Blessed Are the Debtors
How Empire Gentrified the Gospel
How much of your shame comes from debt?
Shame riddles the children’s toys left on front lawns as families are evicted across the country. Guilt eclipses the accomplishments of university graduates juggling multiple jobs outside their degree specialization to keep up with the rat race, and the race against student-debt deadlines. The critically ill breathe, but without relief, while suffocated with mountainous medical debt. Western capitalism would have you feel that you’re not broke. You’re bad; and not in the sexy way. Suffering the consequences of your own actions and lack of personal responsibility.
Headaches and clenched teeth spanning generations over such perceived personal failure is no accident. It’s a selective culture cooked over millennia at the intersection of church and state.
I
There’s an oft-quoted legend in Christian liberation theology circles that Guatemala banned the Magnificat during their civil war in the 1980s due to these provocative lines:
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. [1]
It’s easy to see why a regime hyper-vigilant of communist infiltration would view the prayer as a political threat. However, there’s no primary or secondary source citing any formal Guatemalan decree on that ban. Yet the legend was written in the real blood of Catholic clerics, catechists, and Christian community organizers who were executed or disappeared by the state for making the connection between liberty and Christianity. [2] The ban is fake, but the bloodshed is real. Although there was no formal decree banning the Magnificat, it was that exact religious social teaching that led to the brutalization of clergy by the state — which was enough for victims to consider it virtually banned by the armed circumstances of their time.
It’s much safer for the church to operate as a legitimizing agent of the state than as its opponent, if it wants to live. Everyone wants to be like Jesus until it’s time to do Jesus shit. Nobody wants to be crucified. But an authentic depiction of original Christian history reveals a collectivist economic model and liberationist messaging that predates Rome’s domestication of the faith. And the texts that carry that original message are still in the canon — hiding in plain sight.
Eastern Orthodox theologian and classicist David Bentley Hart is associated with no politically-motivated liberation theology movement. As a classicist, Hart has a tendency to err on the conservative side. Yet working directly with the Ancient Greek, he revealed suspicious mistranslations like “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3), finding the original was better rendered:
“How blissful the destitute, abject in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the heavens.” [3]
Blessed are the poor in spirit would be more palatable for the wealthy elite who want to participate in religion. They can imagine themselves in the metaphor. But the original Greek reveals direct economic terms referring to the lower class as being in a blessed state possessing the correct perspective of the Beatific vision. They have the eyes to see.
Hart went on to argue that the New Testament thoroughly depicts wealth itself as a spiritual obstacle. The wealthy are painted with a brush illustrating them as more cautionary tales than models of faith. Meanwhile Jesus’ regard for the abjectly destitute was “more or less exclusive of any other social class.” [4] In other words, the impoverished were not a footnote in the Nazarene’s thesis, but central to it. Those who enjoy power and privilege would prefer a Messiah that bears equal witness across the classes, but it was unmistakably a one-way appreciation for the poor as his people. And when wealthy people asked to follow Jesus, he would instruct them to sell everything they owned before inviting them to follow him.
The parable of The Workers in the Vineyard continues to be a stumbling block to conservatives to this day. The lord of the field pays out the same wages to all workers regardless if they worked all day or just one hour. Equal pay is dispensed regardless of the amount of work provided. They’re paid for their human dignity. Because productivity is not the measure of a personal worth, or need. Jesus doesn’t mince words when he articulates the intentions of the lord of the field:
“Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” [5]
He’s prescribing a way of life that lives above the rule of oppression that keeps the disenfranchised hungry. He was a doctor of liberty, and his first patients were the early christian community that lived in common:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” [6]
“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” [7]
The halls of academia were filled with debate as to whether Acts was prescriptive for christians or descriptive of that particular community. Regardless, the content is unambiguous, and later institutional powers would interpret to contain exactly this scriptural model.
Christian conservatives prefer the term communalism over communism to describe this model — but that still begs the question: which is closer to early christian practice? Their common objection is that communism calls for state control and violent overthrow of the current regime, while early Christian communalism was voluntary. Never mind that capitalism today introduces compulsory taxation, and opting out is punishable by prosecutable homelessness. At its heart, communalism invokes a collectivism that is patently removed from conservative capitalist thinking.
