From time to time I encounter a publication that transforms the means I look at the world. Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Birthed to Be King was one such book (though technically a play cycle instead of a conventional book). So also were Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Treatment, and Sandra Glahn’s No one’s Mommy, and Elena Ferrante’s My Dazzling Pal. Each of these brought about a basic change in my thinking of a certain subject– faith, or history, or even my own family members history– or concerning life in general.
Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Scripture is an additional such book. Foley, a priest, historian, and consultant to the president of Baylor College, makes a provocative and persuading case for changing our thinking on bigotry and exactly how to overcome it. “Contrary to popular point of view,” he writes, “race is not mostly regarding skin color but regarding individuals looking for to categorize one another in order to manipulate them. It has to do with greed.”
Foley backs up this contention with an abundance of historic evidence and scriptural understanding. The heartbreaking history of racism, he shows, can be traced straight to the desire for wealth. White Europeans and Americans kidnapped and oppressed Blacks from Africa not since they despised them, however because they desired complimentary labor to assist them build up cash, land, and power. That is how the wrong of racism took root, and that is why, Foley argues, efforts to get rid of racial hatred will certainly never be successful unless they take greed right into account.
The heartbreaking background of bigotry can be mapped directly to the desire for wealth.
After all, he shows us, greed continued to motivate racial persecution in the post-slavery era. We require just consider the terrible technique of lynching from Restoration forward to see the pattern. Foley thoroughly points out the crusading reporter Ida B. Wells to show how lightweight or outright produced justifications for lynchings often concealed the real factor: the desire to hoard wealth and home and keep Black people from accessing them.
As Foley clarifies:
One of our primary inquiries whenever we come across bigotry worldwide is this: That stands to profit politically or financially from racist actions? We will discover that when individuals act out of hate, such hate does not arise from a vacuum cleaner. Someplace along the line, self-involvement crawled right into the mind of the transgressor. After smoldering, it took a new kind: hate.
Foley draws on Christ’s trainings about greed to drive his factor home. “This publication is precipitated,” he creates,” by the fact that competing gods call for blood sacrifice. Mammon is no various. Jesus is not exaggerating when he claims we can not serve two masters: God and Mammon. … We will dislike one and love the various other.”
As I said, Foley’s powerful discussion of his situation has actually modified my sights on the nature of the issue. In the second fifty percent of guide, where he lays out potential solutions, he shed me a little, primarily due to the fact that he is a dedicated pacifist and I am not. He spends a good deal of time advertising the concept, and I value the thoroughness of his research and the stamina of his convictions– specifically as he’s arguing against his own self-interest– but ultimately I still believe there’s an area for protection (and so did Foley’s heroine Ida B. Wells, as he acknowledges).
So I might not be Foley’s ideal viewers, however I still deeply appreciate the overall ethical vision he uses in this book, one that calls for Christians to demonstrate a love radical sufficient to push back against our society’s profane praise of riches and its dangerous effects. This battle is combated, he reveals us, on both the spiritual and worldly degrees, and fighting it will certainly require our creativity, our creative thinking, our sincerity, and our determination to walk together with the oppressed and the suffering. If I can’t agree with Foley on every strategic detail, I’m still really thankful for the knowledge and support he offers right here. Publications that change your reasoning do not occurred everyday; when they do, they need to be savored.
This evaluation was originally released on Dear, Strange Things! on May 11, 2025 Republished below with the writer’s permission.