The Anti-Greed Gospel: How Wealth and Racism are Connected with Dr. Malcolm Foley

In this thought-provoking episode of Faithful Politics, co-hosts Josh Burtram and Will Wright sit down with Dr. Malcolm Foley, a historian, pastor, and advisor at Baylor University, to discuss his latest 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. Dr. Foley unpacks the historical and theological connections between greed, economic exploitation, and racial violence, challenging the conventional narratives about race and capitalism. He explores how the desire for profit fueled the transatlantic slave trade, sustained Jim Crow laws, and continues to shape modern economic and political inequalities. Through a compelling discussion of history, theology, and practical application, this episode invites listeners to examine how greed operates in their own lives and communities—and what the church must do to counteract it.

Guest Bio: Dr. Malcolm Foley
Dr. Malcolm Foley is a historian, pastor, and special advisor to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor University. He earned his PhD in religion from Baylor, specializing in African-American Protestant responses to lynching from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. He serves as the director of Black Church Studies at Truett Theological Seminary and co-pastors Mosaic Waco, a multicultural church in Waco, Texas. Dr. Foley has been featured in Christianity Today, The Anxious Bench, and Mere Orthodoxy, where he addresses racial violence, economic injustice, and the church’s role in promoting equity and inclusion. His latest book, The Anti-Greed Gospel, provides a bold theological critique of capitalism, calling for a reformation of Christian priorities away from wealth accumulation and toward communal care.

Transcript

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Hi there, faithful politics listeners and viewers. If you're joining us on YouTube and of course our listeners joining us on the podcast stream, it's great to have you here today watching with us. Also, if you're on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe and hit the notification bell. Come on. Well, we're getting, we're getting professional here, man. We gotta remember to tell them to like, subscribe, slam the like button, smash it. All those things. And of course, I'm your faithful host, Josh Bertram. And I'm joined as always by our political host, Will. It's good to see you, Will. How are you? Good, absolutely. And today we have the privilege of having Dr. Malcolm Foley on our show. No relation to Matt Foley, by the way. We already cleared this up from the beginning, but he is a distinguished pastor, historian and speaker. and he serves as a special advisor to President for President for Equity and Campus Engagement at Baylor University. He earned his PhD in religion from Baylor and which focuses on African-American Protestant responses to lynching from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. He's also the director of Black Church Studies at Truett Theological Seminary and co-pastors Mosaic Waco, a multicultural church in Waco, Texas, alongside with his wife Desiree. He's been featured in many publications such as Christianity Today, The Anxious Bench, and Mere Orthodoxy, where he addresses topics related to racial violence, economic exploitation, and the church's mission in promoting equity and inclusion. And today we get to talk to him about his new book coming out, The Anti-Greed, sorry, that, there you go, The Anti-Greed, Gospel, Why the Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way. forward. Thank you for being on this program. Do you have it there? Yeah, this is it. I just got my first actual physical copy of the book yesterday. So this is fresh. Oh, oh yeah. See, and I got the real back. You can see the colors. see? Uh-huh, see? It even smells, I mean, that's the advanced copy. The real one, I mean, it even smells wonderful. The art doesn't have any smell to it, but this is the good stuff. That is true. is true. Hey, real fast, real fast. I'm going to edit this out, but do me a favor. Your sound is clipping on my end. So can you turn the gain down a little bit? And the... Good. The microphone too, just so you know, it's the flat part or it's the side part that actually is picking you up. Okay, okay. yeah, just keep it in mind, but you should be okay. Okay, sorry about that. Is that sounding... does that sound better? Okay, okay, okay, sorry about that. good. All right. Go ahead, Josh. Sorry. I mean to mess you up. I do all the editing. So it's like, I think about this stuff. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. You know, and I'm just wondering, you have that nice fresh copy. Did you completely rewrite the book and give me or did I get the okay. It's still the same. It's the same content inside. Good, good. Well, thank you so much for being on the program with us, Malcolm. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing with Happy to be with you all. So yeah, we kind of gave you a little bit of a biography there, but kind of to start us off, give us a sense of what brought you from, you know, kind of your origin stories to writing a book about the anti-greed gospel. Help us kind of get the big anchors there. Yeah, so first of all, I mean, I was a math, and computer science kid all through up from middle school, high school, even up through a fair amount of undergrad. I took a compared religion class in 10th grade. And that was what kind of incited my love, particularly for church history and theology. But I really didn't want to talk about race. I was like, I've got other things that are really interesting to me. I don't want deal with all this race stuff. so when I started my PhD, I wanted to do work on the early church fathers, specifically the Greek early church fathers and Calvin. And so I did that for a little while. But there was just this question that bothered me. when we were studying the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the early 20th century, a bunch of basically a bunch of Christians fighting about the interpretation and authority of scripture, one of the questions that kept bothering me was, well this is a period where particularly black men are being set on fire in front of crowds of thousands of people. What's the church doing and saying about that? And I was especially wondering what black churches were doing and saying about And I kept looking for a book specifically on that and I found paragraphs in books and articles, but not something focused on specifically what were black Christians doing and saying, especially at the height of this death. And so that's what inspired my dissertation. But then that also got me