When Jesus stood in the Nazarene synagogue in Luke 4 reading from Isaiah 61 — “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” — that phrase carried a specific economic meaning to the native readers of the time. [8] The year of the Lord’s favor was the Jubilee: once every fifty years all slaves were freed and ancestral lands returned to their families. [9] Jubilee was the catharsis of a starkly similar observance every 7 years known as Sabbatical Year or Shmita where debts were cancelled, and the land allowed to rest from toil. “There need be no poor people among you” Deuteronomy 15 — wasn’t some spiritual metaphor, but a covenantal promise being fulfilled with direct action. [10] That rhythm pointed to Jubilee mathematically as 7x7 leads to 49 followed by the grand Jubilee on the 50th year.
The first notion of good news in scripture was that god’s children were free and their debts forgiven. It was always a political and economic message.
From Leviticus, to Deuteronomy, and Acts: Judeo-Christian history was built on the liberation of the impoverished and the disenfranchised. The ancients understood that debt was not some innate problem with human identity. That undying cultural guilt and shame over debt was built over centuries of theological work to censor a central aspect of early Judeo-Christian life. This essay is going to go over the receipts.
II
The same gospel that got Guatemalan Catholic clergy slain by the state was the same message that got early christian communities persecuted by Rome. One might even draw a parallel in the reactions both groups had to state oppression. Guatemalan liberation theologians didn’t want the smoke, and neither did the 4th century christian communities that capitulated in what John Howard Yoder dubbed the Constantinian Shift. [11]
In 313 CE Constantine legalized christianity in Rome ending centuries of christian persecution marking the end of christianity as an enemy of the state, and the beginning of its servitude to state power. By 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius I made it the official state religion of Rome fulfilling the work Constantine had put forward.
In just two generations christianity went from protest chants like “Christ is king” in response to Roman soldiers chanting “Caesar is king” to becoming a legitimizing agent of the state. Defanged, colonized, and bastardized from the original spirit of their work, christendom became a footstool of state power. It was a win/win for the two entities as institutions. Rome lost an antagonist to their rule, and christianity no longer had to endure the bloodshed their alleged founder shed when his mission brought him to Pontius Pilate representing Roman authority.
And in one swoop western christianity’s salvific language was appropriated for the language of loyalty to debt as a civil duty. A tragic end to a three century tradition of anti-imperialist collectivism focused on divinity and liberty becoming a platform to man’s power.
Baptist pastor and social critic Walter Rauschenbusch understood what had been lost. Spending his early ministry watching children die of poverty-related illness in the tenements of New York, he diagnosed the institutional betrayal in a single line:
“Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus.” [12]
Christianity’s theological drift from anarcho-communalism to authoritarian compliance with empire came at the expense of the disenfranchised, and the convenience of institutional power. But the political acquisition of christianity was just the first seal on the church’s critical Beatific vision. It still needed a new cosmological justification to make it stick as common sense for religious followers of Jesus.
III
In 1098 Anselm of Canterbury showed up to deliver that cosmological foundation with his Cur Deus Homo where he systemized salvation as a feudal-honor financial transaction. [13] His work paints sin as an eternal unpayable debt once owed to god the father, now under new management after being bought out by Jesus of Nazareth. Humanity’s life debt transferred to a new creditor.
“Therefore to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due... This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin; but every one who does not pay it sins... Therefore the honor taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow.” — Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo, Book I, Ch. XI (1098)
Jonathan R. Miller came from the same vein of protestant thinking as Anselm. He even wrote in The Christian Century, the flagship publication of U.S. protestantism. Digesting Anselm from within the same flavor of christianity, he wasn’t an outside critic. When putting Anselm under the microscope his take on satisfaction theory was equal parts perturbed:
“The satisfaction theory of the atonement centers on debt, humanity’s debt to god. It’s often criticized for its gruesome picture of god. But it also paints a weird picture of Jesus: Christ the Debt Buyer.” [14]
A far cry from earlier christian frameworks like Christus Victor, which proclaimed salvation as liberation from captivity as opposed to a settlement on a balance sheet. Christus Victor writer, Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén argued that it wasn’t merely one framework among others, it was the original one. [29] A perspective that the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection weren’t merely a transaction settling the account of sinners, but a confrontation with the powers of sin and death. Salvation wasn’t a repayment so much as a rescue.
