The Tyranny of Greed

Tyranny is a word that has, unfortunately, been heard often in recent years. The term usually refers to “the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”*¹ But it can also describe any power, such as greed, that dominates and dehumanizes. 

Greed is the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention of keeping it for oneself, far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort. It is not merely a personal flaw; it is also a power that enslaves both individuals and societies.

The biblical phrase “the love of money” is clearly a reference to greed (“the inordinate desire to possess wealth”)—and also a clear reference to its tyrannical nature, as it is “the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10, CEB).

According to my AI “buddy” Claude, “greed was absolutely central to Jamestown's founding in 1607.” The Virginia Company was a corporation “created explicitly to generate profits for its investors.” It became profitable after 1614, when it began shipping tobacco to Great Britain.

The greed of the Virginia Company led to enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia in 1619 to work in the tobacco fields. Human beings were reduced to property so that plantation owners could increase their wealth.

A century later, cotton became king, and greed increasingly drove the engines of slavery. So, citing Claude again, “the desire for wealth [=greed] from cotton drove the expansion and entrenchment of one of history's most brutal systems of human exploitation.”

“The more profitable cotton became, the more deeply the South invested in slavery, making it nearly impossible to imagine their economy without it—which ultimately helped precipitate the Civil War.”

But as far back as 1607, greed also wreaked havoc on Native Americans. The founding of Jamestown inadvertently initiated the genocide of the Native nations. Much later, the desire for more land to grow cotton was a major factor behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830. 

For much of the nineteenth century, greed fueled the seizure of Native American lands under the banner of progress, or “Manifest Destiny,” as settlers and governments justified the displacement/removal of the Indian nations for the sake of acquiring land to use for their own economic gain.

Whenever and wherever greed is rampant, people are exploited, lands are stolen, and justice is distorted. Sadly, though, even today, tyrannical greed continues to shape economies, politics, and daily habits of consumption—and that greed is epitomized in the current POTUS. His “business” activity is just one indication of his greed.

According to an Oct. 9 post (here), Trump has launched ads “to sell his new collection of watches.” This will add to the wealth he has greedily accumulated as President. He reportedly made $10 million in the last year selling watches, sneakers, Bibles, and guitars.

His most profitable business, though, is cryptocurrency. Last year, he made over $57 million from his stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency platform. His $TRUMP meme coin launched in January 2025 is estimated to have earned $320 million in fees.

Since the tyranny of greed is so prevalent, attention needs to be given to Malcolm Foley’s book, The Anti-Greed Gospel (2025).*² (Here is a picture of author Foley and his “million dollar smile” along with the subtitle of his book.)

In his book, Foley cites John Chrysostom (d. 407), who asserted that “great is the tyranny of Mammon.” That tyranny exacerbated the idolatrous worship of Mammon rather than the true God. It also led to the construction of racism.

Plantation owners needed a moral and legal justification for treating human beings as property, so they constructed an ideology of racial inferiority. This allowed them to justify the brutal exploitation and to prevent solidarity between poor White and enslaved Black people.

While he does not cite them, Foley’s basic explanation of racism is similar to that of contemporary scholars Inram X. Kendi and Starlette Thomas.*³ They all argue that racist ideas were created to justify slavery. The latter was based on greed, which led to exploitation and then used racist ideology to justify it.

In the last part of his book, Foley challenges churches to confront greed as both a personal and systemic sin, and to replace it with practices of justice, solidarity, and truth.

Since greed is personal as well as societal, all of us need to remember the oft-quoted admonition of Thomas Merton: 

*¹ These words are from Timothy Snyder’s instructive book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017).

*² Foley (Ph.D., Baylor University) is a pastor, historian, and speaker who serves as special adviser to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor. Foley also co-pastors Mosaic Waco, a multicultural church in Waco, Texas

*³ Kendi is an author, professor, and anti-racist activist. He is the author of three books, the most influential being How to Be an Antiracist (2019). Thomas is an author, preacher, activist, and race abolitionist who serves as the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Media. She is the author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church (2023).

Remembering Thomas Merton

Growing up in rural northwest Missouri, I didn’t have much opportunity to know people who belonged to the Catholic Church.

And then during my years in two Baptist colleges and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that didn’t afford much possibility of getting to know Catholics, either.

Actually, as I think back, I guess my first Catholic friend was Zénon Yelle, a Canadian priest who lived in the same city in Japan. In the 1970s he became a member of a book discussion group that June and I attended monthly.

Fr. Yelle was a thoughtful man and a good scholar, and getting to know him helped me gain a more positive idea about Catholics.

It was also probably in the 1970s that I first became aware of, and then read a book by, Thomas Merton, an outstanding Catholic thinker and prolific author who was born 100 years ago tomorrow, on January 31, 1915 (exactly six weeks before my father).

The first of Merton’s more than 70 books that I read was “New Seeds of Contemplation” (1962), and I have read it a time or two since. And then a few years ago I read “The Seven Storey Mountain” (1948), his highly acclaimed autobiography.

Partly in honor of his memory, this month I have read Merton’s “No Man Is an Island” (1955), one of his most widely-read books on what he calls “the spiritual life.” These books are quite beneficial for Protestants as well as Catholics.

In 1941 Merton became a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. That was his home for the next 27 years before his untimely death.

Dr. E. Glenn Hinson was one of my teachers at Southern Seminary in the spring semester of 1960—and after all these years I still exchange emails with him regularly.

In the fall of 1960 Dr. Hinson (b. 1931) began taking students to Gethsemani. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in any of his classes that did that, so I never had the privilege of meeting Merton or hearing him speak—or of learning more about Catholics then.