into thinking more deeply about not only the origins of race, but why racial violence persists. And then and paired with me reading some reading some other things around that around that time. It became very, very clear to me that race is not fundamentally an issue of ignorance and hate. It's actually it's actually it's actually an issue of greed. That was its origin. And that's why it and that's why it continues that race is fundamentally a category that's meant to justify modes of economic exploitation. And so if that's. If that's true, that also has to then that also ought to shape the way the way that we treat the way that we treat race and racism. That the that the antidote is not necessarily just that we learn about each other or that we are just nicer to each other. No, like it it it actually requires a kind of material commitment on all of our on all of our parts. If greed is the issue, then we've got a then we then we've got a. as I like to tell folks, we've got to go for the eyes of the demon rather than its extremities. that's what was kind of the catalyst for this particular book. Awesome. Yeah, I think that that's really, that's a really unique perspective and take on it that I don't disagree because you're way smarter than I am, but when you hear people talk about slavery and they talk about, you know, racism in the country, Depending on who you're talking to, most of them will find that little nugget and say, well, you know, was a black person anyways, right? That like sold them on to slavery. I'm like, like, yeah, like tribes, you know, and people just with their side hustles. Like if that person knew what the outcome would be of the slave trade, like would they have still made the same, you know, the same choices. And so everything you're saying. does apply. But I'd love maybe for you to kind of unpack that a little bit more if you can, just so we can better understand how greed was really at the origin of all this. Yeah, so I have a line in the book that I try to repeat every chance I get, which is that the Portuguese got involved and formed this slave trade, not because they were racist, but because they had markets they wanted to expand. But once you get your hold on such cheap labor, just like, however I can keep this going, I'm going to keep this going. So as they have to justify that to both themselves and to the pope, that's when you get the narratives of, these people are savages and we're here to civilize them. Or they're heathens and this is an opportunity for us to Christianize them. All of these are narratives that essentially allow them to hide the fact that actually we're making a whole bunch of money and we just wanna continue making a whole bunch of money. And so whatever narratives sound good to you and to me to keep that going, we'll keep that going. And so, and that then bleeds into, when this form of slavery reaches the Americas and starts getting embedded into American law and things like that. You know, the reason for all of those things. is the fact that they maintain these systems of economic exploitation. As long as people are going to keep making money, people are going to keep finding ways to justify them making all that money. And so I frame it in the book as a demonic cycle of self-interest that begins in greed and pride. So it begins with the desire to both exploit one another and to dominate one another. And because As human beings, we don't like being exploited or dominated. In order to keep somebody in that position, you need to use violence to do it. But we also, most of us, have consciences. And so we don't like to wake up and think, what a, I'm excited for a day of exploiting, dominating it, and killing my neighbors. So, because we don't like to think that about ourselves, we create narratives that then tell us, well, I'm not, like, that's not what I'm doing to this person. Some of those narratives may tell me, well, this person isn't even really a person. Like they're really just, they're just a thing. They're just property. That allows me to treat them in a particular way. Or, you know, it's because of something in them that they're in this position. So it's really not my fault that I'm making a whole bunch of money off of them. But all of this creates a cycle, a cycle of exploitation of violence and of lies. And that's the cycle that we're seeing when we see America's history of race and especially of racial violence. Man, that's really compelling to think about the justifications that were made in the name of greed, in the name of economic prosperity for a certain amount of people. And of course, you know, we want to think that we're different, you know, that we don't have those same proclivities or those same, you know, that greed doesn't affect us to that way. But, you know, before we get into more of like really analyzing greed and the way that it affects not only the history of racism and prejudice, but also its current manifestations. I would love to talk a little bit about the concept of race itself. So one thing that I heard and This is probably because I haven't read as widely as I should on this, but how is race a concept that's been created? I've heard this said that it's essentially was created in the bi-white. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. order to give justification, be able to conceptualize something around a justified slavery and exploitation and racism and things like that. Because the reason I'm asking this, I'm assuming that... It wasn't in like the 1600s or the 1500s when people first started noticing that people had different color skin than they did or that they had different cultures and things like that. So how is it that where did this concept really come from? Kind of make the argument for us to understand where race comes from, because that is very controversial to a lot of people. And the circles that that I Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. but in the ones like they question that. And so I would love for you to kind of make that case and that justification for us. that's the thing. The fact that we look different, mean, that's, okay, that's a fact, but placing any more meaning in that is something that we have to do. Like, it's not something that's just apparent. You can't tell anything about me. just by nature of my skin color. That's all that tells you is the color of my skin. But for that to become bound up in claims about my character, about my preferences, like all those kinds of things, all those things have to be imported into that understanding. And so then the question is, so we can think about this with any form of racial stereotyping. Why do those stereotypes exist? Is it because of the gathering of data or is it