While a variety of atonement theories emerged around the world, Anselm’s debt-satisfaction model rose to prominence in western christianity. His outlook came from a world entrenched in feudalist honor and obligation. Then the idea outlasted the context of his era because debt continued to exist after the fall of feudalism. Uncoupled from its historical context, debt-satisfaction atonement became embedded as western christianity common sense. Indebtedness became more innate to the human condition instead of a material condition. You owe; therefore you are.
Anselm’s worldview cemented the normalization of indebtedness as the fundamental relationship between humanity and their creator. It’s a tough talk to have with the poor, but if you can get them to believe it’s fundamental to their relationship with god, then predatory debt stops being an aberration of injustice. That’s just how the world works. It’s part of life. But what it needed was a social mechanism to deal a moral verdict about people depending on their economic status.
IV
Anselm got the ball rolling with christian language around salvific debt, but John Calvin would pitch it into economic terms that states could truly capitalize on.
Calvin gave us double predestination, unknowable to the individual, making it harsher than Augustinian or Paulin predestination. A notion that god decided your fate before you were born. Not a prayer, not a penance, and certainly not a good deed from faith affects your salvific outcome. Your soul on pre-order by celestial forces.
Naturally, Calvin’s predestination led to existential anxiety for his protestant audience. If there’s nothing that can be done about one’s status with their god, then how do they determine who has his favor? Calvinist communities began concerning themselves less with fulfilling the call of god, and more with discerning signs of election. The sign that won the most cultural recognition through Protestant England, colonial America, and the protestant mercantile class — worldly success.
Max Weber observed Calvinism as a German sociologist rather than a theologian, so he had no intention of theologically defending or attacking it. Which gives us something of a less biased approach in weighing its impact on society. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism dropped in 1905 where he discussed the discomforting fact of Calvinism-induced predestination anxiety. He covered the gnawing uncertainty it birthed in believers as to whether they were among the elect — quietly driving them toward endless work and accumulation to show evidence of their god’s favor. And how this mechanism built the culture that capitalism would inherit and run without theology.
“In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.” [15]
Existential anxiety wasn’t Calvin’s design, but it was the natural sociological fallout of establishing predestination. Faced with a lack of power over their eternal fate, protestant communities became desperate for evidence that they weren’t damned. And once material wealth became braille for tangible evidence of grace, poverty inversely became a signal of damnation. Suddenly economic conditions beyond our control became less about bad luck, or structural exploitation, but the creditor god’s assessment of your account.
To measure the way the dominoes fell between Calvin and modern day predispositions we have to measure the theological gap between the thinkers that built upon Calvinism since then. Where Calvin discussed the futile efforts of a depraved humanity before an inscrutable god, ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Norman Vincent Peale, sought to flip this into a more positive, and therefore more digestible, worldview.
His work focused on the heights of human efficacy through something that resembled modern Law of Attraction with his 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking. But for all its positivity it concluded in the same space as Calvinism. Namely that external prosperity is evidence of internal spiritual alignment. Peale just made it more accessible, more American, and easier to shelve in U.S. bookstores. [16]
The book even rivaled Bible sales over a couple years. Between its pages a marriage of protestant theology and pop psychology was born. Pray with enough gusto, believe with enough confidence, and worldly success will naturally yield to the wishes of your soul. But for all that positive branding, it still leaves us with the same negative Calvinist conclusion. That if you’re economically unsuccessful it’s your fault, and there’s something wrong with you. Surely struggles to cover rent are an innate fault of your lack of faith. It was Calvinism repackaged as self-help. Postwar America ate it up.
