Deconstructing the Capitalist Christ
Today is the first Sunday in Lent, a season that has always felt transformational, but this year carries a different weight. Ash Wednesday—the threshold of this journey—coincided with the start of Ramadan and the Lunarsolar New Year. It feels as though the universe is exhaling a collective breath, calling for a pause. For the second year, my wife and I are observing together. We’ve returned to our meat-free discipline (save for Friday fish), and while I’ve surrendered chocolate, she has put down cigarettes. We’ve also invited Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life back into our morning routine—her first time, my third—and I’ve added The Daniel Plan to my research stack.
This spiritual recalibration was sparked about a month ago when a pastor at our new church home preached on Daniel. She spoke about the immense pressure Daniel faced to “be like everyone else” and how he used his eating habits to draw a spiritual boundary around his life. It made me realize that in America, our “unhealthy habits” have very little to do with biology and everything to do with marketing. We are a nation shaped by surpluses and deficits; entire campaigns were designed to make us “Got Milk?” or crave “the other white meat,” not because our bodies needed it, but because the market demanded it. Today, the cycle continues: after decades of being sold the food that makes us ill, we are now being sold a lifetime subscription to GLP-1 shots to fix it. This isn’t healthcare; it’s the ultimate capitalist closed-loop system.
The Entrenchment of the American Hive Mind
Capitalism is so deeply entrenched in our lives that we’ve lost the ability to see it as an elective economic system. We treat it as an immutable law of nature—a “way of life” that has become indistinguishable from our national and spiritual identities. Back in 2016, I told friends that the Republican party would eventually realize they hadn’t endorsed a conservative, but a capitalist. Our collective disconnect from accurate information is so vast that it took a decade for that seed to take root. Now, we see the fruit: a subset of this country is so ashamed of who they’ve backed that they are doubling down, even when it reveals a profound moral rot. There is no “good way” to protect the interests of those who harm the vulnerable, yet the system demands we protect the “bottom line” at any cost.
The Prosperity Lie: Jesus as a Vending Machine
This is where the bastardization of Christianity reaches its peak. Capitalism matured alongside the American government, and now the two are so entwined that many feel being anti-capitalist is inherently anti-Christian. This is the birthplace of the Prosperity Gospel—the ultimate capitalist “middleman.” It has convinced a portion of the faithful that their wealth is a direct reflection of their proximity to God, and that their prosperity was “meant to be.” They have forgotten that the historical Jesus was a displaced brown man who lived in the Roman Empire, a high-extraction empire, and preached against the hoarding of wealth. They’ve replaced the radical, communal care of the early church with a “vending machine” theology: put in your faith (and your tithes), and receive a blessing. It is a trick of the highest order, getting us to believe that the “overflow” of the few is more divine than the “enough” of the many.
Reclaiming the Care Economy this Lent
This isn’t a sermon—or at least, I didn’t intend for it to be. It’s a map of the two streams flowing into the American hive mind. We have to address how white capitalist nationalism has hijacked the Gospel. This Lent, MetaCocoMom will be posting every Sunday and Wednesday, aligning with the days many ELCA Lutherans gather to study and fellowship. I’m not here to convert you; I’m finally allowing myself to write about my faith in a way that is meaningful to my work. My faith is the anchor of how I raise the “JSquad,” because I do believe in family values—just not the ones the “American haters” are so fond of.
It kills me that the phrase “There is no hate like Christian love” makes so much sense in our current climate. But the only way to push that hate aside is to speak truth and love into it. I am using the power of the Holy Spirit this season to speak back to the Christian hate being passed off as Americanism. Because I am an American, and I know that the care economy—the one Black women have used to stabilize this country on their own dime and time—is far closer to the heart of Jesus than any stock market ticker will ever be. 🤎
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