What is money? Cryptocurrencies push the question up in our faces. The “crypto” in cryptocurrency means “hidden” – obscured. But in a way, all money is cryptocurrency.
Worshiping the ATM
Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo
What is a dollar, really? Ultimately a dollar is worth what people believe it is worth – it has little intrinsic value in itself. Now that we have a president who is spectacularly inept at managing the economy with his wild turnarounds on tariff policy, and now that Congress is about to add a trillion dollars to the government budget deficit, which is funded by selling dollar bonds to governments and investors all over the world, amounting to the government "printing" more money – people around the planet are beginning to question the stability of our currency. The value of a dollar is a figment of the collective imagination of humans. It is a habit of mind that can change. The dollar is getting more “crypto” by the day.
When you get down to the root of it all, money is the quantification of trust, of faith. There’s something religious about it, eh? You put a $20 bill in your wallet and you trust that it will be worth something when you go to the store. You trust your employer to tell its bank to send a number to your bank, and you send numbers from your bank to the banks of the companies that provide you with the stuff you want to pay for. Our cash is printed with the words “In God We Trust,” promoting the fiction that there is supernatural backing for its value. A backing that most assuredly isn’t there, whether or not you believe in God! If we were honest, we’d have these words printed on our money: “Just trust that this piece of paper is worth something.”
Money isn’t divine. But there is something divine about maintaining trust and faith in each other. Children trusting their parents to take care of them – that is a sacred trust. Neighbors trusting neighbors to pitch in and help in times of crisis – that’s a sacred kind of trust. The trust we put in each other in our churches is holy. And the institutions we create to enable our economy to run smoothly and predictably – that too necessitates a sacred trust.
The global financial system, precarious as it is, backed up by little but habits of mind, inspires both awe and suspicion – especially now, as we are getting a look behind the curtain to see the very flawed humans turning the cranks and pushing the levers that generate its illusions. The weirdness of cryptocurrency, and the peculiar characters behind it, practically beg us to do what Dorothy did in exposing the Wizard of Oz for who he really was.
How do we change the money system so that it serves humanity more equitably and humanely, without tearing away the delicate filaments of trust that hold it all together? At its root it is a religious question, a spiritual question. How we make and spend money – that’s a matter of morality. How we structure the way money is created and how money flows – that’s a matter of a morality founded on spirituality. How does love move us to gain and distribute money – both as individuals and as a collective?
Money itself is not sacred, nor are the banks and financial institutions through which it moves, but the trust that gives money value has a sacred quality that we must hold precious even as we demand reforms to the financial system to achieve greater economic justice. We’re going backwards on this front today, but soon enough we’ll have the chance to elect politicians who can move us forward on economic justice.
In the gospel story about him, people hated Zacchaeus because of his ill-gotten gains. Tax collectors in the Roman empire effectively were robbers. They were given an amount they had to deliver to the Romans and they were set loose to gather it up by hook or crook, backed up at sword-point, and keep whatever extra they collected in the process. We can be sure that he set neighbors against neighbors, getting them to rat each other out about who had more money than who, so he could extort as much as possible from all of them.
Zacchaeus was a cog in a machine that tore apart the filaments of trust between people. So folks were boggled when Jesus invited himself to dinner with this social pariah. Jesus inspired him to pay back what he had extorted from people. Jesus’ mission was to restore trust among people, to inspire people to forge communal relationships that would enable them to thrive. His encounter with Zacchaeus was a microcosmic reform of the money system of the day, moving its needle in the direction of economic justice. Let’s do our parts toward the same end today!