away. The mind can’t handle gaps in our knowledge, and has to fill it with something. Anything. Myths if necessary.

Christians invented all sorts of theories about who Mammon is. Fallen angel or demon. Elder god or spiritual force. What its motives and goals are. What it plots when we’re not looking. Popular Christian mythology (namely The Faerie Queene, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost) include Mammon as one of the demons under Satan. Our saints invented complicated theologies about where it fits into the devils’ hierarchy. Whole books were written. Whole industries were created.

All of it guesswork. ’Cause our only source of Mammon’s existence is the Mishna and Jesus, and neither of ’em define it as anything but money.

Is there any legitimacy to any Christian teachings about Mammon? Depends on who’s teaching. Any preacher who claims, “We know from the bible that Mammon is a demon,” knows no such thing. “We know Mammon is headquartered in the financial capitals in the world”—no we don’t. “We know Mammon gains power every time the market goes up”—we do not.

We know money is a force. Educated economists understand how we create it. Yes, we humans create it. Money’s a human invention. Originally, humans bartered, but barter’s inefficient; how’s a week of labor precisely worth one goat? But if you can trade goods and labor for grams of copper, silver, gold, or platinum, now you can meter out how much you think something’s worth—and haggle over that price. Problem is, the value of precious metals is way too easy to manipulate, so governments switched it to pounds, dollars, euros, yuan, yen, pesos, and our other currencies… and now people worry about how much governments manipulate its value. I’m not even gonna touch the constant manipulation people perform upon cryptocurrency. Not that the “cashless society” meme considers that… but I’m gonna stay off that tangent today.

People who don’t understand money, and how humans influence it, tend to imagine money has a life and power of its own. They attribute all sorts of special abilities to it. Those are myths too. Stands to reason these same folks would imagine Mammon is a living being, and it controls money, not humans. And that we’re powerless against it—when in fact we humans have a great deal of power over everything we’ve created. Yeah, even when it sometimes gets away from us.

I’m gonna stop capitalizing the word for a moment: I treat mammon as the same as money. It’s a spiritual force. Not a person. Yes it’s always possible there’s some no-foolin’ spiritual being which attaches itself to money, and claims power over it. After all, there are humans who do the very same thing; why not a devil? But that spirit has no more power over money than we do. It’s tricking us into thinking it’s mightier than it is. We can dismiss it, because through Christ we can easily defeat it. Any fear or awe we have of it is misplaced, and will simply get in the way of our understanding.

So… why’d Jesus personify mammon? Because Jesus is a poet, and this is what poets do. When the Greeks described ἔρος/éros, “passion,” as if it’s Eros, a god—one which might strike you with its arrows of love or hatred—it’s a clever way to describe what passion kinda does. Problem is, the Greeks wrongly thought you had to worship these personifications in order to gain some degree of control over them. You gotta worship Eros, and appease it, otherwise it’ll smite you with the wrong arrow, and now you’re uncontrollably horny for your slave girl; or Eros makes your wife despise you—and of course she will, now that you’re lusting for your slave girl.

The Greeks worshiped Eros same as they did Phobos (φόβος/fóvos, “fear”) or Plutos (πλοῦτος/plútos, “wealth”—not the Latin god Pluto; notice the -S at the end). But Jesus’s intent isn’t to declare Mammon is a competitor god. Just to warn us to not grant it our worship—which only rightly belongs to the LORD.

Mammon doesn’t need to become a person before humans’ll worship it. A money manager doesn’t go to any Church of Mammon to pay homage to her god; she just goes to the office. A banker doesn’t need to pray to Mammon; accessing his online bank account serves the very same function. The ancients worshiped lifeless stone gods, and Mammonists just happen to worship lifeless wealth. Worshiping a dead god is just as wrong as worshiping a spirit; the pursuit of a fake deity will lead us just as far afield.