because these are very convenient things to think about these groups of people because they benefit me in a particular way? So, in so in thinking about particularly the history, the history of race, and I take this I take this definition from from sociologists from sociologists Oliver Cox. He basically he's he's his his his his framing is essentially that that race becomes a thing when when you have European nations seeking to exploit African African peoples. And so once the I have this image where once Europeans begin basically have the technology to travel, know, to essentially travel the world, they see the world, they see that it is good for the picking and they reach out and they reach out to grab it. And so they encounter African civilizations, don't understand the language, don't understand kind of what's just kind of what's going on, but also don't necessarily have the desire to figure that out. So, so there's like, well, here's a cheap source of labor. Let's work, let's go with that. And so then as opposed to seeking to understand those civilizations, you then just default to, Their civilization is not like ours, so it must not actually exist. And so you get, so you start forming those narratives about people. And we can really tell how different they are because of how different they look and how different they act and all these kinds of things, which we don't necessarily want to put in the work to understand, but if that can benefit us in a particular way. Let's do that. And all of that just points to the fact that, mean, for many of us, just as human beings, our tendency is first to self-interest. It's one of the things that the gospel has to work out of us every single day of our lives. That's one of the hardest things to do to be obedient to the scripture that says that we're to set others' interests above our own. Like, that's just not the way that we normally go. But the history of race specifically and starting in the 15th century where you start seeing the narratives of particularly blackness and whiteness, they show up as kind of moral and racial categories, that's when that happens. And it happens at the same time as the flourishing of the slave trade because that's the reason why those categories exist. They exist in order to prop up that system. And that's an important point that a number of have made, but one of the things that I've noticed about a lot of the popular literature, particularly about race, is that that particular connection gets muted. And this is something that Martin Luther King emphasized in the last two years of his life. He pressed that when we're dealing with racism, we're actually dealing with triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism. That is to say, racism, economic exploitation and war and violence. And he's like, you can't deal with one of those things without dealing with all three of them. And so in a sense, what I'm doing in my book is also re-narrating that paradigm for folks too. so that people understand that all of those things are connected. So if we're gonna deal with this thing that we call race, we've gotta deal with all of its elements. Wow. So, Ida B. Wells, has been a pretty central figure, like, you know, resisting racial economic oppression. I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on, You know, one, what we can learn kind of from her advocacy, activism, whatever you want to call it. But before you do that, maybe you can explain a little bit about who she is. And I should note, I'm not talking about Nicole Hannah Jones because she uses that. So yeah, who's, who's that to be Wells? So Ida B. Wells is also a personal hero of mine. My eldest daughter's middle name is Ida after Ida B. Wells. So she is, I mean, she is the most significant person in the history of anti-lynching activism. Up until the early 1890s, she alongside most people in the nation thinks that lynching is something that happens to black men because they sexually assault white people. white women and and and in 1892 one of her friends is lynched in Memphis when she's out of town and she hears about this because it's it's it's it's three men but one of them but one of them is one of her is one of her friends and she and she finds out about this and she's like wait a minute I'm I'm pretty sure my friend didn't didn't didn't do anything like that so let me investigate and so and And so she investigates this and finds out that it's part of a dispute between grocery store owners that then turns into violence and there are all these other elements to this story. And so then she starts investigating other lynchings and she's like, wait a minute, there are a lot of kind trumped up charges in a lot of these situations. It seems to be the case that what's common is that these black men and women are either transgressing spoken or unspoken social boundaries or things like that. In some cases, people get too well off and they become a threat to the status quo, like all these kinds of things. And she's like, oh, lynching is just a form of social control. It's a way of, as she'll say, it's a way of keeping the Negro in his place. And this kind of sets off for her a decades long anti-lynching campaign, which is not only across the nation, but international, where she's giving speeches, where she's writing editorials, where she is just relentlessly trying to fight back this violent regime. And some things that are laudable about her, I mean, her creativity. I mean, this is a by any means necessary thing for her. she will advocate for particular modes of political action, whether it's voting for particular individuals or voting for particular laws. She'll encourage black communities to leave the communities where lynchings take place because as she'll say, these communities depend on black labor. So if you remove that labor, then with that capital investment goes goes with it. And that'll show these communities not to treat you in that way. She'll also advocate for self-defense. She'll advocate for... for narrating these things from the pulpit, in the press, all those kinds of things. Basically every major form of anti-lynching resistance can be found in her corpus. And that's amazing, especially for a black woman at that time to do that kind of work and to face the kind of flack that she did, because she wrote some of these things. immediately after this lynching in 1892 and she wrote them in an editorial under a pseudonym and after that editorial came out there were threats against her life. There were folks who said, you know, we're gonna find this guy and castrate and lynch him. so she, so after that she actually, she fled the South and didn't live there anymore but constantly visited to. to investigate