A good friend once asked me for help with the rent. They were going through a hard time, they explained. Would my husband and I be willing to cover this one expense until they got through it?
I didn’t know how to answer. We had just given birth to our second child, and I had recently quit my job. Before that, we had been living on nonprofit and education salaries that were considered low even within our industries, and were spending as frugally as possible so that our paychecks wouldn’t be swallowed whole by the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I interjected before the conversation could go any further and said we needed time to think about it.
“Open thine hand wide,” says the Book of Deuteronomy, in one of many verses that indicate how adamantly God expects his people to follow his generous example (15:8, KJV).
Comprehensive Old Testament instructions encompass both individual giving and systemic movements toward land redistribution, debt forgiveness, and almsgiving. The New Testament is similarly insistent that we honor God through showing material care to others. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat,” says Christ; “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.” In Christ’s own telling, whatever we do for the dispossessed, we do for him (Matt. 25:35, 40).
As the early church establishes itself, similar commands are given to the people of God, even as they struggle to survive under foreign occupation. Paul, commending the Corinthian church for its spiritual depth and maturity, concludes by reminding its members to practice radical generosity in order to “prove … that your love also is genuine” (2 Cor. 8:8, ESV).
He accompanies his command with a pithy little closing, astonishing to anyone used to the acquisitiveness of contemporary life. If the Corinthians give to one another, he says, they will be assured that “the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little” (v. 15)
The assumption here is that having too much is a problem to be solved and that the people of God can help those who struggle with this particular problem by rerouting their resources. Anyone with too little—even, provocatively, with too little as a result of insufficient “gathering,” or planning and saving on their own behalf—can be cared for and protected by their more affluent neighbors.
This is a revolutionary way to think about our belongings and how they ought to be managed. The scriptural narrative, which identifies all of us as bearers of the image of God and therefore as possessors of inalienable value, gives us the corollary identification as each other’s keepers. What we do with our possessions must be constellated around our shared, inherent belovedness.
I find the Bible’s view of money beautiful but unpersuasive. I approach its teachings with the admiration and unease of a visitor to a foreign land: appreciative of what I am witnessing, sharply aware that my home is elsewhere.
Once my husband and I finished the conversation with our friend, I began thinking about all the verses about money that I’ve memorized without fully internalizing them. I reside within another narrative about wealth, and that narrative comes from the market economy.
The market and its teachings are so compelling that they have, on multiple occasions, moved me to tears. When we had our first child, I realized that there were gorgeous strollers to be had, models affixed with four-figure price tags that could roll my baby forth on sleek metallic frames that looked like ergonomic Scandinavian thrones. All the ads I scrolled through suggested that affording such a stroller was the next step in our progression as parents, in proving we were capable of providing for our offspring.
Our child’s low-slung plastic contraption seemed like an affront to her beauty and a testament to the insufficiency of my love. What had all these other parents done, I wondered, to afford their strollers? Why had I not figured out a way to do the same? I wanted the same thing that the ads wanted for me, which was to grow into the kind of person who could provide our child with the best of everything. This longing was potent enough to make me cry.
Once my child began expressing a greater interest in her surroundings, different questions arose. Why could I not provide her with Waldorf-approved toys in natural colors and textures? Why did regular admission to the baby gym seem so exorbitant? Was there any real benefit to mother-baby Pilates classes? Why was I failing to afford these things? The story that exists in my imagination, the narrative line I want to follow, features a woman whose purchasing power is commensurate with her love.
These ideas don’t seem objectionable: I want money so that I can grow into my God-given responsibilities as an adult woman. Yet they also don’t explain the protectiveness I feel toward my possessions or my reluctance to grant a friend’s request. As I considered the prospect of covering someone else’s rent, I tried to identify the reasons why we couldn’t help and realized that my logic didn’t make sense.
Was I withholding money due to fear of lack? Truthfully, my husband and I were making enough to cover our basic needs. Was I afraid that giving would compromise my child’s prospects? Our ministry and education salaries already qualified us for free preschool programming. Besides, my child had already been outfitted for the first five years of life with a raft of hand-me-down clothing and gifts from doting family and friends.
Making decisions based on financial prudence has a semblance of wisdom. Yet my reasons for wanting to protect my wealth are surprisingly ill-defined, suggestive of beliefs I can rarely bring myself to articulate. My relationship to money has the clarity of a pointillist image—coherent from a distance but disintegrating upon close inspection.
In her book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, historian Sophia Rosenfeld suggests that most of our moral questions are clarified when understood as outgrowths of an obsession. To a historically unprecedented degree, we are fixated on personal freedom. Whenever we weigh contemporary debates about money, abortion, vaccinations, or schooling, Rosenfeld says that we are really weighing arguments about individual autonomy and how to best maximize its expression.
