SPECIAL PRÉCIS ON AMERICAN GREED: THE ROOT OF MUCH EVIL – (WITH VIDEO)

SCRIPTURE. “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder [unrest, rebellion] and every evil thing and morally degrading practice.” – JAMES 3:16, AMP

PREFACE. I was awakened about 3 am this morning, troubled over an exchange I just had with still another former friend who works at the Christian Broadcast Network in Virginia Beach, VA. Intelligent, godly life, gifted professional. She has criticized my stand on Trump with the Standard Apologia:  (1) ‘Trump is the firewall against the Left and the World Conspiracy to rule the planet;’ (2) ‘You refuse to listen to the reasonable voices on our side by Unfriending so many of them;’ (3) ‘Oh yes, I am so sorry that “some” in our movement act so threateningly – I hope you will be okay, Cliff.’

KEY TERM: “SELFISH AMBITION.” ‘Zelos’ [ζῆλος]: “From a primary word meaning: ‘Heat or fervency; emulation, envy, jealousy; a longing after [another’s possession].’ NOTE: “Strong’s Greek 2205 (zēlos) gathers into one term Two Opposite Passions: ‘Fervent Devotion’ and ‘Corrosive Envy.’ Context alone reveals whether the writer has honorable ‘zeal’ or sinful ‘jealousy’ in view, yet both ideas share a common core—‘The heart’s intense heat toward a person, cause, or possession.’”

QUOTATION. “‘Envy is the Religion of the Mediocre.’ It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the Doors of Heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude – and destroy if possible – those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. ‘Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.’” ― CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN, The Angel’s Game, 2008; edited

COMMENTARY. “‘For where envying and strife is, there is confusion.’ – Margin, tumult or unquietness. Everything is unsettled and agitated. There is no mutual confidence; there is no union of plan and effort; there is no co-operation in promoting a common object; there is no stability in any plan; for a purpose, though for good, formed by one portion, is defeated by another.

And every evil work.’ – Of the truth of this no one can have any doubt who has observed the effects in a family or neighborhood where a spirit of strife prevails. All love and harmony of course are banished; all happiness disappears; all prosperity is at an end. In place of the peaceful virtues which ought to prevail, there springs up every evil passion that tends to mar the peace of a community. Where this spirit prevails in a church, it is of course impossible to expect any progress in divine things; and in such a church any effort to do good is vain.” – ALBERT BARNES, Notes on the Old and New Testament, 1834, 1884; edited

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. “You shall not covet [that is, selfishly desire and attempt to acquire] your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” – EXODUS 20:17, AMP

DK’S TAKE. In my travels around America in the Month of June 2025, I proposed Seven Observations about our country that characterized a piece of what I termed, “The American Soul.” The Sixth Impression was “GREED.”

I realize that is a hard pill to swallow for nearly all Americans, especially for White Americans, but it is nonetheless demonstrably true. And worse, I have come to believe in the last five years or so that it has served as one of the “Fouled Roots” on which the Republic was founded.

Consider the following very, very carefully.

“GREED IS GOOD.” “The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bull—-. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it. You’ve got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I’ve still got a lot to teach you.” – GORDON GEKKO (Portrayed by Michael Douglass,) Wall Street, 1987; edited

I turn here to a favorite journal, The Atlantic, in an article by DR. JOHN PAUL ROLLERT, in his monograph, “Greed is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea,” published on April 7, 2014 (edited).

Dr. Rollert is a graduate of Harvard College and earned his JD from Yale Law School and a PhD from The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Since 2005, he has also taught courses at Harvard in ethics, politics, and leadership.

Here are his MAIN POINTS.

• PRELUDE. “Among MBA students, few words provoke greater consternation than ‘Greed.’ Wonder aloud in a classroom whether some practice might fairly be described as ‘greedy,’ and students don’t know whether to stick up for ‘The Invisible Hand’ or seek absolution. Most, by turns, do a little of both. Such reactions shouldn’t be surprising. Greed has always been the hobgoblin of Capitalism, the mischief it makes a canker on the faith of Capitalists. These students’ troubled consciences are not the result of doubts about the efficacy of free markets, but of the centuries of moral reform that was required to make those markets as free as they are.”