Oral Roberts ran with it on a grift. The Pentecostal televangelist went on the air to preach “seed faith.” The notion that donating to ministry returns dividends in god’s mercy in the form of material success. Give to the ministry, and get back tenfold from god. In the 1950s Roberts was televising sensational alleged physical healings as proof of his authority. The tangible evidence of his favor with god through miracles made the sermon on giving him money as “seed faith” a short step to subscribe to. One of the most lucrative forms of christianity.
Over the years disillusionment grew among donors whose investments yielded no material blessings. And by 1987 Roberts sealed his legacy as a grifter when he told his congregation that if he didn’t raise $8,000,000 by the end of March god would kill him. [30] But the damage was done to U.S. protestant culture; give to get. Suddenly god was an investment vehicle in the U.S. similar to the Roman Catholic paid indulgences of 16th century Europe.
Itinerant U.S. evangelist, Kenneth Hagin, brought the idea full circle. Widely acclaimed as “the father of the modern faith movement,” Hagin established Rhema Bible Training Center near Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1974. From these halls he gave the U.S. the Word of Faith movement. His flavor of christianity taught that proclamations of faith could speak material blessings into reality. And that it was always god’s will that his followers enjoy wealth, therefore their lack of it was a sign of some inward failure of faith. Transformed by “seed faith” economic morality, Word of Faith became known as Prosperity Gospel. Hagin’s influence was far-reaching, and to this day his ministry has established 300 such schools across 50 countries, along with thousands of churches. Nearly everyone that teaches Prosperity Gospel either studied under him, or under someone who did.
And that’s how we got Joel Osteen.
Where the Magnificat avowed an assurance from the divine that the rich would be sent away empty, Prosperity Gospel promised the poor they were empty because of their lack of donations to their pastor. They both called themselves christian, but proclaimed opposing theologies. It’s the distance between the two that this essay is measuring.
V
In 1921 Walter Benjamin wrote Capitalism as Religion — three pages, never published in his lifetime, found among his papers posthumously. [17] He described capitalism not as a replacement for religion but as a religion itself. The thesis was built on three essential principles.
First, capitalism is purely cultic. Traditional religions develop beyond a cult through theology, doctrine, feast days, and seasonal observances. Capitalism reduces existence to mere compliance. It dominates your life without requiring your belief. Disbelief offers no relief. Every year, every month, every hour of every day is governed by a structure that has no regard for your feelings about it. There is no opt out.
Second, it is permanent. All ancient religions built relief into their calendar — a sabbath, a Jubilee, a season of rest. Capitalism, in Benjamin’s diagnosis, recognizes no such rhythm in its fundamental logic. Every day is a day of obligation. One might argue that weekends and holidays are a sabbath from capitalism. But those days don’t delay rent or loan deadlines. Contractual agreements hang over your head, even in your sleep.
Third — and here is Benjamin’s sharpest observation — capitalism creates Schuld without atonement. A German word combining debt and guilt into one: an economic condition and a moral standing fused into a single term. Every religion in human history offers a mechanism of release from guilt: confession, Jubilee, absolution, sacrifice. A history wiped clean. Capitalism provides none. A credit score follows you for the rest of your life. Even filing bankruptcy might save your credit score, but it still leaves its suspicious mark on your history that deters creditors from trusting you. There is no confessor who can truly relieve the burden of your financial history in capitalism.
Capitalism manufactures debt-guilt, ensures there’s no relief or meaningful forgiveness, and then labels your inability to escape its infrastructure a personal failing.
Benjamin didn’t suffer an illusion that the capitalist machine was in this shape as some accident. He saw it as the design. People who read their own poverty as personal failure buy self-help books. They try taking personal responsibility to work on themselves. All of that effort detracts from the effort it would take to organize against the capitalist arrangement that requires a working class in poverty to function. Shame is an essential cog in the capitalist machine.
Mind you, Benjamin wrote this in 1921 — before his eyes could witness the prosperity gospel, the student loan crisis, the payday lending industry, or the medical debt epidemic. He was a canary in a coal mine whose foresight named monsters before they were born by reading the writing on the walls within the nightmare. Benjamin’s insight revealed Weber’s iron cage wasn’t made of iron at all, but Schuld. The shame of the working class.