lynchings. But she is just a marvelous woman and like I said, a personal hero of mine too. And that is amazing. What an awesome story about someone, like you said, who faced unbelievable odds against her and yet persevered and the difference that it makes. I love those stories because there's something about the human character or perseverance that is so touching, you know, in the midst of this and this threat to her own life and this threat to her own family and her own means of production herself and way of gaining, you know, a good living herself. And all of this is under threat. And yet she has the values and character to continue despite. I think that's amazing. And what an awesome story. And I hope that what you just said and that little taste of what you gave of her life really wets the appetite of people that are listening to go and explore more. I know it's done that for me, even just like being honest, right? And just transparent here that's done that for me to think this is a person that I should try to understand because people that are able to persevere through that kind of adversity. Those are the kinds of people you want to learn from and want to understand. And so I just I just really appreciate that. And, you know, one of your chapters, it's actually Chapter two, you name it, the Talons and Tendrils of Racial Capitalism. And, you know, we grew up in America. We're like the capitalists, whatever. I know it started kind of in England and in Europe. And now, you know, we're like this big capitalist country. And I kind of grew up thinking, I mean, capitalism, there's nothing wrong with capitalism. There's no issues with capitalism. It's great. It brings the most people out of poverty, yada, yada, yada. And again, I'm not saying anything about those specific truths or arguments or whatever. Obviously, I don't think there's nothing wrong with any, because I don't think there's any perfect system that would imply perfection. And that's not true. But I would love for you to talk about racial capitalism. Mm-hmm. a term I don't hear. I haven't heard very much in the conservative circles that I've ran in in the past and haven't heard that talked about very much. Probably if anyone were to say that someone would just write them off, you're being woke and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. I would love for you to kind of what is racial capitalism? Is it distinguished from capitalism itself? And how does it kind of show up in our lives today? So thank you. Thank you for that. Because this is actually this is another one of the intentions of the book, which is to to not so much popularize, but to but to but to but to expose people to this to this to this term. So so included in that in that term of racial capitalism is this understanding that the capitalism that we know is racial, which is to say that that that that that the that that our political economy requires us to place one another in categories so that some can remain exploited, others can remain exploiter. And over the course of the past 500 years, that category has been race. so historically, the rise of capitalism and the rise of race are happening at the exact same time. And they're happening at the exact same time because they're in many ways the same phenomenon and so and so and so that so and and and and we can see this I mean the obvious example is is racialized chattel slavery where the category the category of black is meant to define This is a this is a slave like by by being black. You're supposed to be a slave now Historically, are free black people throughout that period. But when you look at the law, when you look at the way that people, just the way that people will commonly think, the expectation is if you're black, you're enslaved. And as history goes on, even after emancipation, what you find is people continually trying to find ways to continue to exploit and suppress black communities, particularly. And so one of the things I want to do here is also apply that to the lynching era, because when people think about lynching, they generally, they're generally thinking, well, these are just like these wild racist mobs that just track people down and kill them. And one of the things that I want to press is that actually there's an economic route to that. too. And the reason why it stops is not because, there's this moral revolution and we suddenly figure out that burning people alive in front of thousands of people is wrong. No, it's that it becomes a national embarrassment. It becomes a drain on Southern business. It becomes something where as the South is industrializing and looking for capital investment, it's an It's an embarrassment. Like you don't want to be known as like, I mean, you don't want to be known as the region doing these, doing these things that France and Japan are saying is bar is, is barbarous. Like that's like, no, we've got to find other ways. We've got to find other ways to do this. So, so it's, so it, so it's also in that period that people start that the South starts, starts leaning more into Jim Crow legislation and other things like that, where they're like, okay, well, we've got to find other ways to suppress this community that aren't as. visibly violent. So violence starts to move into capital punishment and other forms like that that are quieter but still do the same kind of damage. So in using the language of racial capitalism, one of the things that I want to do and other scholars have done this too, Cedric Robinson is one, but Jonathan Tran, who I refer to in here, is another. I want people to understand that with that with our particular political economy is, at least for us, it's necessary for us to be able to think of somebody in a category that basically makes them not equal to me. I can make money, I can make money, I can make money off of them. And for us, that category has been race. Man, it's just so heartbreaking hearing this story. It is, you know. I guess I'm newly shocked. I've heard it before, but I just am. The shock is renewed, and I think that's a good thing. At just how bad it really was. You know, you think about, you think about... slavery. You're like, well, you know, the Emancipation Proclamation and this created this, you know, new society. And it's like, no, this was, this was very much embedded deeply within the culture. And we would love to think, like you said, there's some renewal, some great awakening that came around and the Christians finally were like, yes, now we're going to be equitable. Now we're going to treat people like they're actually people and they didn't because I'm assuming basically everyone in those crowds was Christian. Go ahead. Or professing. may, I mean, yeah, yeah. And if