As an example, Rosenfeld points to the way “My body, my choice” has become a rallying cry for both pro-abortion and anti-vaccination activists. That two groups associated with opposing political camps will frame their work so similarly—as advocacy on behalf of personal decision-making—illustrates our collective state of mind. We may disagree about how to wield our liberties, but we rarely have meaningful disagreements about whether more liberty itself is good.
Rosenfeld sees evidence of this not only in our political language but in our religious and romantic practices as well. She points to the relatively recent emphasis on individual conversion experiences as evidence of spiritual authenticity and to the shift away from arranged marriages toward companionate partnerships.
The goodness of unfettered personal decision-making has become what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed a doxa—an idea that defines a culture. Undergirding this particular doxa is the continued expansion of market capitalism. “The business of selecting and the logic of the menu of options,” Rosenfeld writes, “have become both a way of life and, it is widely assumed, a means to build a life.”
My attachment to money takes on a troubling shape against the backdrop of these arguments. Rosenfeld views democracy, capitalism, and liberal societies as equally oriented toward maximizing choice. But as democratic governments and liberal societies become captured by special interests, the market appears to be the only realm in which my choices are still guaranteed to mean something.
I’m not convinced that my government will be responsive to me. My neighborhood institutions, ranging from local storefronts to schools and churches, have struggled to regain their pre-COVID vigor. Money, if I am honest, extends the most credible promise of a good life. It offers one of the few remaining mechanisms through which I can exert my will and expect to see a result.
Rosenfeld would point out that the control I wield as a consumer is already far more limited than I think. Although we experience ourselves as independent decision-makers, she says, “we rarely make up the rules of the game or craft the banquet of possibilities.” Modern adults have comparatively greater freedom to date and marry as they like but no control over the proliferation of dating apps and diminishing in-person opportunities to meet a potential romantic partner. They have choices, yet those choices are shaped by the companies that code their algorithms.
We may perceive ourselves as free—Rosenfeld observes that much of contemporary discourse around marriage still centers on our right to choose our partner—while living in a network of conditions that heavily constrain our will. Personal liberty becomes a subjective experience at best and an illusion at worst.
So who, exactly, is facilitating our convoluted relationship with money? The most glaring culprits are tech companies.
For decades, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff has produced landmark research examining the effects of technological advancement and corporate dominance on selfhood. Her masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, coins the term “surveillance economy” to describe the system we currently inhabit, and gives it the credit, or culpability, for both the comfort and dissonance of contemporary life.
Zuboff proposes that capitalism, having played out the competition for land, natural resources, labor, and attention, has evolved yet again. The most aggressive corporations are no longer focused on these comparatively traditional realms of activity, but on using consumer data to generate “prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.”
Big Tech’s era-defining innovation, says Zuboff, is its understanding that we are disclosing information about ourselves every time we interact with a device, and that this information can be used to manipulate our relationship to our future. Clients pay tech firms to create “behavioral futures”—to aggravate emotionally vulnerable teenagers before the release of a new wellness product, perhaps, or to induce the correct forms of outrage in swing-state voters in advance of an election year.
“We are not surveillance capitalism’s customers,” Zuboff says.
We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
Her claims would sound hyperbolic if they were not accompanied by nearly 700 pages of documentation laying out the patents, interviews, correspondence, and litigations that tech firms have generated in their attempts to monetize our behavior. She offers Meta’s infamous “61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization” as an early demonstration of how precisely companies can move users towards a desired outcome and Gonzalez v. Google as a more recent, and much darker, example of what is possible.
In Zuboff’s view, life under surveillance capitalism promises to be convenient and fun, a utopia of two-day deliveries and astonishingly well-curated “For You” pages. But this life requires a long obedience in a direction that we have no way of fully comprehending. In order to receive surveillance capitalism’s comforts, we have to surrender our ability to imagine a life independent of its incursions. Zuboff believes that we are battling for the “right to a future tense”—for our capacity to conceive of our existence outside the priorities of the market.
I understand this intuitively. On all my devices, my future as an adult woman has clearly been mapped out in the exact way Zuboff describes. I receive ads about the vacations my family can take as my children grow older. I come across videos about buying insurance packages for house and car, and about depositing money in college savings accounts. I am regularly served content about home decor, meal-prep subscriptions, anti-aging beauty products, and boutique health care services, all of which, if I am honest, I find appealing.
To me, the closed loop Zuboff describes—in which companies plant and cultivate our desires, in which we can be trained to salivate for whatever the market has on offer, in which our money will obtain the exact items we have been conditioned to want—offers a comforting way to live.
Helping my friend in response to the scriptural call to generosity only endangers my place in this ecosystem, all but guaranteeing that there will be no lavish vacation in my future, no subscription boxes in the mail. Why would I relinquish these things?
Jesus famously declared that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon, casting money as a spiritual presence to which we cannot give partial devotion—only total fealty. The sharpness of his phrasing always makes me want to blunt his words a little, to interpret this teaching as a general warning against divided priorities instead of a direct rebuke of humanity’s lasting wealth obsession.
