Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Tizon, Mammon and Empire: Confronting the Root of All Evil 92 

  
 

 

Mammon and Empire: 

Confronting the Root of All Evil1 

 

Al Tizon 
 

 
 

International development organizations assume that poverty is the core problem to be solved. This 

article makes the case that wealth is the ultimate problem, and poverty is the consequence. The pursuit 

of wealth, as defined by market-based societies, is driven by the spirit of Mammon, which is also the 

spirit of Empire. Faithfulness to the gospel requires wealthy churches, which send missionaries and 

development workers to poorer regions of the world, to confront Mammon—in themselves and in the 

world—and to do mission according to the upside-down economics of the kingdom of God. Insofar 

as they do, they also undermine the power of Empire. 

 

 

 
 

The Problem of Wealth 
Wealth is the problem, not poverty. The driving 

question for community or international development 

studies seeks to address the problem of poverty. But 

based on Paul’s teaching that “the love of money is a 

root of all kinds of evil…” (1 Tim. 6:9), I contend that 

we do not primarily have a poverty problem; we have a 

wealth problem. Poverty is the tragic result of the 

problem of wealth.  

This is not to say that the question of poverty and 

poverty alleviation is not within the purview of 

community and economic development theories and 

practices. I engaged in community development 

ministries for ten years in my homeland of the 

Philippines, and I do not believe it was a complete waste 

of time. In fact, some families our organization worked 

with experienced genuine social uplift by virtue of some 

of the programs we introduced and facilitated. And yet, 

I am convinced, partly from my experience as a 

development worker, that if we do not tackle the 

problem of wealth, then at the end of the day, our well-

intentioned development efforts only treat the 

symptoms and not the root cause of poverty, which 

explains the frustration and sense of futility that often 

accompany development work.  

When I talk about the problem of wealth in this 

article, I am talking about our wealth. Those who 

 
1

 The author would like to thank Orbis Books for granting permission to include two passages from his recent book, 

Christ Among the Classes: The Rich, the Poor, and the Mission of the Church. 2023. Maryknoll: Orbis. These 

passages are on pages 84-85 of this article. 

confess Jesus as Lord in affluent societies—which 

probably include most, if not all, the readers of this 

article—must be willing to ask hard questions regarding 

the wealth they have attained, as well as the current 

systems that have enabled economic excess for some 

and debilitating lack for others. “Instead of asking why 

some people are poor,” argues Elizabeth Hinson-

Hasty, “we would ask why other people are so affluent” 

(2017, 14). She observes that very little research on 

affluence has been done in development studies, 

relative to material produced related to poverty. But this 

must change. “The ways we create wealth and the US 

patterns of consumption need to be carefully 

interrogated and examined to understand how they 

accelerate the wealth divide [and] arguably create 

poverty…” (Hinson-Hasty 2017, 15). By redirecting the 

development question toward the wealthy—toward us—

we shift from treating the symptoms to looking at the 

causes.  

When we begin to do that—tackling wealth as the 

problem—we subvert empire. I will offer a definition of 

empire soon enough; for now, suffice it to say that when 

we take on the ideology of Mammon, instead of just the 

consequences of Mammon, we take on the very driver 

of the colonial and neo-colonial project. As such, when 

we critique Mammon and our propensity to bow down 

to it, we engage in the decolonizing of our development 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Tizon, Mammon and Empire: Confronting the Root of All Evil 93 

  
 

and mission practices in the world, as well as the very 

theologies that drive them. I seek in this article to argue 

that the pursuit of wealth, as modern market-based 

economies encourage it, is incompatible with the 

gospel, and to the extent that the church rejects it in its 

own practices of international development and 

mission, it undermines the ideology of empire.  

    

Jesus People in the Midst of Empire 
Jesus teaches us plainly that “No one can serve two 

masters…[that] we cannot serve God and wealth” (Mt. 

6:24). Paul translated this teaching in more practical 

terms as he taught his protégé Timothy in his first letter: 

“Those who want to be wealthy fall into temptation and 

are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that 

plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of 

money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their 

eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from 

the faith and pierced themselves with many pains” (1 

Tim. 6:9-10). That is the way the passage reads in the 

New Revised Standard Version.  