and and and if I may, I mean, this the period that I'm looking at of the lynching era, mean, contemporaries of that era of the era named that as the as the the darkest period of African-American history. And these are folks who like are a generation or two removed from slavery. So they know how bad slavery was. And this is and this is even. even darker than that. And one of the things that I want to press and kind of at the beginning of the book, I hinted this a little bit, is that what this is, what this history is, is actually a proxy war of a cosmic battle. Well, the cosmic battle is between, as Jesus says in Matthew 6, in Matthew 6 24, you can't serve two masters. You'll either love one and hate the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon. And he uses that language, I think, intentionally because what we're actually engaged in is a cosmic battle for our souls. And that cosmic battle... is the same cosmic battle as it was 2000 years ago. And that battle is between God and mammon. And so one of the things that I want to do for folks is to place these conversations about race in a cosmic context. Because I want people to understand that what you're up against, it can be very easy to turn this into a black white thing or whatever, as though our enemies are one another. And our enemies are not one another. Our enemies... are the powers and principalities. So even if somebody is seeking to kill me, they're still not my enemy. They're being a tool of the enemy, but they're not, but they're not, but they're not my, but they're, but, they're not my enemy. And that's, that's, that's what leads into some of the, some of the nonviolent stuff that shows up in the later, in the latter half of the book, because I want, I want people to, I want people to remember what the actual stakes of this battle are. Because like I said, we're not up against each other. We're up against sin, death and the devil. their most significant tools are the lies, theft and murder that ultimately result from the category of race and the acting out of racism. And so it's those like those are the categories that I want to emphasize to in many ways reshape our conversation about these things. You know, I'm going to ask you a process question, kind of like as you were writing the book. I don't read a whole lot of books about economics or whatever like that. And I'm going to make a statement that may or may not be true, but I'm guessing it's probably going to be true. rich people don't write about the dangers of greed. Yeah, that seems like it would be a really dangerous thing to do. And as you were writing this, did it dawn you, like, what if I became rich one day? Would this be a memoir to myself? Or what? Help me walk through this. Tomorrow, you hit the lottery, whatever, you come into a bunch of money. What happens to your message now, Malcolm? Yeah, that's a great question. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. i got a great church by the way i know you're i got a great church you can make a donation to by the way Yeah, so that's the thing. Yeah, so part of it has to be, at least personally, that there is a, in many ways, of a refusal to become rich. Because, well, so this is, I did this kind of thought experiment with my church a little bit where I was like, hey, have you thought about the amount of money that it would take for you to just be okay? Where you wouldn't need to make anymore? and like you could just stop and like nobody's nobody ever thinks in that way like we just think well for the rest of our lives like we'll just try to make more and then when we have to stop like we'll stop like that's like that's just the way that we just generally think and it's and and and one of the reasons is because i mean we live in a world and and a culture and this is why I love, especially evangelicals, we love using the language of the culture. Our economy is one of the most significant elements of our culture and the way that it shapes the way that we think about ourselves and one another. And we're in an economy that has baptized the desire to get rich. And we read 1 Timothy 6 and Paul says, those who desire to get rich fall into a trap and a snare. And so the very thing that Paul tells us is really, really dangerous is precisely the thing that we are told by everything around us is like perfectly fine and great. And so, and that's the same text in which he says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. So this is something that, so for me, as I think through this stuff, personally, it's that. You know, if that were to happen, then it's gonna, then it would, then it, like, I have to, this is the other thing in 1 Timothy 6, when he lays out that love of money stuff, the next thing that he says is, man of God, flee from these things. So I told the church there are two things that we're told not to fight but to flee from, it's sexual sin and greed. so for me, it's that if the opportunity to become rich presents itself, I have to run from it. So if there are ways that I can find ways to redistribute that specifically to the needy, that's the imperative on me. And like, and that's a challenge, like I said, that's a challenge to all of us. But it's also the need to internalize, I mean, in the Lord's prayer, when we pray that the Lord would provide for us our daily bread, what we need for today. And— Also in the Sermon on the Mount when he says that if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all these things will be added to you. It's not riches that will be added to you. It's all that you need. And so that contentment is something that I constantly cultivate. The Lord has met my needs. I've got everything I need. And anything in excess of that. I ought to be pouring into my neighbors and my brothers and sisters. Okay, good. I'm glad we recorded all that because when you sell your 10 millionth book... when I get big Look, look, so my joke my joke my joke is that is that if it if it gets big I I have my like like I have like like the dream car that I want and then like I'm gonna get I'm gonna I'm gonna get that and then I'll redistribute the rest of the port so that's how I just need a taste. I need a taste of that life. just a little bit. So I got to say, Malcolm, this has got to be the most challenging thing that I've for me personally from from the book. And I'm not this isn't this isn't leveling like my next comment slash question isn't leveling a criticism per se. It's more a question of how do we work through this? So one of the lines when I was you reviewing your book was just this idea and I've heard it before, and you just said it was one of the lines was that, sorry, one second. What's going on, Will? Is my mic all right? I can't