• HISTORY. “We sometimes forget that the pursuit of ‘Commercial Self-Interest’ was largely reviled until just a few centuries ago. ‘A man who is a Merchant can seldom if ever please God,’ St. Jerome said, expressing the prevailing belief in Christendom about the relative worthiness of a life devoted to Trade. The choice to enter business didn’t necessarily deprive one of salvation, but it certainly hazarded his soul. ‘If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way then drowning,’ Iago tells a lovesick Rodrigo. ‘Make all the money thou canst’” [Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3, 1603).

• DILEMMA. “The problem of Money-Making: Was not only that it favored Earthly delights over Divine obligations. It also enflamed the tendency to prefer our own needs over those of the people around us and, more worrisome still, to recklessly trade their best interests for our own base satisfaction. St. Thomas Aquinas, who ranked Greed among the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ [#2], warned that Trade which aimed at no other purpose than expanding one’s wealth was ‘justly reprehensible’ for ‘it serves the desire for profit which knows no limit.”’

• RUBICON. “It was not until the mischievous moralist Bernard Mandeville [admired by Karl Marx] that someone attempted to gloss Greed as anything other than a shameful motive. A name now largely lost to history, Mandeville became a foil for 18th-century philosophy when, in 1705, he first proposed his Infamous Equation: ‘Private vices yield public benefits.’ It came as part of The Fable of the Bees, 1714], an allegorical poem that described a thriving Beehive where Dark Intentions keep the Wheels of Commerce turning. The outrage Mandeville stoked had less to do with this causal explanation than with the assertion that only by such means could a nation grow wealthy and strong” [cf. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513; Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit, 1807; etc.].

• SMITH. “Philosophers lined up to take their shots at Mandeville, whose moral paradox seemed so appalling precisely because it could not be so easily dismissed. The most notable among them was Adam Smith, the Founding Father of modern economics, who struggled to distinguish the mainspring of his system from the one Mandeville proposed. Consider how Smith describes ‘The Selfish Landowner,’ of whom he says: ‘The Proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified.’ Looking out over his fields, in his imagination: ‘He consumes himself the whole harvest.’ The belly, however, is not so obliging … This is Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ at work … Recall the Greedy Landlord. Yes, the ‘Primary Aims’ of his daily labors—Vanity, Sway, Self-Indulgence—are far from admirable. But in spite of this fact, his efforts still have the ‘[Secondary] Effect’ of distributing widely ‘the necessaries of life’ such that, ‘without intending it, without knowing it,’ he, and others like him, ‘advance the interest of society.’” 

• GREED. “The Second Move Smith made was to effectively Redefine ‘Greed.’” Mandeville—and for that matter, the Church Fathers before him—spoke in such a way that any Self-Interested Pursuit seemed morally suspect. Smith, for his part, refused to go along. He acknowledged that pursuing our interests often entails getting what we want from other people, but he maintained that not all of these pursuits, morally speaking, were equal. We get what we want in a complex commercial society—Indeed: ‘We get to have a complex commercial society—not because we seize things outright, but because we pursue them in a way that acknowledges Legal and Cultural Constraints.’ That is how we distinguish the Merchant from the Mugger. Both pursue their own interests, but only one does so in a manner that confers Legitimacy on the Gains.”

• CONSEQUENCE. “‘Greed,’ as such, became an acquisitive exercise that fell on the wrong side of this divide. Some of these activities, like the mugger’s, were fairly prohibited, but those of, say, the ‘Mean-Spirited Merchant’ were checked by Censure and Disgrace. These forces did not eradicate Selfishness, but by the moral distinction they maintained, they helped establish a ‘New Ideal of the Upstanding Businessman’ [i.e., ‘Greed is good, so long as you don’t violate the law!’].”

• POSTLUDE. “Moral Revolutions come about in different ways. If we reject some conduct but rarely admit an example, we enjoy the benefit of being high-minded without the burden of moral restraint. We also embolden that behavior, which proceeds with a presumptive blessing. As a matter of public discourse and polite conversation: ‘Greed is unlikely to be ‘Good’ anytime soon, but a Vice need not become a Virtue for the End Result to look the same.’”

IN SUM. We have all been taught all our lives that America was rooted deep into the soil of Judeo-Christian Theism and as such, heir to the rich Moral Superstructure of the Biblical Canon. The Truth is, beloved:

‘Only in part!’

