One way to understand the spiritual lukewarmness of the contemporary church is to examine it against the backdrop of the society it inhabits. That society is largely the product of its history, and tracing that history reveals a pattern of changes that carry real spiritual weight — changes not merely in religion or politics, but in how we order our deepest priorities.
The tension between faith and money is, of course, nothing new. Jesus warned plainly that no one can serve two masters. Paul went further, identifying greed — the elevation of money above all else — as a form of idolatry (Colossians 3:5). And Revelation’s portrait of Babylon situates the excesses of commerce at the very heart of worldly evil, framing the conflict between money-driven systems and the love-and-witness mission of the church as one of the defining fault lines of history. This is ancient ground. What is worth examining is how modern America has navigated it — and how decisively it seems to have chosen a side.
Several developments over the past half-century suggest a coherent, if unplanned, societal pivot toward the prioritization of money above competing values.
The intellectual foundation was arguably laid in 1970, when the economist Milton Friedman published his now-famous essay arguing that a corporation’s sole social responsibility is to maximize returns for its shareholders. Friedman did acknowledge the need to operate within legal and ethical boundaries, but those qualifications proved thin in practice. Ethics are vague, and the gap between what is legal and what is right is wide. The essay’s lasting effect was to license a relentless focus on profit and to push concerns like human welfare to the margins — a predictable outcome, given Jesus’s observation about the impossibility of serving two masters.
The cascade of that thinking is visible in healthcare. The HMO Act of 1973 helped catalyze a transition away from the largely non-profit model of American medicine toward large-scale corporate healthcare. Whether or not that shift directly caused the decline in care quality that many observers have noted, the structural incentive changed: the system’s primary obligation was no longer health, but return on investment.
A similar dynamic reshaped politics. The Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo established that political spending is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. Its 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission extended that protection to corporations, opening the floodgates for concentrated wealth to shape electoral outcomes on a vast scale. The result is a political environment in which money functions less as one influence among many and more as the primary force.
Nor was this shift confined to institutions. At the individual level, it expressed itself through the culture of consumer credit. What began as a financial convenience gradually became a lifestyle — enabled by lax regulation and incentivized by rewards programs — and ultimately gave rise to a range of predatory lending practices. People began routinely spending money they did not have, as if the discipline of living within limits had become an obstacle rather than a virtue.
Taken separately, any one of these developments might be explained away as a policy error or a market failure. Taken together, they suggest something more systemic. And notably, these patterns are not equally pronounced in other capitalist democracies, which implies that something distinctive is at work in American culture — not merely economic logic, but a kind of spiritual orientation.
In theological terms, it looks very much like a society that chose, through a series of incremental decisions, to make money its master. The consequences — for health, for democracy, for human dignity — follow with a kind of grim logic from that choice. How this cultural idolatry has shaped the church, and what it has to do with the lukewarmness Jesus warns against in Revelation, is a question worth pursuing.
Exploring Antioch 