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).

Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

Recently I have been thinking about race and racial segregation. Last month I finished reading Starlette Thomas’s impressive book Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Then on June 2, I learned about the end of segregated schools in Kansas. 

Starlette Thomas, according to her website, “is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist.” She has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. Her book was published last year under the same title as her doctoral thesis.

Dr. Thomas is currently an associate editor at Good Faith Media (GFM) and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative. That program is

a didactic, multifaceted ministry of communication that decenters the sociopolitical construct of race and its progeny for the sake of Jesus’ gospel and in hopes of practicing an inclusive hospitality for a raceless ‘kin-dom’ of God to come.

In the fifth and final chapter of her book, and just before one of the many times she cites Galatians 3:28, Starlette writes, “The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology that aims to drown out all competing identities” (p. 90).

On the following page, she asserts her belief that “human beings were not created to be color-coded”; rather, “all bodies are created equal” and “our allegiance to a racial group directly conflicts with our baptismal identity.”

Because she embraced that decisive identity, Starlette has been on a spiritual journey “of decentering whiteness, decolonizing identity and deconstructing race.”*¹

The Madam C. J. Walker School was built about 1860 to house the Black students of the South Park area in what is now the city of Merriam in Johnson County, Kansas. A new building was constructed in 1888 after Johnson County organized School District No. 90. 

Black and White children went to the school until around 1900 when the school district began separating the students based on race, and the South Park Grade School was built for White students.

In 1947, the school district built a new South Park Grade School for White students using taxpayer funds. Black students had to continue attending the two-room, markedly inferior Walker schoolhouse even though their parents had to pay taxes for the construction of the new South Park School.

The following year, Alfonso Webb filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court in the name of his sons who were second and first grade students at Walker School. That case was won in 1949 and Black children were allowed to attend the South Park School.*²

That decision in Kansas was a precursor of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court settled that case by ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.*³

Why are there still so many segregated churches since segregated public schools have been ruled unconstitutional for seventy years now?

At the end of the first chapter of her book, Dr. Thomas cites the well-known words of MLK, Jr.: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning” (p. 29, citing an address King delivered in 1957).

In that seminal talk, King stated, “Racial segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Starlette’s advocacy of the raceless gospel is her endeavor to continue doing what King was urging Christians to do 67 years ago.

Fortunately, most church segregation now is not because of opposition to integration so much as it is because of the importance of the Black church for its members. (In this regard, consider ”The Downside of Integration for Black Christians, Jemar Tisby’s 2017 essay.)

King declared that the church “cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life. It has always been the responsibility of the Church to broaden horizons, challenge the status quo, and break the mores when necessary.”

Starlette Thomas is currently endeavoring to do that admirably—but in a way that doesn’t bypass “the beauty of particularity” seen in the Black church.*⁴

What can we who have benefited from White privilege do to promote the raceless Gospel and to combat the vestiges of racial segregation?

_____

*¹ These words are from Starlette’s column titled “The Raceless Gospel as a Proclamation of Somebodiness,” which was first posted (here) on Good Faith Media’s website in April. Also, please consider reading this June 5 “conversation with Starlette Thomas” about her book.  

*² On June 2, two of Alfonso Webb’s five daughters (and he also had five sons) were honored guests at Rainbow Mennonite Church, and I was able to chat briefly with one of them. The former Walker schoolhouse, enlarged and completely remodeled, is now the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, and June and I much enjoyed attending their Sunday morning worship service yesterday.

*³ My blog post on May 10, 2013, was titled “Brown v. the Board of Education.” Here is a link to that post, if you would like to read it (again).

*⁴ The quoted words are from Felicia Murrell’s book, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World (2024). This link will take you to an article with the author being interviewed about that insightful book.