VI
In the fallout of the 2008 economic crash, Maurizio Lazzarato wrote The Making of the Indebted Man. [18] He argued neoliberalism’s greatest achievement wasn’t the deregulation of markets or the dismantling of the welfare state. Though it succeeded well in disenfranchising the people in those regards. No, its pieta was the transformation of the human being from worker to debtor. A critical narrative shift for the evolving U.S. oppression that’s outlived its Gilded Age, and implements a new system for the socioeconomic circumstances it finds itself in today.
Neoliberalism’s self-image in fantasy is homo economicus, coined by Foucault. The rational self-interested market actor characterized by their free choice of options aimed at maximizing their utility. A narrative that at least dignified the human person with agency.
Neoliberalism’s self-image in nightmare is Lazzarato’s homo debitor. One who doesn’t enjoy the luxury of choice, but whose debt obligation precedes him. He’s no market actor. He’s the market’s raw material. One whose future is decided before the individual has an opportunity to make any choices. And the entire economy is built on his back.
The elegance of the shift from worker to debtor makes it more elusive to comprehend, and therefore to resist.
Worker wages are transparent. You can visit the workplace. You can read the cheques. You can run the math. Get the torches and pitchforks, and get in the car loser; we’re going to threaten our employer to pay us fairly or suffer the brutality of our hands.
But debt is total. It colonizes more than the hours you spent clocked in. It impacts your psychology, your sleep, breeds self-limiting beliefs, your sense of who you can become next year, where you can live, and even how much you’re willing to address your medical needs. Coping with debt-based economics requires the worker to minimize themselves to fit between the cogs in the machine. It’s harder to organize a resistance against something that feels like a personal condition. Homo debitor simply lives and dies by the ledger.
Let’s read the ledger on the average U.S. citizen. U.S. citizens collectively carry over $1.66 trillion in federal student loan debt according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [19] A number students aren’t paying back fast enough to stop the bleeding. Did you know student debt is the single largest asset on the U.S. federal government’s balance sheet? [31] And let’s not forget the predatory lending in the U.S. called payday loans. On average, payday loans of $375 cost $520 in fees by the time the debt’s reconciled according to Pew Charitable Trusts. [20] And one in four payday loans roll over nine or more times trapping borrowers on a hamster wheel that stops being about the original amount owed according to The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [21] How much of those receipts read like evidence of personal irresponsibility to you? Or does that read more like an all-encompassing cult that subsists on perpetual indebtedness to function?
A study published in Social Science & Medicine tracked participants carrying consumer debt and found that the psychological distress operates independently of the financial stress itself. [22] Respondents described their debt in the language of moral failure: “I feel like I’m a bad person because I can’t pay this off.” Participants exhibited higher blood pressure, higher rates of depression and anxiety, and worse self-reported health across every metric compared to those without such debt. Debt induces real measurable medical conditions.
Medical debt operates under similar circumstances. Illness and injury aren’t conscious choices you consented to. Did you get the opportunity to negotiate the number at the bottom of your hospital bill? Was there any conversation about your consent to the years of your life that would go into paying for the privilege of breathing? But if you can’t pay it then you already imagine the criticism of your peers. You’re bad with money. You’re financially irresponsible. You failed to plan ahead. Misfortune that naturally comes with the human experience becomes a debt so far beyond your means that attempting to repay it means forfeiting the very life that medical care was supposed to preserve. Yet somehow that’s your guilt to carry. Some kind of character flaw that doesn’t befall the finest among us.
Leonardo Boff argued that the destitute aren’t mere objects of theological concern, but its epistemological locus. The Brazilian Franciscan, and liberation theologian, was silenced by the Vatican in 1985 prohibiting him from teaching, publishing, or speaking publicly. That sanction came directly from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later be known as Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican had been groomed by empire for centuries into domesticating their gospel message into something more conducive to the rule of men, and that same institution saw Boff’s work as something that needed to be stopped.