As I have argued increasingly against the American Mythos, or False Narrative that we truly are the Greatest and most Virtuous Nation on the Earth: ‘It is a Lie!’ We are that massive philosophical amalgamation of Theism, Deism, Naturalism, and even Pagan Mysticism since our Founding.

Indeed, The United States of America is fundamentally and accurately, a GRAND SYNCRETISM:

“‘Religious Syncretism is the blending of religious belief systems into a New System, or the incorporation of other beliefs into an existing Religious Tradition.’ This can occur for many reasons, where religious traditions exist in proximity to each other, or when a culture is conquered and the conquerors bring their religious beliefs with them, but do not succeed in eradicating older beliefs and practices. Many religions have syncretic elements, but adherents often frown upon the application of the label, especially those who belong to ‘Revealed’ religions, such as Abrahamic Religions, or any system with an Exclusivist approach, seeing Syncretism as corrupting the Original Religion.” – EDITORS, Wikipedia, May 27, 2025; edited

THE GOSPEL AND MAMMON. During recent my 30-Day Circuit Ride VII around the United States, I was flagged by author and close friend Amy Hawk on a rather extraordinary work by Black scholar, the REV. DR. MACOLM FOLEY. His just published book, The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a Way Forward (2025; edited).

Dr. Foley earned a Ph.D. in Religion from Baylor University in December 2021. His dissertation investigated Black Protestants responding to lynching from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Before coming to Baylor, Dr. Foley earned a B.A .in Religious Studies with a second major in Finance and a minor in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis. He subsequently completed a Master of Divinity at Yale Divinity School, focusing on the theology of the early and Medieval Church.

Note. Hold on to your bootstraps, boys and girls. This work is “No polite tap on the shoulder, but a Howling Reproach” to all Americans, to restate a phrase from the May 1987 Duke University Commencement Address by journalist Ted Koppel.

Since I was unable to purchase the book in time for this Commentary, I borrow from a copious review by DR. ROBERT CORNWALL, Minister Emeritus of Woodward Christian Church. He holds a Ph.D. in Historical Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and is a prolific author on Political Eschatology and other topics of current interest.

Here is his SUMMARY OF FOLEY’S MAIN IDEAS.

• THESIS. “‘Foley roots Racism in Greed.’ While Foley acknowledges the traditional definitions of Racism that involve Prejudice and Power, he argues that: ‘Racism is not ‘primarily about hate and ignorance. It is about Greed.’ That is, Race and Racism are, he argues, the “Children of Mammon.” He uses the word Mammon, capitalizing it, because it involves ‘Idolatry. ‘According to Jesus, we cannot serve God and Mammon. Going even deeper, he roots Racism in Covetousness, the desire to accumulate, which is understood in Scripture to be the Root of Evil. In this case, Greed leads to the Desire of some (primarily White males) to gain economic domination through exploitation. He states that Race/Racism is a social construct created to justify the exploitation of some by others for economic gain (pp. 2-3). With this in mind, as he develops his view of Racism, Foley points to the use of Lynching to control African Americans for economic gain after the demise of Slavery. ‘Race and Racism are rooted not just in Prejudice plus Power, but in Greed, breaking seven of the Ten Commandments.’ Therefore, Racism is Evil. Thus, the goal here is to enlighten Christians about the Danger of Racism to the Christian Faith.”

• CAPITALISM. “Central to Foley’s argument is the Problem of Capitalism, an economic system that requires workers to reach its objectives. One way to provide workers is through Slavery or similar realities. ‘Historically, White (Europeans/Euro-Americans), used Race as a means of Dominating for economic exploitation, thus Economics precedes Race/Racism.’ After defining his terms, Foley goes deeper in Chapter 2 to explore ‘The Talons and Tendrils of Racial Capitalism.’ It is in this chapter that Foley brings into the conversation the use of Lynchings to control African Americans to exploit them for economic reasons. After the end of Slavery, Lynchings became a tool of labor control. He points out that Lynchings came to an end once they were deemed bad for business.” [NOTE: This form of Economics I have come to call, with others: “Predatory Capitalism:” ‘Acquiring all that you desire, ostensibly within the bounds of The Law’].