hear you, you're muted. Yeah, I lost you. When you lean back, you're away from the mic. shoot, sorry dude. All right. Let me mark this so that we can edit this part. All right. So, but one of my questions that like I am wrestling with and you just said it, essentially after you have your needs met, surplus should be given to our brothers and sisters, neighbors in need, the poor. And of course like, I agree with that in principle and I also struggle with it because of this sense of, no, I've known a lot of wealthy people. I've known people that weren't wealthy. I've known people that were wealthy and just really nasty people. And I've known people that were not wealthy and really nasty people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. also, you know, that people that were great and people that were wealthy that were very generous. Like I've been the recipient of people that have been very, very generous to me and helping in the church and everything. And so, you know, when I think about the people with wealth in the New Testament that would open up their homes or that would provide for missionaries, Mm-hmm. assuming would still live lives of somewhat luxury, certainly in comparison with some of the people that were not in places of privilege. I think about, and this is kind of to your point, the problems that the Church of Corinth faced with this divide between wealthy and not, between patron and client, and how much that... caused tensions and issues and how Paul was like, don't you have your own houses to get drunk in? Which is interesting that he was like, hey, just stop getting drunk. He's like, hey, just go to your own house. anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, yeah, we'll move away from that. But my question that comes, like, how do we define need? So for instance, I have a microphone, right? I have my camera. I have this computer. I have two cars, I have a house. It come to my head. Are those needs? Well, I I, I don't know. Is there a distinction between absolute needs and relative needs between what I need in order to accomplish this? I'm assuming, like I see you've got a mic, not to try to poke at you, right? You got a mic that maybe the church paid it for, maybe you paid for whatever, but someone, well, there you go, but someone paid for it, right? And, and... And my point again is not to, it's just the right, I try to raise the kind of questions that I feel like people, not only am I thinking, but people might be thinking that they're hearing this. Well, how do we determine what a need is? Are you saying that if I buy an extra car, if I get a vacation home, that I'm in sin, that I should sell that and give the proceeds to the poor? How do I do that? How do I trust? My point is the complication of it, guess. And I would love for you to kind of speak to that and kind like, how do we determine this issue of need? Because of course, I don't want to be complicit in racism, right? I don't want to be complicit in environmental destruction. The reason I bring that up, I just talked to an author that wrote a book from Ivy University Press that was talking about the... to dual things of environmental destruction and racism and greed, yes, I think, but greed was in, and the point was that greed was at the, the, at there. By the way, well, I just heard that chat GBT for a hundred words takes up like some certain milliliters of water that has to be used to cool. The servers. on. And so, yeah, the server is, and we're using water. And so we're using all this water with how much chat GBT I've used. So all that to say, it gets complicated. And we start wondering, I know that was long, but how do we determine this? How do we work through this personal greed and whether or not we're being greedy? Yeah, this is one of like, I really do think that this is actually one of the most important pastoral care questions that we need to ask and answer in American churches. We just don't. Very few of us will actually go through that exercise of actually thinking about what it is that we actually need. And and it starts and I think it starts there. My goal is my my my goal is not. It is not necessarily the case that people are going to have to, you know, sell everything that they sell everything that they have. I have a reflection on the the on the Rich Young Ruler, an extended reflection at the at the end of the book where I basically say, you know, I mean, it it might not be the Lord's word to you that you need to sell all you have and give to the poor. It might it might be like that, like that might be what the Lord's tell you to do. But. But he is at the very least telling all of us that we ought to have the habit of selling our possessions and giving to the poor because that's it because that's in Luke and Addressed to the entire crowd. It's just that the rich young ruler has to sell everything that he has But but there is a sense in which and this and this and this is even in the in the Sermon on the Mount in the beginning of Matthew 6 when he frames fasting, prayer and almsgiving as just three regular Christian practices. There's like that, like that ought to be kind of a regular habit in our lives. But the way that I narrate need in the book is that if there is something that I am willing to narrate as a need for myself, then it is also something that I ought to be able to narrate as a need for my neighbor or my brother or sister. So then it ought to be a priority of mine that those other people have what they need to, if I say that I love them. for example, if I think that housing is a need, if I think that food is a need, then when I see my brother or sister without those things, love compels me to... to find a way to work that out for my neighbor. Like that's what, when I think of the way that love is framed by both James and John and also Christ, like it's that kind of material commitment. so I don't wanna turn this into kind of just a kind of nitpicking because it can be really easy to just kind of turn that into a navel gazing. experiment or whatever. But I do want us to ask some questions of ourselves that we're not used to asking. So even just that base question of, okay, what of these things do I actually need? And as I get closer to my brothers and sisters... What are the things that they need? What are the ways that the Lord has gifted me in ways that can serve them? What are some ways that the Lord has gifted them in ways that can serve me? So, when thinking about the 2 Corinthians passage where we're looking at Corinth and Macedonia, you know, his... Paul says, my goal is not that you suffer and they thrive or that they thrive or that they suffer and you thrive, but my goal is equality. Well, that equality is not so