But Boff’s perspective was Beatific. He argued that only those most consumed by the material consequences of the debt economy can see it clearly. Blessed are the abject, and the destitute. He saw that privilege obscures the vision of injustice designed into man made systems. And that the fat cats who sit at the top enjoy the illusion that their freedom from debt’s boot on their throats is the product of merit and outstanding character. But the father of four, t-boned by a drunk driver on their way home after juggling their third job, accumulated astronomical medical debt due to some character deficiency. Capitalism’s arrangement failed to support those who needed it most; and it was built that way as a feature not a bug. All to fatten the bottom lines of insurance shareholders.
“Anyone who wants to elaborate relevant liberation theology must be prepared to go into the ‘examination hall’ of the poor. Only after sitting on the benches of the humble will he or she be entitled to enter a school of ‘higher learning.’” [23]
Who witnessed the Beatific vision in Jesus’ thesis more clearly; Boff or Osteen? Reader, if you have the eyes to see, then is the good news empathy for the destitute, or Prosperity Gospel? The counter-tradition of prosperity against the Beatitudes was no accident. It came from systemic selection of interpretation that compounded on itself until it eclipsed Jesus’ original message.
VII
The powers that be did their damndest. But they never erased the whole canon.
The Magnificat survived in black and white contained in Luke. The Workers in the Vineyard parable remains in print. Acts 2 and 4, the Jubilee — all still canon. It was the Christian institutions that were subverted. The spirit of the original gospel message was not. Leviticus 25 commands debt cancellation every 50 years by divine decree invoking the Hebrew word deror meaning liberty — “Proclaim liberty throughout the land.” Not as philanthropic charity, not virtue-signaling mercy from performative politicians, but rather a holy prescription from on high. [9] Deuteronomy 15 runs the same logic on a seven-year cycle: “There need be no poor people among you” — not spiritual metaphor, but a covenant being fulfilled via direct action. [10]
When Jesus began his mission reading off Isaiah 61 in Luke 4, ancient listeners didn’t hear vague spiritual rhetoric, poetry, or allegory. [8] To their ears an economic announcement had been proclaimed boldly. Release the slaves. Cancel the debts. Give the land back. The good news was always political and economic first. The Constantinian shift made sure you inherited a merely spiritual version — because the economic prescription of a just lord doesn’t serve the interests of those hungry to accumulate wealth endlessly like tumors in the body of our countries. It’s more convenient to table the conversation as literature about the sins of the soul. That works for seats of power more conveniently than serving justice to the poor.
The Political Theology Network chimes in, not as some fringe liberation theology outlet, but a peer-reviewed academic body based in Villanova University. Their journal Political Theology posits that debt forgiveness wasn’t some act of discretionary charity, but a matter of divine justice, and a god-ordered liberation of persons and families crushed by debt and indentured into slavery by creditors. [24]
The Vatican declared 2025 a Jubilee of Hope which led to no comprehensive debt cancellation anywhere on earth of course. [25] We’re talking about the world’s largest religious institution, holder of billions in real estate and financial assets and an active participant in global banking systems, performatively issued the ancient symbol of Jubilee without acting on a single debt instrument anywhere in the world. Sure the world’s debt is not theirs to forgive, and the original Jubilee was more of a practice between ancient Israelites. But we don’t even see Catholics forgiving each other’s debts. The Vatican flashed the tiger stripes of the gospel with none of the fangs. It was more of a suggestion than something that resembles the covenantal demands of the original Jubilee observance. Roman Catholic Jubilee was ceremonious, but left ledgers unchanged. Which is convenient for Catholic fat cats who want to be able to attend mass without any guilt over not actually dispensing any justice for the impoverished.
Ernst Bloch was a German Jewish Marxist philosopher and close intellectual peer of Walter Benjamin; the same Benjamin whose diagnosis of capitalism as religion you just read about. Bloch was a committed atheist who fled Nazi Germany, and later defected from East Germany when the Berlin Wall went up. As such, Bloch had no personal stake in defending christianity as a faith.
But two of his major works, The Principle of Hope and Atheism in Christianity, built the case that the most subversive movements in human history came from religious texts, and that institutional power spent millennia trying to suppress it. [26][27] He coined the phrase “utopian heretic core.” The raw eschatological impulse that insists that the current order is not the ultimate order. That the verdict from the chair of power is not the final verdict. Some innate push from the lowly to assert that a change is yet to be revealed that unties the injustices caused by unjust men. For Bloch, the messianic isn’t a consolation, but the driving force of revolutionary imagination.
