Why the worship of wealth is the most dangerous heresy of our age.
Yesterday we unmasked the school as a temple—the place where the culture trains its children to bend their knees, to see obedience as devotion. But the temple has a treasury, and it is there that culture’s true god is enthroned. That god is wealth.
Not just money, but the fiction that excess is sacred: that those who possess much are more blessed, more virtuous, and more worthy. The culture has always baptized its hoarders. The rich are presented not as parasites but as prophets—examples of destiny, even proof of divine election. This narrative is repeated endlessly: in the prosperity gospel, in corporate media, and in the celebrity culture that confuses wealth with wisdom. It has become one of the most powerful liturgies of our culture.
This is the heresy of sacred wealth. It is the inversion of the sacred. True sacredness belongs to agapē—the shared life of care, trust, and responsibility. But when wealth is treated as sacred, the axis of meaning is twisted: greed becomes virtue, exploitation becomes destiny, and for those who hold supernatural beliefs, inequality becomes “God’s will.”
The fruits of this heresy are everywhere, and they are bitter:
Social collapse: communities hollowed out while oligarchs amass fortunes. Housing becomes a speculative investment, not shelter. Health becomes a commodity, not a right. Human lives are weighed against profit margins and found expendable.
Ecological devastation: forests burned, oceans poisoned, and entire species extinguished so balance sheets can show quarterly growth. The Earth itself is treated as raw material to be monetized; its sacred abundance reduced to units of trade.
Spiritual distortion: billionaires are worshipped as saviors while the poor are blamed for their suffering. Philanthropy is treated as divine generosity, masking the theft that made it possible. The rich sit on thrones of influence, praised for “vision,” while those at the bottom are told they lack character.
Think of the yachts taller than cathedrals and the rockets reaching for the heavens while islanders drown in rising seas. These are not blessings. They are blasphemies. They reveal a civilization kneeling before the wrong altar.
Prophets have warned us. Yeshua said you cannot serve God and Mammon. He told the wealthy to give away what they had and join the community of care. Karl Menninger showed how punishment is society’s crime against itself—and what is the punishment of poverty if not wealth weaponized against the poor? Alfie Kohn shows how competition corrodes the human spirit—and what is wealth but competition enthroned as destiny? All point to the same truth: wealth made sacred is incoherence enthroned.
Wealth is not ballast. It does not steady the ship of humanity. It drags us down. The worship of wealth is a false religion, and its fruits are destruction.
Sacred coherence comes only when we dethrone wealth and return meaning to where it belongs: in agapē, in the commons, in the life we share. Wealth is a tool, not a temple. The sacred lives not in what we hoard but in what we give. And until that truth becomes flesh among us, the storms of culture will only grow stronger.