Unmasking the Soul of a Nation
On wayfinding an alternative Path to the paved Road of Mammon
I want to pause here at the beginning of this post to simply say “Thank you” to you, my readers, who have walked with me on this writing adventure in to the wild in-betweens as we search for the Real. I consider both humbling and joyous to be able to sit with you at the writer’s desk as I work out my unfinished thoughts. As always, I welcome your feedback and participation in this space. At the end of this post you’ll find an invitation—an idea that’s been ripening within me for sometime and seemed fitting as a conclusion for today’s post.
“In what came to me from them there was both wealth and poverty, and I have been a long time discovering which was which.”
~Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill”
What happens when you wake up in a soceity with a President who worships at the altar of wealth and keeps plodding along the paved road to that altar with delusion, deception, and domineering control? A so-called Leader who installs by his side one of the world’s wealthiest men, a herald of the Technouptopian empire that sets its gaze upon an AI-driven workforce and the colonization of Mars?
It’s an apocolyptic moment for this land and this people, for us all—a revealing, an unveiling, an unmasking of the trauma and the spirits scheming to devour us with their disordered desires whom we have not resisted but rather invited over for dinner. We’re likely so cozy we don’t even recognize their strangeness.
Recent statements from the current President continue to unmask this spirit of greed and exploitation that has fueled the machine of progress and prosperity churning across the soil and through the soul of a limping civilization in search of muchness and manyness:
"All I know is this: We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money."
“We will begin a new era of soaring incomes. Skyrocketing wealth. Millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.”
“[T]ariffs are not just about protecting American jobs...They are about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly."
Apparently being rich, wealthy consumers is the “soul of our country.” The popular vote chose it. The elected President embraced it and sees himself as the king of such an empire.
The history of greed and exploitation in this land is well recorded; a story of repair not well heeded. The story’s prophets confront us uncomfortably, not with a narrow goal of environmental conservation or policy change, but with a gaze into the deep soul logic of this nation—the very lens through which we see and inhabit the ground we stand on. Such contemporary history-unmaskers, reverent earthkeepers, empire-resisters, and Mammon-namers are few, but their voices are singing. Consider a few lines from artist Josh Garrels’ 2006 song “Zion and Babylon”:
Oh great mammon of form and function
Careless consumerist consumption
Dangerous dysfunction
Disguised as expensive taste
I’m a people disgraced
By what I claim I need
And what I want to waste
I take no account for nothing
If it’s not mine
It’s a misappropriation of funds
Protect my ninety percent with my guns
Whose side am I on?
Well who’s winning?
My kingdom’s built with the blood of slaves
Orphans, widows, and homeless graves
I sold their souls just to build my private mansion
I said don’t trade your name for a serial number
Priceless lives were born from under graves
Where I found you
Say, my name ain’t yours and yours is not mine
Mine is the Lord, and yours is my child
That’s how it’s always been
Into this history, Indigenous wisdom-keeper, story-teller, and wonder-filled botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer peers and sees the ravenous spirit of greed that has stained the soul of this nation. In a June 4, 2020 open letter, “Greed Does Not Have to Define Our Relationship to the Land: On Choosing to Belong”, she writes:
We’ve seen that face before, the drape of frost-stiffened hair, the white-rimmed eyes peering out from behind the tanned hide of a humanlike mask, the flitting gaze that settles only when it finds something of true interest—in a mirror. Cruel eyes, a false face and demeanor of ravening hunger despite the unconscionable hoarding of excess while others go without. The spittle quickly licked away from the sly “fox in the henhouse” smirk that sends chills down your spine, a mouth that howls lies pretending it’s an anthem.
…I can’t speak for all Native people, but we’ve smelled that carrion breath before. We know who this is, the one whose hunger is never slaked—the more he consumes, the hungrier he grows. We’ve met him on our shores, at the Thanksgiving table, at the treaty table, at the Greasy Grass, on the riverbank at Standing Rock, and in the courts. His mask does not fool us, and having so little left to lose and all that is precious to protect I call him the name of the monster that my ancestors spoke of around the winter campfire, the embodied nightmare of greed, the Windigo.
…The particular weapon of the Windigo-in-Chief is the executive pen, used against what has always been the most precious, the most contested wealth of Turtle Island—the land. With the stroke of that pen, he has declared that “oil is life” and that protecting the audacious belief that “water is life” can earn you a jail sentence. The same pen gutted the only national monument designed by Native people to safeguard a sacred cultural landscape, the Bears Ears. In opening those protected lands for uranium mining, he triumphantly claimed that he was re- turning public land to the people.
From his origins as a real estate developer to his incarnation as Windigo-in-Chief, he has regarded “public lands”—our forests, grasslands, rivers, national parks, wildlife reserves—all as a warehouse of potential commodities to be sold to the highest bidder. [Emphasis mine. Note: President Trump reduced Bears Ears National Monument protected lands by 85% in 2017.]
Kimmerer unmasks this “Windigo” spirit at work in America’s historic obsession for wealth, prosperity, supremacy, consumption, domination. The current administration, then, is problematic, traumatizing, and vile, yes, but also symptomatic and revelatory of the deeper, historic maladies of our original wound that manifests in an anti-shalom racialized capitalism and diseased land ethic. In short, “as goes the land, so goes the people,” as Wendell Berry has said. When greed, exploitation, and consumption take the wheel, the land suffers (“the land” here being inclusive of the total ecologies of land, sea, sky in our human habitat) and we suffer the infection of anti-shalom that keeps thinking Babylon will be a suitable balm to our inner hungers.
But the jig is up.