A theologian from Arkansas named James Cone is widely recognized for founding black liberation theology, and spent his career at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He paralleled Bloch’s observations from within Christianity. [28] Whereas Latin American liberationists read the gospel through the lens of colonized poverty, Cone read it through the lens of anti-black racism, segregation, Jim Crow, and the bodies of black U.S. citizens hanging from trees. In his work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he argues the crucifixion isn’t a symbolic transaction settling a cosmic debt that should avert our eyes to the heavens, but rather an injustice issued by the state executing an impoverished preacher from a colonized people for threatening the status quo of Rome and the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. He puts the crucifixion back in the body of Christ vs the state, instead of a cosmic symbol about sin and afterlife.
Cone didn’t perceive a vision of the resurrection without the context of what lynching meant to black and white people in U.S. history. The resurrection is god’s response to the noose, the cross, and every instrument of empire used to wave a hand that certain lives don’t matter. Jesus undoes it.
The last will be first, and the first will be last. The powerful will be cast from their thrones. And the hungry will be filled with good things. That’s not a metaphor to Cone, but a divine promise yet to be revealed from behind the veil of state-issued oppression and erasure.
What this essay is covering isn’t new. We’re drawing on the original tradition of the gospel message, and dusting off the obscurity that institutions used to subvert its message. A plain reading does the revolutionary soul more service than the lens institutions have imposed between the pages and the reader. Which begs the question: how did the lens get there, and was it a deliberate conspiracy?
VIII
This was not a master plan.
There was never a secret cabal of bishops and emperors conspiring to bury Christianity’s origins in economic liberty with the dirt of oppressive power. It was a natural process of selective interpretation over millennia contextualized by the conveniences of power, and the emerging theologies of each era. Something harder to dismantle than conspiracy, because conspiracy can be exposed. What happened to christianity was structural, gradual, and built upon the mutual self-preservation of mingling institutions around the world.
Institutions select for interpretations that serve their survival. That’s more common sense self-preservation than a radical political take. Guatemala didn’t need to formally ban the Magnificat. It just needed the church to become useful rather than threatening. And the church, faced with the choice between martyrdom and survival, made the choice that any self-preserving institution makes.
I can attest to this personally. As a former Catholic seminarian before my own dissent from the church, I can assure you the halls of seminaries are filled with cautionary warnings about the hazard of Marxism. When you ask why, no one has a particularly good answer. But the warning has been so deeply instilled that educators repeat it unanimously. Roman Catholicism’s Guatemalan wound left an anti-Marxist scar. But the reasoning behind it was conveniently forgotten. Probably because the memory wasn’t particularly noble to begin with. There’s no easy way to teach Catholic capitulation to state pressure in a digestible way to seminarians. But that’s how institutions transmit ideology. The truth doesn’t get burned in a pillaging victory of the empire. It burns out with a quiet whimper. Less a conspiracy, and more a gradually tightening grip on the voice of history and justice until the institutionally correct narrative becomes common sense.
Anselm wasn’t a hired ideologue. He was a theologian working within the intellectual framework of feudal Europe, using the honor-debt logic of his era to describe the relationship between god and humanity. His framework fit the world it came from, and then outlasted it. Because debt and guilt are virtually timeless at this stage of human history and its legacy with surplus. Protestant thinkers took Calvin’s predestination to levels of existential anxiety that he never planned. There are no meeting minutes of Peale, Roberts, and Hagin discussing the establishment of Prosperity Gospel so much as independent thinkers contextualized by a gospel message as it was relevant to their experience (and their experience of their wallets). Though they worked independently, a single idea evolved through each of them chronologically in an organic way until it became the western christianity we know today.