much a state as it is a relationship. as it is a recognition, hey, the brothers and sisters that I come into contact with have things that I need. I ought to be willing to ask those things of them. I'm going to have things that they need. So I'm going to expect them to ask those things of me. That kind of dynamic relationship, I think, to build the kinds of relationships of solidarity that I think deeply resist greed and exploitation. And so really, I hope that I hope that this raises those specific questions in the churches of anybody who reads this book and that as a pastoral care question that this is something that, you know, that people actually do work through because it's something I've had to, not only do I have to work through it, but I encourage my own, like, I mean, I encourage my own church to be thinking through these things, to be thinking through these things too. I hope that my book is an invitation. It's short, so I'm not going to answer all the questions in the book, I do want to kind of catalyze some of those kinds of questions as people seek to build communities that might look like this. So my my my last question for you is Like I don't get I don't get the sense that you're full of yourself or you You sit on a high horse and then like that I really do get the sense that you wrote this book from a from a position of passion for Care, you know about your fellow brother sister. What have you so so you you've probably never really thought about the answer to the question I'm gonna ask you I know we've been joking about your book selling five, 10 million copies or whatever, but if it does, what would that tell you about our society? What takeaway would you get about the needs of the population that purchased your book? Well, quite frankly, use the word ambition. I don't really have too many ambitions, but my ambition for this book was to, in some ways, to foment a revolution. And I say that because greed is a deeply, deeply insidious evil that has gone. It's gone under theorized in churches and under resisted in churches. So the more so, so I mean, I want to get this out because I want people to understand the evil that is is eating at them. And and and and I don't want I and I desperately don't want it to eat at them. And and and I want people to experience the fact that Christ Christ has called us not just to be producers and consumers, but to fundamentally be sharers. Because what the world needs is communities indwelt by the Holy Spirit that can show the world that there's another way to live. That we don't have to just live our lives just kind of selfishly seeking our own gain and stuff. Because that is a way that leads to destruction. And we're seeing it all around us. And so what I desperately want is for people to... not only encounter Christ in this book, to see the kinds of communities that Christ has called his people to be so that we can show, so that the world can see the church as a different form of communities that then they want to be a part of, to which we can then respond with, repent, believe, and you can get some of this too. And so it would be, I mean, that's really at the core, kind of the heart of this project. so, you know, so there's the part of me that, I mean, I think anybody who writes a book hopes that a lot of people read it. But like, but I hope a lot of people read it because this is something that, I mean, it's... The goal of book was literally to go after the eyes and the heart of a demon because it is one that has its cause in God's people. And I do not want its cause to be in God's people. And I also want God's people to be able to be an invitation to the world. And the only way that we can be an invitation to the world is if we're distinct in some of these ways that I'm naming in the book. So those are my, I guess, my hopes and ambitions for the book. That's really cool. So I would love for you, and this is my last question before, we're just going to ask some practical things at the end. How, let me put it this way, I would love for you to call out, we've kind of been dancing around it, and hitting it as well in some ways, but I'd love for you to call out the current manifestations of greed that you see in our society at large and the church in America. Almost a clarion call or a siren call maybe is better to not a siren call but a warning I guess not a siren would be bringing them so they could destroy them. That's not what I mean. I mean a warning call to get people thinking and rethinking if they haven't yet from this conversation. Getting people to think and rethink like, man, maybe this practice isn't really honoring God. Maybe things that they're saying when we're talking about the church. So yeah, call out the issues that you're seeing and the issues that, you know, in the church and in the society, maybe society first in church. And then I'd love for you to give us a little bit of hope, little injection of hope here. at the end for what you see that is going well, what's encouraging you about the future. Yeah, so it is it's rife in the world and it's rife in our in our churches. So it's rife in the world, especially if we look at the American political system where where it is. We I think we were in a situation where billionaires just ran stuff from the in the in the back room. Now they're going to be running it from the from the cabinet. And so. And we're just all gonna be upfront about it, because apparently that's where we're at. And there's that. And there's just how much power money can buy. But then there's also the fact that there are Christians who get caught up in that logic, where they're like, the only way that we survive is if we have power in these ways. And that is in many ways a failure of hope. And it's a failure to really understand that Christ's way is the way of the cross. That the way that Christ resists empire and specifically the logic of empire is not by out dominating empire, but by dying. Like that is just, that's just fundamental, like that's fundamental Christian logic, but it's like really weird to most people. So most people are like, I'm not gonna go that far. I'll believe stuff about Jesus, like, but not that far. And so even in church context, you have folks who think that the only way that the church survives is with state support. and or if it amasses a certain amount of money or whatever. And those and those things just kind of tend to go tend to go hand in hand. And then there's also just like the the the prosperity gospel meant it's the prosperity gospel manifests itself in churches in a number of different ways. And in some ways, like the assumption that the church ought to have political power is an element of the prosperity gospel. It's just you think