But the contact with Merton was quite meaningful to the seminary students who did go to Gethsemani with Dr. Hinson, and in a recent email Dr. Hinson wrote, “Merton had a very profound impact on my life and ministry.”

Through the years, Merton became a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue, engaging in deep discussions with Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

In December 1968, Merton went to Thailand to attend an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks. From there he intended to go on to Japan to learn more about Zen Buddhism. After speaking at the conference in Thailand, though, he suddenly died.

It is generally concluded that while stepping out of his bath, he was accidentally electrocuted by an electric fan. It was a tragic loss to the religious world and to all who knew him.

It is impossible to know how much more good he could have done if he had lived 39 more years as my father did.

One chapter in “New Seeds of Contemplation” is titled “The Root of War is Fear.” Several times I have quoted the concluding words of that chapter, and they are words worth remembering and worth considering over and over again:

If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another (p. 122).

In Memory of Thomas Merton

His death 43 years ago today, on December 10, 1968, was a tragic one. I am speaking of the accidental death of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk.

Merton (b. 1915) had gone to Thailand for an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks, a meeting held in a Red Cross Conference Center in a suburb of Bangkok. While stepping out of his bath in the cottage where he was staying, Merton reached out to adjust an electric fan, apparently touching an exposed wire, and was accidentally electrocuted. A tragic loss of life!

Merton died 27 years to the day after entering the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, south of Louisville. That was just three days after, but not directly related to, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He became well known through his bestselling autobiography, which is mostly about his life before entering the Trappist monastery.

The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton’s story of his early life, was first published in 1948, when he was only 33 years old. By May 1949, 100,000 copies were in print, and that year it became the first religious book to make the New York Times bestseller list. The cover of the 1978 edition I just finished reading proclaims that over one million copies have been sold—and that was 33 years ago.

25 Books Every Christian Should Read: A Guide to the Essential Spiritual Classics was published earlier this year, and Merton’s autobiography was the 23^rd of those 25 books. It was followed by C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity (1952) and Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992).

In much of The Seven Storey Mountain Merton describes his rather unhappy childhood and young manhood. He narrates how he lived a rather undisciplined life, mainly seeking pleasure. But he didn’t find peace and contentment. After a year a Cambridge University he wrote, “. . . all my dreams of fantastic pleasures and delights were crazy and absurd, and . . . everything I had reached out for had turned to ashes in my hands, and that I myself . . . had turned out to be an extremely unpleasant sort of person—vain, self-centered, dissolute, weak, irresolute, undisciplined, sensual, obscene and proud” (p. 132).

From this confession we see that Merton’s story is similar in some ways to that of Augustine. Accordingly, his autobiography is often compared to Augustine’s Confessions, the second work listed in 25 Books mentioned above.

To be honest, I enjoyed reading Daniel Berrigan’s autobiography, To Dwell in Peace, much more than Merton’s The Twelve Storey Mountain. That was mainly, I think, because Berrigan was exactly twice as old as Merton when he wrote his autobiography and included much about his many experiences as a peace activist. How I wish Merton had lived to write another autobiography in 1981, when he would have been 66 years old!

Beginning on January 1, I plan to start reading Through the Years with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Writings (1983). At some point one of those meditations will surely be Merton’s words that I have often quoted:

“If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, 2007; p. 122).

Criteria for "Top Ten Christians"

The September 15 posting on this blog was about my list of “Top Ten Christians.” I appreciate the many comments and suggestions made about that list. Because of the response received, I have, somewhat reluctantly, replaced William Stringfellow with Thomas Merton. I am considering other changes, such as replacing Clarence Jordan with Roger Williams.

Some objected to the idea of making such a list. One of my closest Facebook friends wrote, “Time magazine called Stanley Hauerwas the best theologian in the U. S.; Hauerwas replied that ‘best’ was not a theological category. I think I agree.” I responded, “Hauerwas is probably right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to identify those who serve as the best examples of what it means to follow Christ.”

Some thought the list should be more inclusive; specifically, they thought there should be more women on the list. If I were to add another woman, at this point I am most likely to choose Catherine Mumford Booth, the co-founder of the Salvation Army, or Lottie Moon, the outstanding Baptist missionary to China. But to add another woman, which man should be eliminated?

Some wondered about the criteria used in composing my list. An old TF, old not just in the sense that she is the same age I am but also because we first met fifty-five years ago, wrote, “I’m not sure why I react negatively to the idea of a top ten Christian list. I’ve been pondering that since you posted it. But if it is a good thing, I would wonder why Clarence Jordan would outclass William Carey or Lottie Moon. Does social action trump quiet sacrificial living? There is something oddly ironic about the notion on which such a list rests. But I'll keep thinking.”

I like the closing words, “I’ll keep thinking.” That is largely why I write this blog, to think and to encourage others to think on topics of shared concerns. The above comment prompted me to think more deeply about the criteria for making a list of the top ten Christians. And after starting to work on those criteria, I received an e-mail from another perceptive TF who wrote, “I would be interested to learn what criteria are important or inconsequential.”

My starting point was St. Francis, who is often said to be the best historical example of a person who literally lived like Jesus. So, who else lived and acted the way Francis (and Jesus) did? Such a consideration should, I think, include criteria such as these:

·       observing a simple lifestyle (no personal luxuries)

·       living a life of love for others as much as self quite literally

·       working for social justice and peace as well as for salvation in the more traditional (evangelical) sense

·       experiencing opposition by political leaders and/or the religious “establishment”

The people on my “top ten” list meet these basic criteria; most other notable and noteworthy Christians do not to the same extent.