True, every once in a while some Christian will claim they had a prophetic dream in which Mammon is one of the archdemons, battling the holy angels with its silver arrows. I’ll be blunt: A lot of these dreamers are rubbish. Basic confirmation will tell you so: They don’t forewarn us of anything, and if they do, those dreams don’t come to pass. They’re not always consistent with scripture; there’s a fair amount of Christian mythology mixed up in them, but that’s not scripture. There’s a lot of popular beliefs mixed up in ’em, and that’s not consistent with scripture either. So clearly, these “prophetic dreams” are their subconscious—and they’re too often pandering to Christian fears and wishes. So when Mammon is a mighty being in those dreams: Nope, it’s still not. It’s a force. It’s money.

Money. It’s a gas.

Money isn’t material.

I know; pocket change is a physical thing. As are dollar bills. But these items only represent the actual value of money. That’s why people will pick up a quarter when they find one in the street, but they won’t pick up a washer. (Or even pennies anymore.) They’ll pick up a $10 bill, but not a napkin. Currency makes money appear tangible. The reality is money is a cloud of mathematics, behavioral psychology, economic theory, and political theory. When we convert it into bills, coins, and bonds, we make it look tangible, solid, countable, and controllable. But it’s really not solid.

For the longest time, instead of bills and coins, humanity used metal, and we attached a specific value per gram to the metal. (Or in the States, value per ounce.) For this reason certain people wanna put us back on a gold and silver standard: They insist gold has an inherent value, and dollars don’t. But they’re wrong. Gold, like cryptocurrency, like money, is worth whatever people believe it’s worth—and humans can easily manipulate that value. One of the first events people called “Black Friday” was when Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to manipulate the New York gold market. They slowly bought up a lot of gold… then on 24 September 1869 they sold all of it, dumping it on the market. Thanks to the rules of supply and demand, too much gold caused people to value it less, and gold’s price plummeted. Gould and Fisk took advantage of the new cheap price of gold, and bought back more than they sold. And if we didn’t pass laws against this practice, people would do it again and again, just to enrich themselves. It’s why people still do this with unregulated cryptocurrency—and it’s why crypto isn’t a safe investment.

Goldbugs insist such acts artificially alter gold’s price. ’Cause they refuse to believe gold doesn’t have a fixed value. Which only proves they’ve no idea how money works. All value is entirely based on belief: What do people imagine something’s worth? Same with trading cards, collectible toys, art, memorabilia, silver, gold, and the dollar.

The U.S. dollar is worth a dollar because the American people believe it buys a dollar’s worth of something. If we figure a dollar can buy a can of soda, that’s how far its power extends: Any soda sold for more than a dollar is “too much,” or less than a dollar is “a bargain.” Everything gets tied to that dollar=soda metric. We don’t even think about why they should be equal. Says who? Um… the government? The Federal Reserve? The economy? (Clearly not restaurants.) The collective belief of every American?

Actually… yeah it is collective belief.

Gold works precisely the same way. Gold is worth $120 per gram because gold buyers believe it’s worth $120 per gram. When they don’t anymore, that’ll change. Might go up, or down. Claiming, “But its real value never changes” is the illusion: Everything’s real value changes. And you don’t want two speculators who don’t mind bankrupting the world, wielding the power to make these changes so they can enrich themselves. That’s why we abandoned the gold standard.

Stocks are a more obvious example. A corporation might make no money, and hasn’t for years, but it’s an internet company, and people are convinced they should put their hopes (“put stock”) in internet companies, so its stock is outrageously overvalued. Some ninny on CNBC with a sound effects box said it’s worth a lot, so it is. Conversely another company might be really profitable, doing great, very stable, yet its stock value is low because stockholders think it should be inexpensive.

The collective belief of shareholders just happens to be far more volatile than that of every American. But even American faith and credit has its limits. When other things take greater priority than money, like food during a famine, humans will trade a decent pile of money for donkey heads and dove crap. 2Ki 6.25

So money isn’t material. And any force which isn’t material is spiritual.