But once in a great while, I prefer the wording in 

the King James (KJ) version: “The love of money is the 

root of all evil,” it says in 1 Tim. 6:10, “which while 

some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and 

pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” The 

KJ version says that the love of money is not just a root 

of evil, but the root of all evil and that people pierce, 

stab, impale themselves with many deep, heavy, 

miserable sorrows. Which resonates much more with 

Jesus’s black-and-white statement about the 

incompatibility of the love of wealth with the gospel. 

Jesus was not as either/or about any other matter as he 

was with the pursuit of wealth or the love of money.  

Jesus was clear. Paul was clear. And for the first 300 

years of the church’s development, there is no 

indication that the Jesus people strayed from this 

teaching, except in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, 

who found out the hard way just how serious the matter 

of financial integrity was in the church (Acts 5:1-10)! 

Positively stated, for the first 300 years, the church 

remained faithful to the economics of the kingdom as 

they bore witness to the gospel throughout the Roman 

Empire. Granted, the opportunities for the Jesus 

people to benefit from the economics of Rome were 

slim to nothing, as they were a marginalized and 

persecuted religious sect. Forced to the margins, the 

Jesus people took care of one another in every way. 

From the margins, the church lived life under the reign 

of God, bearing witness to an alternative community 

amid the cruel, unjust, violent life of the empire.  

Part of the formation of the alternative community 

of Jesus people—the church—included a way of viewing 

and using material and monetary resources, not as 

conduits through which one gets rich, but rather as the 

means to ensure that all were taken care of, a 

community where no one had need. “There was not a 

needy person among them,” Luke wrote in Acts 4, “for 

as many as owned lands or houses sold them and 

brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at 

the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any 

had need” (vv. 34-35). As such, part of the witness of 

the alternative community was to say, in the context of 

empire, that socio-economic justice is possible in Jesus 

Christ.  

Empire-builders, of course, took (and take) offense 

at such a notion, because it issues an inherent challenge 

to the injustices of empire. In the case of market-based 

empires, the injustice is manifest in the cruel 

unevenness of wealth and poverty where opportunities 

for wealth creation abound for the rich and are hard to 

come by for the poor—this, in stark contrast to the false 

narrative that equal opportunity exists for all.  

Socio-economic injustice was and is the natural 

consequence of the pursuit of wealth, a cornerstone of 

market-based societies, because the fittest survive and 

thrive while the less fit and the unfit have a harder time. 

The dogged pursuit of wealth (the love of money) 

creates a system of class in which rights and privileges 

sit at the top and diminish as they trickle down. In a 

class system, socio-economic injustice is perpetuated by 

the rich maintaining their privileged position by keeping 

the poor in their underprivileged position, which is 

called classism. The alternative community of Jesus 

people was and is called to demonstrate another way.  

In every generation, God’s people need to be 

reminded of the nature of the church’s most formidable 

enemy—Mammon, the root of all evil. To be driven by 

the “love of money” or the pursuit of wealth is to be 

possessed by the spirit of Mammon. This reminder is 

not just so that individual believers can repent and 

adopt simpler and more generous lifestyles, but also so 

that the faith community can practice socio-economic 

justice amongst themselves as a prophetic witness 

against the unjust laws, policies, and practices of 

Empire. 

 

Mammon and Empire 
I contend that Mammon is the ultimate building 

block of empire throughout time. A simple definition 

of “empire” would be an ideology manifesting in a 

political entity (kingdom, nation, state, etc.) that is 

formed, maintained, and expanded by hegemonic 

power that is more often than not used to subdue, 

occupy, and exploit other peoples, lands, and 

resources. Empire manifested itself with 

unprecedented force in the colonial era. “In a span of 

approximately five hundred years—from the late 

fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century—European 

nations and, later, North America, used their 

religiopolitical power and military superiority to extend 

their respective empires in the Americas, Africa, and 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Tizon, Mammon and Empire: Confronting the Root of All Evil 94 

  
 

Asia on a grand scale never before experienced in 

human history” (Tizon 2018, 39). Colonialism was 

driven by the “four Cs” of commerce, crown, 

civilization, and Christianization (Tizon 2018, 45)—in a 

word, empire. While the four Cs of colonialism are not 

necessarily listed in any particular order, it is no surprise 

that commerce leads the pack. Empire—whether we call 

it Babylonian, Roman, Russian, Chinese, or 

American—forms, maintains, and expands by the power 

of Mammon.  

