The Root of Evil

It's about greed, and always has been.

I first met Malcolm Foley years ago. He was a grad student at Baylor and we were presenting at an academic conference on the same panel. His paper had to do with his dissertation research—on the Black Christian response to lynching. I remember two primary takeaways from his presentation. First, I was struck by his powerful historical and moral reflection. Second, I resolved never again to follow Malcolm on a panel. I am a fairly engaging speaker *as far as academics go* but Malcolm is in a class by himself.

In the years since, I’ve watched Malcolm finish his Ph.D. and take up a position as Special Advisor to Baylor’s president on equity and campus engagement. He also pastors a dynamic church in Waco. (In addition to his Ph.D. in Religion, he holds an MDiv from Yale Divinity School, focusing on the theology of the early and medieval church.) Perhaps the most intriguing part of Malcolm’s CV, however, is the fact that he majored in Finance as an undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis.

This biographical tidbit helps make sense of his debut book, The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward. A testament to the power of a liberal arts education, it is a book we all need to wrestle with.

I had the honor of endorsing The Anti-Greed Gospel, and here’s what I had to say:

[The book] presents a searing critique of the status quo and points Christians to a redepmtive path forward. A must-read book for the American church.

The book just released this past week, and I received my copy along with a letter Malcolm sent via his publisher. Usually these letters are rather boiler-plate, but nothing about Malcolm is boiler-plate. Here’s an excerpt:

“What you hold in your hand is a piece of my soul. When I wrote this book, I wrote it as an act of spiritual warfare: an attempt to pry the claws of the demon Mammon out of the minds and hearts of the people of God. It is my hope and prayer that it, by the power of the Holy Spirit, accomplishes at least some of that work.”

The task at hand: to pry the claws of the demon Mammon out of the minds and hearts of the people of God. These are strong words. But remember, Malcolm’s area of study is the most violent era of racial violence. And what he found in his research was that racism is not first about hate and ignorance. The root of racism is greed.

He explains what he means by this in an interview with Greg Garrett at Baptist News Global:

When people think about lynching, they generally just think about mobs of angry racist white people killing Black people. All that is true, but it doesn’t get to the very root of the issue. One of the things I argue in the book is that greed starts the phenomenon of lynching, greed fuels it, and greed ends it. The violence begins and ramps up because post-Reconstruction, white Americans sought to wrest power and newly developed wealth out of the hands of those who had spent centuries being mercilessly exploited. Greed began the phenomenon.

Lynching continued through the propagation of lies (like the “Black beast rapist” narrative) that allowed Americans around the country to largely ignore the terrorizing and systematic suppression of Black communities. Greed continued the phenomenon.

Last, lynching did not fade because there was a moral revolution in the nation. Lynching faded because it became bad for business. At a time when the South was industrializing and seeking more capital investment, people around the world were disgusted by what they saw as the barbarism of lynching. Editorials came out of France and even Japan about American lynchings. That embarrassment stopped Southern whites from publicly mutilating Black men in front of thousands, but it did not stop the deeper desires to dominate and exploit.

For Malcolm, greed is at the heart of racial violence, and this is at root a spiritual issue:

Most of our conversations about race and racism tend to be about identity, hate and ignorance, when those are really downstream effects. If we want to know what is truly evil about race and racism, we have to recognize that they do three things: lie, steal and kill. That is, the stakes are cosmic.

But historically, the category is born out of greed: the desire to accumulate wealth. Thus, America’s history of race and racism is really just a proxy battle in a cosmic war, the combatants of whom were named by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount.

In Matthew 6:24, Jesus warns us we cannot serve two masters: we will either love one and hate the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. He could have chosen any enemy opposite God, but he chooses “mammon,” the Aramaic word for “riches.” This suggests to me if we want the child, race, to die, we have to kill what feeds it: Mammon. Only then will we begin to see the justice we seek.

His research has obvious relevance in our current political context:

White Christian nationalism assumes the state is a boon for the church. I fundamentally disagree. The Christian Scriptures as a whole are anti-imperial documents, not in the sense that they are only against particular empires, but in the sense that they oppose the very logic of empire.

Any institution that depends on military might and violence, propaganda and economic exploitation is at root an enemy of the living God, as Rome, Greece and Babylon were, and as many states in our midst today are. No, the church is something quite different, for we are called to be outposts of the kingdom of God which, I argue in the book, necessarily commits us to building communities of deep economic solidarity, creative anti-violence and prophetic truth-telling.

Part of that truth-telling is reminding the Christian that any commitment to revenge, to domination, to exploitation, to the amassing of wealth, or to anything that does not manifest itself in the material and spiritual flourishing of one’s neighbor (also known as love) is an antichrist commitment. A distinctly Christian imagination believes the best way to win one’s enemy is to love them: to feed them, to clothe them and to materially invest in their well-being.

Listen here for a conversation between Esau McCaulley and Malcolm:

And pick up a copy of Malcolm’s book. It is the perfect choice for a book club or a church small group.

It is powerful and convicting, but not just when pointed outward. The prophetic critique hits home, for all of us.

Read it, and you will see things more clearly.