I know, some folks are gonna object to my reducing things that way. In part because many pagans imagine material things are real, and spiritual things are imaginary. And money’s real!—therefore it must somehow be material. But money isn’t material. Yet it’s real. Therefore spiritual.

No, others will argue; it’s intellectual. It’s psychological. It’s conceptual. Pick any synonym with means “immaterial but real,” and they’d far rather use that word than “spiritual.” ’Cause that word “spiritual” bugs ’em, and they wanna strictly limit it to religious stuff. Stuff they don’t believe in. They believe in money, but God’s another deal. If money is spiritual just like God is spiritual, perhaps they’ve gotta take another look at God… and they really don’t wanna.

If that’s your hangup, get over it. Spiritual is real. God is real. Stop treating religion as if you’re only pretending. This is substantial stuff.

And too often money has taken religion’s place. It’s why Jesus warned us about making a master of it. People look to money to save them! It solves their problems, achieves their dreams, Ec 10.19 secures their futures, buys their health, conquers their adversaries, gives them peace. Heck, if they can afford to be cryogenically frozen, it’ll even offer them an afterlife.

But like every false god, it destroys more than it gives, and all its promises are deceptions. The Beatles figured out money can’t buy you love. I sometimes joke, “No; but you can rent it.” Sadly, for a lot of people, renting will do.

In Jesus’s day: The opposite problem.

Back when Jesus first taught about Mammon, it was to remind his students money is substantial. Y’see, they had the opposite problem from us: God was real, but money not so much.

First-century Palestine didn’t practice free-market capitalism. Back then the Roman Empire was on the gold standard, but gold wasn’t common enough for common people to use. (Hence the big parties they’d throw when you found a lost coin. Lk 15.8-10) Only the wealthy had actual coins. For everyone else, wealth was tied up in property: Land, slaves, animals, and personal possessions. They practiced barter-based theocratic feudalism: Everything ultimately belonged to their lord, i.e. the LORD. And every seven years the LORD decreed they’d cancel debts and free their slaves. Not all wealth would last.

Under this system, God was more tangible to them than money. As he’s supposed to be.

Jesus taught about Mammon because he wants people to take money more seriously. Well, nowadays we do—often too seriously. In fact our economic system is rigged in such a way, it’s no longer possible to follow the rules set out in the Law. Selling yourself into slavery to pay debts? On the up side, slavery’s illegal; on the down side, debt repayment might take the rest of your life, and consume every single dollar you earn. Debts aren’t cancelled every seven years. And whenever government takes part of our income to help the needy, same as the Hebrew priests did with tithes, conservatives scream bloody murder about socialism.

Every once in a while I hear of some Christian money-manager who holds a seminar, who claims he’ll teach you some biblical principles for dealing with wealth. I’ve been to a few. What they actually teach is free-market capitalism. (Not that there’s anything wrong with learning about capitalism; it is the system Americans live under.) The rest is about debt avoidance, based on various scriptures quoted out of context to support their ideas. Again, not that debt avoidance is a bad idea; it’s a really good idea. But what they teach about money, and Mammon, come from free-market economics, not bible.

Economics in the bible were greatly different than economics today, so of course what these money-managers teach doesn’t wholly jibe with the bible. Problem is, it doesn’t always jibe with the parts of the bible which can apply to our culture. Generosity, fr’instance. Giving to the needy so we can have treasure in heaven. Mt 6.19-21 Giving to everyone who asks, and not turning people away. Mt 5.42 Money-managers don’t teach that. Instead they teach “stewardship”—a concept which they claim is biblical (and it does exist in the bible, Lk 16.1-13) but it’s not about giving; it’s about gathering. It’s about investing our money, and spending none of it, so that our pile of money will grow, so the power and security of Mammon might increase. It’s about storing up treasure on earth, disguised as “kingdom principles.” It’s part of the “prosperity gospel.”