Mammon enables empire; it drives it, maintains it, 

and grows it. The spirit of Mammon is the spirit of 

empire; the power of Mammon is the power of empire. 

The annihilation of whole cultures, the extermination 

and exploitation of peoples, and the confiscation of 

lands have been driven primarily by the pursuit of 

wealth, by the love of money, by Mammon. Classism 

drives all the other isms that empire creates, including 

racism. For example, in the case of the United States, 

the ethnocide of the hundreds of indigenous 

communities and the importation of Africans who fell 

victim to chattel slavery were driven by the vision to be 

“the greatest nation on earth” (read: a wealthy nation of 

Europeans with unlimited freedom). These overt acts 

of racism against the indigenous and enslaved Africans 

were the necessities of classism, the shiny, hypnotic 

vision of wealth that propelled people forward in 

pursuit of more—more money, more land, more 

resources, more luxury—with little regard for anyone or 

anything else. 

When the church challenges Mammon, it 

challenges empire. Conversely, when it succumbs to 

Mammon, it perpetuates empire. Such has been the 

case for the Christendom-soaked church throughout 

the last two millennia after Constantine. With few 

exceptions, the 4th century church and onward has not 

only not been a model of anti-empire; it has in fact 

become a vital part of empire-building.  

At this point, allow me to fast-forward to the 

church’s collusion with the development of capitalism 

in the United States, which is arguably today’s most 

powerful empire. Eugene McCarraher’s The 

Enchantments of Mammon masterfully tells of the 

history of American capitalism—an economic system 

based on a philosophy of self-gain—making the case that 

it constituted the core of the making of the nation. This 

is not a new idea, but McCarraher’s argument that 

capitalism functions as much like a religion as it does an 

economic system might be. “Capitalism is a form of 

enchantment,” he posits, and “…its animating spirit is 

money” (McCarraher 2019, 5). He builds his case in 

part by arguing compellingly that the Puritan vision of 

the “city on a hill” had an unmistakable economic 

component to it. With the divine vision of the new 

nation in their purview, the Puritans set out to create “… 

a beloved community built on the foundations of 

capitalist enterprise” (McCarraher 2019, 117).  

The illegitimate union between church and state 

(Christendom) undoubtedly contributed to the making 

of the Western world, and elsewhere I offer my critique 

of this marriage (Tizon 2018, 21-35). But the 

polygamous church had another mistress—the bank! 

McCarraher continues, “The Puritan errand into the 

wilderness became an errand into the marketplace, and 

American life became an experiment in Christian 

friendship with unrighteous Mammon” (McCarraher 

2019, 117).  

Max Weber’s seminal work, The Protestant Ethic 

and the Spirit of Capitalism, connecting Protestant faith 

and the flourishing of democratic capitalism still 

occupies a prominent place in Western socioeconomic 

theory (Weber 1930). The principles emanating from 

the Reformation provided a way for Christians to see 

faith, wealth, and philanthropy seamlessly. As Melba 

Maggay observes, “[Protestants] saw business and 

wealth creation not as ‘worldly’ but as a vocation under 

God. Riches were seen as a by-product of obedience, a 

trust that called for social responsibility” (Maggay 2015, 

72). A cruder version of such a notion is, “If you make 

me rich, God, I will give to the poor.”  

Standing firm on the rock of capitalism, the rich 

and faithful today are those who basically believe that 

one can serve both God and money. In other words, 

Jesus was wrong! Or at least, he didn’t know, and could 

not have known, anything about the modern miracle of 

capitalism. Based on the belief “that human welfare [is] 

best served when persons with entrepreneurial gifts are 

freed to be creatively self-centered,” capitalism enables 

people to love God and get rich too. “From this point 

of view,” William Pannell reasons glibly, “Jesus was a 

nice man, but basically naïve” about all things economic 

(Pannell 1980, 23). Needless to say, such notions make 

a mockery of Jesus and the good news to the poor that 

he preached. The church’s affair with Mammon needs 

to be named, confessed, and discontinued in order to 

recover the integrity of the gospel and the church’s 

prophetic witness against Empire.  

This is a very tall order in the context of the 

church’s full embrace of the Market as a way of life. It 

will take nothing less than deep conversion and a 

recovery of the mission of the church to demonstrate to 

empire what life can be like under the reign of Christ. 