• CHOICES. “In Part 2, Foley asks ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ This is where things get challenging and even personal as Foley asks the reader to consider how we will respond to the Evil that is Racism. If Part 1 lays out the Problem, Part 2 asks us to consider how we will become part of the Solution. With that in mind, in Chapter 5 Foley asks the question: ‘Solidarity or Greed?’ This starts with having meaningful conversations about money and our relationship to it. Will we embrace Greed or show Economic Solidarity with those affected most by Greed? This involves more than Generosity; it involves participation in ‘Uplift.’ While what he advocates here might sound to many as if he’s advocating for Marxism, instead what he argues for is deeply rooted in Christian Theology, especially: ‘The Call to Love our Neighbors.’”

• EPILOGUE. “At a time when Selfishness and the Pursuit of Prosperity at all costs has taken hold not only of Society in general but of our Churches, this is an important message. The pushback on DEI is rooted in Economics, such that people are being manipulated and exploited, so that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Racism is part of the process that has undermined the Message of Jesus. Foley calls us to account. Even if we struggle with what appears to be an Anti-Capitalist message, Jesus was clear that one cannot worship God and Mammon. The Anti-Greed Gospel is clearly a book that is appropriate for this moment in history.”

ORIGINS. Even more painfully is what Dr. Foley spoke at great length to Amy Hawk about in her incisive Podcast of June 18, 2025. He Posited without any hesitation this: ‘America was founded on Three Principles: Deception, Theft and

Violence.’

As if to unintentionally endorse this radical proposition, the infamous and seditious Heritage Foundation published a white paper on “The Framer’s Understandingof ‘Property’” (July 6, 2020; edited). Its author is PAUL LARKIN, Rumpel Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Here is the most damning corruption of God’s Law governing Property I have ever read in a section from that monograph subtitled: “How Did the Founders View Property.”

“‘In the 18th century, most Americans owned and lived off THEIR OWN LAND’ [sic]. Agriculture was the principal industry. In fact, the opportunity to acquire land and live off of it was the main reason why Colonists left England as well as other nations to ‘come to the United States. The land here was ample, and it was available in ‘Fee Simple’ [Absolute freehold ownership for posterity’],the type of Land Entitlement that gave the Colonists complete and full ownership of the property, unlike what they could have had in England where all the fee simple title was in the Crown and they would at best live at the sufferance of the King and, later, Parliament. The opportunity to come and live off the land and in vast amounts was a tremendous attraction and a great value to the people who came here.”

ENTITLEMENT.  It is if the Founders did not seriously consider the Property Rights of Native Americans when they penned these ostensibly Biblical and later, Constitutional “Rights” that govern an avaricious America to this very day, beloved!  The New Ethos: ‘If you can take the property, you can keep it forever!’

Selah.

Just where and when did Jehovah or His Son Jesus Christ give the Colonists (i.e., ‘Los Conquistadores’) the “Right” to lie and violently steal Indian lands without blinking a theological eye?

Anybody? Anybody at all. Roger that.

I could write volumes about the massive and grotesque American Lie of Presumption here but of course cannot. But I want every true Christian and especially our Leaders to wrestle this literally bloody issue to the Doctrinal Ground and not dare to come up for air until we and they have settled it, once and for all!

CODA. God did not Pre-Ordain that the Antichrist of the Bible would emerge from an America that would become Babylon, the Great Harlot without Divine Reason, beloved. I realize that is a shocking statement of conclusion in the wake of my own ten-year struggle with God and His Word and the brutal facts of American History. In a popular phrase among so many these days:

“It is what it is.”

And should you question my MOTIVES in all this, I repeat before both God and Man what the Messiah Himself proclaimed as the Essential Prerogative of all His followers for such difficult enterprise.

“So Jesus was saying to the Jews who had believed Him, ‘If you abide in My word [continually obeying My teachings and living in accordance with them, then] you are truly My disciples. And you will know the truth [regarding salvation], and the truth will set you free [from the penalty of sin].’” – JOHN 8:31-32, AMP

This is the Word of the God of All to the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord, 2025, as multitudes, multitudes now stand in the Valley of Decision. Selah.

MEDIA

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/makzmHaHvp8