that that's what success looks like. And it's not. mean, that's not what the scriptures say. But it's really attractive. But it's really attractive to people. know, being powerful and rich and famous, like that sounds great. Sounds great. But not according to the scriptures. So what is and what's in what's in what's encouraging, what's encouraging, I think, to me is the fact. I mean, people ask whether churches can actually do this stuff. And my response is, well, Jesus told us to, so yeah, we can, because he gave us his Holy Spirit. And I need people to understand, like, I draw this story as darkly as I do, because I need people to understand that the light shines brightest in the darkness. So understand how dark this story is because you have to understand that the light of Christ and particularly the power of the Holy Spirit is great enough to overcome all of these things. I just need us to build communities that actually lean into it. And because I am 100 % sure that this is work that the Lord is doing, has promised to do, and will complete. And so I want people to experience the joy of walking with the Lord in that. And so we preached at my church, we preached through the Sermon on the Mount over the course of 11 months. And it was just wonderful. But the most encouraging part of that was, because I told them at the beginning of the sermon series, I was like, you went. Often when you hear sermons on the Sermon on the Mount, there's a lot of qualification. You're like, Jesus didn't really say this, he didn't really mean this. I was like, I'm not doing any of that. This is what he said. What would it look like for us to actually live in this way? What would it look like for us to just do the things that Jesus told us to do? So the people who you have not reconciled with in five years and you haven't even talked to them, what would look like for you to reach out to them? Just like, because that seems to be just one of the things that Jesus is calling us to do. Like, what would that, what would it look like? What would it look like if, just if you see people in need, the default is for you to give to them. Like, what might that do to you and your habits? And then to walk with the congregation as they actually did those things and then experience the joy. of being obedient to Christ? I was like, yeah, this is what it's all about. So let's do that consistently. And that, I mean, it not only reshapes individuals, but it reshapes communities. And then when people can see that, they can see, there's something different about these people. And we're like, yeah, that's what the Holy Spirit does. And in a broadly greedy society, to see communities that have invested in the kind of solidarity that I narrate here, where it's not just generosity that can be paternalism, but it's a way of giving that brings the giver and receiver together, similar to what Christ did in the incarnation in becoming one of us in order to bring us up to where he is. When people can see that, I said, my hope is in the fact that that's work that Christ is going to do in his people because that's what the church is supposed to be. Man, I gotta tell you, Malcolm, this has been probably one of the most challenging conversations. Not, mean, just purely in the content, purely in the concepts. Like, you're so friendly and you're so easy to talk to. Has nothing to do with like you being like, I mean, I'm not saying that you can't bring the word. I'm sure you can. But I'm saying this has been like so challenging, like a conviction. And I've seen this. Now there's two separate interviews, one yesterday, one today. I wasn't even thinking about this. And then both talking about greed, both talking about the consequences of greed, the racism, the destruction that greed wrought, what? How do you say that? Not wrought. It has wrought. Yeah. you say that it brings, I guess? And I just, hope that people are listening and I hope that they're taking it to heart and instead of like just pushing it away, pushing the conviction away, pushing whatever, because it's uncomfortable, I hope that they're allowing themselves to feel some of the discomfort and some of the... Yeah, just the reality of how is greed affecting me? Because it's affecting all of us. We swim in the waters of consumerism and materialism and everything is telling us that we don't have enough. Everything is telling us that we deserve better. Everything is telling us that we should put ourselves first and not our neighbors, except with the occasional You know, we need to stop this. We need to stop hate. We need to stop, you know, whatever it is. And then but then it's back to consumer. It's like the NFL. I've been watching the it's the playoffs right now for twenty twenty five. I've been watching the playoffs and then there's this commercial in between my the beer commercials and the commercials that are telling me that the car have. sucks and I need to get a different one. There's the one where they're like, we need to stop hate. Now let's get back to you consuming more and figuring this out. So it's just like, you can't escape it. It's everywhere. And it's just so, I just appreciate the conversation so much. How can people follow your work? How can they connect with what you guys are doing? Yeah, so yes, I'm on I'm still on I'm still on Twitter for now. I will continue to call it Twitter. But it's just at at Malcolm B Foley. But then I'm also on on Instagram at at Rev Doc Malk. And then and then, you know, you can can can can grab the book Mosaic. So Mosaic Wake Up My Church, all of our sermons and stuff are online. So can check they're on they're all they're all on YouTube. You can search those there. But But yeah, my main encouragement is pick up the for yourself, your church, for your family. Yeah, I want us all to be able to fight this battle together. Well, that's so encouraging and really cool. Thank you, Malcolm, for being on the program with us today. been great to talk with you. Thank you all so much for having me. Absolutely and to our viewers and our listeners thanks for joining us again guys this has been Dr. Malcolm Foley we'll put links in the description in the show notes for you guys to check out some of his some of what he's doing and find a place where you can get the book and also thank you for sticking with us to the end of this program we appreciate you so much. We try to get great content out for you guys and this is no exception here. And so we just want to continue to do that. Thanks for your support. It really helps as we're, as we're trying to get this, these great conversations out there. And until next time, keep your conversations not right and not left, but up. God bless guys. Take care. You can hit stop.