Integral to that picture is socioeconomic justice.  

 

Classism and Mission 
I go more deeply into what the church needs to be 

and do in order to loosen Mammon’s grip on the 

church for the sake of the world in the book Christ 

Among the Classes (Tizon 2023). For now, allow me to 

speak specifically about how we need to consider a 

different way of doing intercultural mission, which, of 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Tizon, Mammon and Empire: Confronting the Root of All Evil 95 

  
 

course, includes international development. I say, “of 

course,” since in this article, I simply assume the 

integral mission approach to the church’s engagement 

with the world. There is no other legitimate kind of 

mission, except integral mission! Different names for 

this approach to mission have emerged in different 

parts of the world, but they all refer to a single 

movement that insists on the absolute integration of 

word and deed, spiritual and social, soul and body, 

evangelism and justice, church-planting and community 

transformation (Tizon 2018, 158-164).  

Scott Bessenecker calls the aggregate of the 

church’s worldwide mission the “Christian-industrial-

complex” (Bessenecker 2014, 18-19). Taking his cue 

from former US President Dwight Eisenhower 

describing the unholy alliance between the military and 

commerce as the military-industrial complex, 

Bessenecker identifies an uncanny similarity in the 

unholy alliance between church and commerce as the 

Christian-industrial complex.  

Bessenecker’s basic thesis is that the modern 

missionary movement germinated around the same 

time that “the commercial corporation, as a 

manifestation of capitalism,” came into prominence. 

“In this organizational design,” he explains, “money is 

the central factor in decision-making. Employees are 

valued mainly for their productivity. Demand can be 

manipulated by marketing, and consumers are seen 

exclusively through the lens of their ability to purchase 

the product” (Bessenecker 2014, 22-23). In time, the 

way of the corporation became the unquestioned way 

to get things done, to make progress, to accomplish 

significant objectives in every sector of society, including 

the church and its mission.  

Bessenecker continues: “At that time it was 

axiomatic that if someone had a passion to advance 

anything in foreign lands, even Christian mission, a 

corporation needed to be formed, complete with 

investors, boards of directors, executive officers, 

employees, recruiters, and accountants. The result was 

a missionary corporation, a Christian version of the for-

profit trading company” (Bessenecker 2014, 30).  

It is difficult not to be troubled by such insights, 

and I see much more clearly why many of the problems 

we encounter in the missionary-host and the donor-

recipient relationships have to do with money and 

power. Indeed, the church has helped to expand 

empire throughout the world by way of the Christian-

industrial complex. 

How do we correct this? If corporate capitalism is 

truly the foundation of the church’s mission, do we 

need to take a wrecking ball to the whole thing and start 

over? Perhaps, and we should not rule that out (Mt. 

 
2 For a more detailed treatment of SHG and how Zimele Wethu implements this effective approach to empowerment, 

see Matimelo 2016.  

9:14-17)! Deconstructing, decolonizing efforts 

articulated by the likes of Kwok Pui Lan (2021), Miguel 

De La Torre (2021), and Randy Woodley (2022) may 

not be wrecking balls, but they do plant seeds of the 

kind of revolution that church mission needs.  

 More modest proposals would include taking 

seriously alternative mission structures that have 

emerged on the scene. Bi-vocational ministry or 

mission, what used to be called tentmaking, has made 

somewhat of a comeback. K.P. Yohannan popularized 

the training of local, indigenous missionaries and 

creative ways to partner with them (Yohannan 2009). 

Diaspora mission, where Christians who migrate for 

employment and/or other reasons are trained to bear 

witness to the gospel in their host countries, represents 

another radically different approach (Tira and 

Yamamori 2016).  

Specifically for development in mission, 

Appreciative Inquiry approaches, women’s 

empowerment, advocacy, reparations, and mutuality in 

partnership signal positive pathways to less capital-

based community transformation. The Zimele Wethu 

Foundation in South Africa exemplifies these pathways. 