Yet even a brief consideration of what money promises, and why we come to rely on it, makes it impossible to ignore Jesus’ meaning. He calls money an idolatrous deity because it aims to satiate the appetites we would otherwise bring before the Lord.
All our interactions with money are freighted with spiritual consequence. Rosenfeld’s history of choice and individuality is a history of how thoroughly capitalism has reshaped our concept of self; Zuboff’s analysis of the surveillance economy also functions as a study in human insatiability and greed. If religious practice consists of regular behaviors that gradually reconfigure our affections, then our history with money is clearly a history of devotion.
Today, no one acculturated to consumerism will find Paul’s letters immediately comprehensible. To me, the idea that “the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little” sounds deranged. So does the idea that Paul’s readers should seek to imitate the Macedonian church, who managed their circumstances of “deep poverty” by “overflow[ing] in the wealth of their liberality” (1 Cor. 8:2, NASB here and below). Why should anyone, as a practical matter, not retain “too much” of what they have earned or respond to their own “deep poverty” with acts of lavish giving?
Perhaps Paul is too flippant, praising people for giving “according to their ability, and beyond their ability (v. 3). His letter, breezily cheerful in its recommendations, indicates total ignorance regarding the terror and need that permeate the relationship between people and their money.
But to a mind conditioned by Scripture, Paul is not deluded but is deeply, appropriately critical. His writing bridges a vast tradition, which has long subjugated money to the task of honoring God and people. He addresses money not because it is his special concern but because it is the preoccupation of his audience. The goal of his argument is to rob money of its primacy and remind his readers of its best use—to be generously dispensed as an expression of love. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul writes, “that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.”
Echoing Christ’s God-and-Mammon juxtaposition, Paul draws a connection between money and worship, arguing that the choice to retain or surrender our resources is also the choice to limit or consummate our devotion to God. We can appraise one another through the eyes of the market, or through the eyes of the Lord.
Even across millennia, Paul’s critique holds true. Surveillance capitalism has yielded structures that respond to our desires with alacrity, but these structures prioritize only viable consumers. Those of us who become too sick, too old, or too impoverished to sustain our earning and spending quickly grow irrelevant. We have built a market system that imparts meaning and comfort to human life and gives us the tools to care for one another. But this system retracts its services the moment we enter a state of actual vulnerability.
Conversely, Paul describes Christ’s generosity as a phenomenon activated by the circumstances that cause human-made systems to falter. Christ, when faced with our helplessness, responds by voluntarily dispossessing himself, giving so extremely that there is no possibility he can ever be repaid.
Taking Christ’s example seriously, as Paul asks his readers to do, has a vertiginous effect, reminiscent of the moments in Scripture that have people presented with a shimmering new reality—Moses and the voice of God in a burning bush, Ezekiel sighting a heavenly figure in a storm. These men are so overcome at the prospect of a realm more potent and profound than our own that their only response is to prostrate their bodies on the ground.
Paul’s letter reads like these instances of divine encounter, in which the sheen of the familiar briefly melts away and exposes us to the startling immanence of the holy. Like the flame that is also a presence, like the storm that is a vision of eternity, Paul’s letter is also an invitation to communion with the Lord. He casts our confrontations with material need as opportunities to apprehend a Christlike generosity, as paradigm-shattering as a voice in the wilderness calling my name, as a vision unfurling before me in the sky.
Rosenfeld, at the close of her book, seems to anticipate my reaction to Paul. Every doxa comes in for a reckoning, she says, and the morality of personal liberty, as unimpeachable and self-evident as it has seemed in my lifetime, is revealing its limitations. American society is at an impasse, gridlocked by conflicts that treat every political contest as a zero-sum game for agency, indebted to surveillance capital for the uneven pleasures of optimized consumption. She suggests that we take this opportunity to “start wondering, without prejudgment, if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.”
In other words, if we are seeing fissures in our moral universe, perhaps we should peer into them. If I am drawn to Paul’s letters, it is probably because they read like missives from someone who has already glimpsed what is on the other side.
Paul, whose orthodoxies led him to violently persecute the church, was on the road to Damascus when he was apprehended. Christ asked Paul, “Why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14).
With a few phrases, Christ punctured Paul’s understanding of his own life, framing it as not a story of piety and certitude but of a struggle against a presence that Paul detects but cannot accept.
When I read the account of this conversion, I also want it to be an account of my life. I too am a person who has been obsessed and troubled by the gospel ethic of generosity. I too want to be standing on the precipice of a reality I have intuited and yet hesitated to enter. I want, like Paul, to surrender my right to kick against the goads.
Ultimately, I went to my husband, who was already prepared to give our friend the money. I told him that I had my answer.
Yi Ning Chiu writes the newsletter Please Don’t Go. Previously, she was the columnist for Inkwell, Christianity Today’s creative NextGen project.