That being said, capitalism isn’t a monolith. Welfare states, debt relief programs, and bankruptcy law represent internal contradictions within the broader arrangement. Which shows us that guilt mechanics are contested even within the systems that produce it. Different capitalist societies have produced different relationships to debt and shame to varying degrees. The argument isn’t aiming to call the outcome inevitable or universal. Merely that a dominant theological tradition covered for a dominant economic logic, and that cover was less of an accident than relationships forged by institutions that shared space in a hegemony. If this economic model and that theological model are going to both be part of a de facto way of life that people ought not question, then they’re going to weave together to protect one hegemony — that’s just the way things are.
And any interpretations that threaten the reality that keeps capitalism and christianity as the social norm gets spiritualized, outsourced to an afterlife with no material conditions, or declared metaphorical rhetoric.
There’s no conspiracy to expose, but a structure that has to be dismantled on multiple dimensions. The first step is to go back to the original texts, and the people they were written for. Which takes us back to where this essay began.
IX
The original Christian scriptures were always a letter written to the family whose children’s toys are riddled across the front lawn during an eviction. Divine inspiration written for the person drowning in medical debt after an untimely trip to the emergency room. A love letter to the graduate whose diploma came with more debt than job offers.
Gutiérrez and Boff weren’t in the business of inventing new radical interpretations for a woke mind virus, so much as reading off the original canon without letting the institution over their shoulder tell them how to read it. As a conservative classicist, Hart had no fondness for liberation theology. But his work revealed the original Greek text carried explicit economic content that centuries of mistranslation had quietly eroded. Institutional power didn’t need to remove the canon if only it could control how it was read, and outsource the Nazarene’s communalist economic model to the metaphysical; effectively defanging a faith originally commissioned to subvert the state power that now claims it. I always thought Roman Catholicism was a bit of an oxymoron.
Yet for all of the language we’ve covered there’s a curious gap remaining. We discussed Benjamin’s Schuld; the fusion of guilt and debt as a simultaneous burden in a word. Benjamin envisioned that word to refer to the guilt of the lower class owed to the upper class. But where is the language to discuss that same concept reversely moving in the other direction?
What about the colonizer’s debt to the colonized? Don’t the slave owners owe something to the enslaved, and their descendants? Will the bank pay back what it owed to the neighborhood it redlined for decades while extracting what equity remained? This essay could go on for another 10 pages discussing the massive debt the global north owed to the global south; a relationship built on centuries of colonial extraction. Fret not reader, we’re not going another 10 pages.
The point is these are also Schuld. The phrase ‘white guilt’ didn’t come from nowhere. There’s a relentless pile of guilt and shame accumulating under the stacks of dirty money. Unfortunately for the impoverished, the fat cats seated on power have been broadly remorseless.
From Anselm to Prosperity Gospel, a western christianity has been molded to fit a one-way motion of Schuld. It makes the debtor carry their condition as a personal moral failure while making the creditor’s accumulation appear like divine virtue. Schuld is shit rolling downhill. The shame belongs to the lower class, and the blessing belongs to the upper class as the primary function of the debt machine.
Yet the origins of Judeo-Christian history directly reveal a two-way window, not a one-way. Leviticus 25 commanded the creditor class to release what was owed. To be stewards of wealth that belonged to a higher lord. The Magnificat wasn’t mincing words when it called for the powerful to step down. It said they would be cast down. The Workers in the Vineyard parable promised justice to all, not just those who earned first place through merit. Did scripture call on the creditor class to be generous, or did it tell them their account with god was in the negative?
Reader, if you have the eyes to see, then what direction does the Schuld of the original Judeo-Christian text call for? And who really holds the bag on the debt from the Beatific perspective? More importantly, are we going to pretend we can’t see the real reason these religions were created in the first place? Manifestations of the utopian heretic core grasping at justice. And although the U.S. has established separation of church and state, there’s no denying the coupling that’s happened between capitalism and religion. Not to mention the burgeoning Christian Nationalism. Therefore to harness what this essay has called the most subversive power in human history, the utopian heretic core, one must separate the radical message of faith from the institutions that tell us how to interpret it. But history shows that mission comes down to individuals who seek to educate themselves without the censorship of institutions that tell them how to exercise their faith.
There has never been a western Jubilee. And the lower class is keeping count.
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