True Christianity is forsaking everything, everything, to follow Jesus. When we spend too much time on wealth “stewardship,” rather than making God’s kingdom grow, we forget to be generous. We forget to take leaps of faith with our money: It’s not prudent to be foolish and wasteful, even if it’s for the kingdom’s sake. We trust our pile, instead of trusting the ultimate Owner of every pile, who can easily tap those other piles for our sake. We serve the wrong lord. And as Jesus said, we just can’t serve both.

But dammit, we Americans are convinced we can serve both if we try hard enough.

The Mammonist gospel.

One particularly American teaching—one popular among the poor, and one we’ve even exported to poor countries—is God doesn’t want his kids living lives of defeat. (Which is true.) He wants us to find success in everything we do. (Which is also true.) He wants us to be rich. (Wait a minute…)

Supposedly God wants us to have so much wealth it makes pagans jealous, and want to get in on this Christianity stuff so they too can become fat and comfortable. (Wait, God tells us not to covet, Dt 5.21 but it’s okay to use covetousness to spread his kingdom?) So to these folks, Mammon isn’t God’s opponent or competitor. The love of money isn’t a root of evil. On the contrary: Money is God’s tool, and money-love is God’s bait. It’s our reward for trusting him, following him, for giving money away to Christian charities or churches. God’s gonna open heaven’s windows and make it rain, baby. Make it rain!

This prosperity-gospel bushwa isn’t a new idea. Pharisees believed in it too. It’s how the rich justified their many possessions… and their stinginess. They were wealthy because God blessed them… and the poor had nothing because God didn’t bless them. Why? Well, they must’ve sinned or something. Some defect of character.

Properly this philosophy is called social Darwinism. Like Darwinism, everybody fights to survive, and the “fittest” do. The wealthy are the “fittest”—they struggled, came out on top, and deserve their wealth. Even if they inherited it, or if they stumbled into wealth through dumb luck: Those are just other forms of God’s blessing, claim the wealthy.

In bible times this was how Pharisees believed the world worked. It’s why Jesus’s students were floored when their Master informed them the rich are gonna have the darnedest time getting into his kingdom. Mk 10.23-27 To their minds, the rich were already in the kingdom—it’s why they were rich! But in this age, God gives people wealth for one and only one reason: To spread his kingdom. Not to grow our own. If we aren’t growing his kingdom, we may not even be in it. We’re worshiping Mammon… but we call it “Jesus,” and pretend its power came from God.

Nope, prosperity gospel folks aren’t worshiping God. Really he’s a means to an end, and that end is wealth. They’re Mammonists. Whether they think God’s got a mansion and a crown waiting for them up in heaven, or they think God’s gonna get them a Bentley and an Apple Watch here on earth, they’re following him for the bling. They’re proclaiming their ideas to an impoverished world because hopeful Christians who believe their tripe will send them donations, and these contributions fund their lifestyle. They’re exploiting the poor, same as plutocrats who make 10,000 times what their underpaid employees do. They irritate God just as much.

I used to say I have no problem with billionaires, or preachers who make really good salaries. I’ve learned better. These people are poisoning themselves. Unless they’re giving so much to the needy it endangers their billionaire status, they’re rendering themselves wholly unfit for God’s kingdom; by embracing Mammon they’re embracing hell. I’m not saying we have to overthrow them; Jesus will do that. Although we really should stop giving them tax breaks; why are we tempting and corrupting them further by making them richer?

And one of the surest signs we’re dealing with a Mammonist instead of a Christ-follower, is when people justify this sort of behavior. I’ve heard many a Mammonist misquote Jesus’s story of the Equal-Pay Vineyard, “Isn’t this my money, to do with as I please?” Mt 20.15 They miss the whole reason the employer said this: To justify his generosity, not his miserliness. In Jesus’s culture, the only one who really owns everything is God. And it just so happens, the employer in Jesus’s story represents God. It is his money, to do with as he pleases—and it pleases him to be generous, and it pleases him when his children are likewise cheerful givers. 2Co 9.7

’Cause when we’re not, when we’re fruitless and tight-fisted, we’re likely not his children either. We’re Mammon’s.