What Garrels names in “Zion and Babylon” and what Kimmerer names as Windigo are echoes of the song of Yeshua Messiah, who unmasked and named Mammon, the rival, devouring, ravenous spirit of Mammon. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon,” he declared. Jesus named this rival god, and not just as “money,” because a coin or a paper note alone cannot be the totalizing power but are semiotic agents of the spirit of Mammon. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Jesus said of such coinage, “but render to God what is God’s.” Whose image do you bear? Whose semiotic agent are you? Whose iconic representative are you? The empire’s? Mammon’s? God’s?
Jesus and the early wisdom-keepers and leaders of The Way warned against the constellation of disordered desires that swoop in on Mammon’s coat tails: wealth hoarding, greed, love of money, unjust wages, deference to the rich over the poor, coveteousness. Apprentices to Jesus talked about this stuff as much, or more, than anything they discussed.
“Woe to you who are rich,” Jesus warned his contemporary religious law-keepers, and his half-brother James spared no punches either:
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence.”
Three centuries later that soul logic of an alternative Path continued to resound in the words of Way-keepers like Basil of Caesarea or John Chrysostom (347-407), who wrote in his commentary on John 15:9-17:
“And perhaps one of you will say, ‘Every day thy discourse is about covetousness.’ Would that I could speak about it every night too; would that I could do so, following you about in the market-place, and at your table; would that both wives, and friends, and children, and domestics, and tillers of the soil, and neighbors, and the very pavement and walls, could ever shout forth this word, that so we might perchance have relaxed a little. For this malady hath seized upon all the world, and occupies the souls of all, and great is the tyranny of Mammon. We have been ransomed by Christ and are the slaves of gold.”
As I understand God’s vision of our relationship to the land and to one another, it was and is to be one of shalom—flourishing, justice, integrity, wholeness, jubiliee, harmony, equity. We see the hallmarks of this in our Edenic origins and then in the torah that entered into the enslaving, exploitative, post-Egyptian spirit and wrestled out a better way of being a human community that included Jubilee—returning ancestral lands, restorative justice, interest-free loans, sharing of agriculatural abundance, equity and enoughness. The truth that “the meek will inherit the land”—from the torah and then re-claimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount—was a vision of jubilee, blessing, restorative justice, and hope for an enslaved and exploited people. We are adamah creatures with Divine breath; we are divinity and dust; we are heaven-breathed earth-keepers.
This is why the biblical story points to a God incarnate, who came as an earth-walker among the lilies and sparrows, the breaker of bread and drinker of wine, the nailed, bloodied, and scapegoat violence-ending Redeemer to ransom and liberate this earth—and you and me and all the captives—from the Enslaver-Exploiter in order to renew what God began in Eden so that Divine Reality could come and dwell in union with us and all creation.
But that’s not where are in the story is it? Where are we? And where are we going?
Here in the United States of America—or Turtle Island, or Colonial Territory, or the American experiment—we bear the hunger and toil of a people who’ve trod long upon the paved road of Mammon.
In Wendell Berry’s essay “A Native Hill,” he relays a late 18th century account of Kentuckians—who “knew the art of fighting the Indians”—clearing a forest for a new road in present-day New Castle, Kentucky.
In contrast to Native American ways of keeping a path in the wilderness that honors the contours of the land, and building small shelters warmed with a small fire, the Kentuckian settlers’ road involved “utter violence”—the grand felling of trees, large blazing fires, hurried clearing of land. This account of “the road” exposes a greed, exploitation, hurry, consumption, and violence that Berry believes is part of the spirit of “the truly influential men” in our history who are still glamorized today in the “magic mirror of the television set” (he wrote the essay in 1968). In choosing the road over the path, “they have cut all our Gordian knots.” And we still choose the road, as evidenced in the rhetoric of one of those yet influential strongmen in our society in the 2020s—another apocolyptic era not unlike the 1960s when Berry wrote “A Native Hill.”
Malcolm Foley laments our historic pursuit of wealth, consumption, and exploitation in his book The Anti-Greed Gospel. He argues that our greed-based political economy of racialized capitalism was built upon and still has a symbiotic relationship with the Enslavor-Exploiter spirit—what Kimmerer sees as the “Windigo” spirit and what Jesus names as the rival god “Mammon.” Foley argues that we needed and still depend upon categories of people in order to justify the deep soul logic of exploitation and greed in America. Race-based chattel, in Foley’s mind, was a race-based construct manufactured to justify our greed for spices, tobacco, corn, cotton, sugar, and private property. I believe Willie James Jennings makes a similar argument in Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, as does Michael Harriot in Black AF History.
I suppose this post was a bit like tumbling down a hill, bumping our heads on inconviently placed stones and logs that may have tripped us up on our way up the hill of Prospeity and Progress but which surely bruise us on the way down. But, now with a period of tumbling behind us, we can pause and get our bearings: Where have we come fromt? Where are we? What do we want? Where are we going? Is there any good news? Is there any hope?
Alice, from Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, said something I return to quite often: “Why, I’ve sometimes believed six impossible things before breakfast.” This is not delusional thinking, or willful ignorance, or innoculating hoodwinkery, rather this is the childlike, curious faith of a wide-eyed seeker of the Real.
So now as we sit here at the bottom of this hill, rubbing our bruised brows, let’s consider one impossible thing we might believe together: that another way is possible than the paved road of Mammon.
For starters, Malcolm Foley suggests some alternative ways of seeing and being in his book, and for that reason, I’d like to invite you to join me for a book club to discuss The Anti-Greed Gospel. This will be the first study I am proposing for a new “Words in the Wild” monthly book club. Themes will include those traced in this essay: Mammon, greed, wealth, race, land, restorative justice, the claims and history of Jesus Way-keepers, Indigenous wisdom, community, ubuntu philosophy, economy, shalom, desires, and related “impossible things.”
Send me a DM if you are interested in learning more!
Shalom to you,
Jonathan