Zimele Wethu is “a non-profit company committed to 

creating self-sustaining communities through 

empowerment.” The poor have been told all their lives 

that they have little to nothing to contribute to their own 

betterment, that the only hope of social uplift must 

come from the outside. The power of the SHG (self-

help group) concept lies in its radically different 

messaging—namely, that together the poor have the 

resources to increase their capacity to transform not just 

their own lives but the lives of their neighbors too. In 

the words of Zimele Wethu’s cofounder and executive 

director, Audrey Mukwavi Matimelo, “We … 

encourage [the poor] to start thinking about how they 

can change their poverty situation with what they have” 

(Matimelo 2017). As for how Zimele Wethu partners 

with outside help, it seeks partners whose financial help 

goes primarily to training and encouraging its staff and 

community volunteers, but whose enduring help comes 

in the form of lasting intercultural friendships.
2

   
Though Zimele Wethu and similar organizations 

throughout the world, as well as the mission practices 

mentioned above that represent less-cumbersome 

alternatives, have not posed a significant threat to the 

Christian-industrial complex, they demonstrate 

possibilities and the way of the future. On the other 

hand, in light of the power of the mustard seed (Mt. 

13:30-32; Mk. 4:29-31; Lk. 13:17-19), these practices 

play their part in subverting the system. In the hands of 

God, the church’s small acts together become, in the 

words of Tom Sine, “the mustard seed conspiracy” 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Tizon, Mammon and Empire: Confronting the Root of All Evil 96 

  
 

(1981), undermining the works of empire until these 

acts overtake the garden in Jesus Christ.  

Challenging the Christian-industrial complex by 

striving in the Spirit to find less capital-based ways of 

doing mission and development, as well as remaining 

faithful to the small but subversive activities of justice in 

the world, at least begins the process of conversion that 

the church desperately needs to undergo if it desires to 

weaken the power of Mammon, and simultaneously 

undermine the imperial spirit, whose headwinds are 

blowing more aggressively throughout the world.  

 

 

References 

 

Bessenecker, Scott. 2014. Overturning Tables: Freeing 

Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex. 

Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press. 

De La Torre, Miguel. 2021. Decolonizing Christianity: 

Becoming Badass Believers. Grand Rapids, MI: 

Eerdmans. 

Hinson-Hasty, Elizabeth. 2017. The Problem of 

Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of 

Affluence. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

Maggay, Melba. 2015. Rise Up & Walk: Religion and 

Culture in Empowering the Poor. Oxford: 

Regnum. 

Matimelo, Audrey Mukwavi. 2017. Quoted in Omega 

Moagi, “Turning Poverty Around,” News 24, April 

4. 

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/turning

-poverty-around-20170403.  

Matimelo, Audrey Mukwavi. 2016. Mobilizing 

Community Assets to Alleviate Poverty among 

Women: A Case Study of Zimele Developing 

Community Self-Reliance in Rural KwazuluNatal. 

PhD dissertation, University of Kwazulu-Natal, 

Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. 

McCarraher, Eugene. 2019. The Enchantments of 

Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion 

of Modernity. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: 

Belknap. 

Pannell, William. 1980. “A Call for a Simpler 

Lifestyle,” in Living More Simply: Biblical 

Principles and Practical Models, edited by Ronald 

J. Sider. Downers Grove, IL: IVP. 

Pui-Lan, Kwok. 2021. Postcolonial Politics and 

Theology: Unraveling Empire for a Global 

Church. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.  

Sine, Tom. 1981. The Mustard Seed Conspiracy. 

Waco: Word. 

Tira, Sadiri Joy and Tetsunao Yamamori, Eds. 2016. 

Scattered and Gathered: A Global Compendium 

of Diaspora Missiology. Oxford: Regnum.  

Tizon, Al. 2023. Christ Among the Classes: The Rich, 

the Poor, and the Mission of the Church. 

Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

Tizon, Al. 2018. Whole & Reconciled: Gospel, 

Church, and Mission in a Fractured World. Grand 

Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 

Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the 

Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s 

Sons. 

Woodley, Randy. 2022. Mission and the Cultural 

Other: A Closer Look. Eugene: Cascade. 

Yohannan, K.P. 2009. Revolution in World Missions. 

Carrolton, TX: GFA Books.  
 

 

Al Tizon is Affiliate Professor of Missional and Global 

Leadership at North Park Theological Seminary in 

Chicago and Lead Pastor of Grace Fellowship 

Community Church in San Francisco. He holds a 

PhD in missiology from the Graduate Theological 

Union (Berkeley, CA). 

 

Author email: drtizon@gmail.com  
 

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