Money, power, and religion: exploring ‘belief’ and cultural imagination
Is it rational to live your life around something that does not really exist?
Money is the cause of so much suffering and pain in the world, surely we should condemn the system that causes such harm and is based on a falsehood?
I am not religious, I do not wish to defend or protect ‘religion’ or beliefs in god(s), or anything else that looks like religion to us. I am not able to say that religion is a good thing (particularly as I do not think that religion is a thing at all).
But that does not mean that ‘religion’ must be condemned as false or anachronistic.
What we label as religion can be many things, all of which are part of culture, what humans do. I’m not interested in proving or disproving ideas, statements, claims, or beliefs that explore realities beyond the human. I leave that to theologians, and I am not a theologian.
What we call religion is about power, economics, gender differences, sexualities, race, art, expression, embodiment, inclusion and exclusion, and all the many other ways in which humans create, live in, and exploit meaningful worlds for themselves
I am not privileging religion here, this happens in many other ways too. But in many contexts in the modern world the idea of religion is a very powerful category for siting culture and power and agency.
I also get very annoyed by the narrow, modernist arguments of Richard Dawkins and other ‘new atheists’ — not only for the gross simplicity of their cultural and social analysis, but also for their misogyny, orientalism, and racism.
And as my initial questions and title suggest, if rationality and a pursuit of the truth is the main focus of new atheist polemic, then this should be equally applied to any culture that relies on a belief in money.
Show me the money
When we think of money, we tend to think of specific material things, in particular the pieces of alloy and ‘paper’ (or polymer) that we hold in our hands and exchange with others (such as when we buy or pay for something).
But money is not simply coins and banknotes. I can spend money without having any. Thus I can pay for something in a shop with a plastic card, or through tapping my phone on a wireless terminal. Otherwise I can simply go online and spend money through the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen.
We might think that perhaps we are spending virtually something that exists in reality somewhere else. That is, in spending ‘our money’ we are transferring to someone else a thing exists somewhere.
Although we would rarely articulate it as such, there is a residual assumption that somehow our money is located physically in some place — such as a pile of coins in the secure vault of a bank, Gringotts style. So when we spend our money through Paypal, Visa, or bank transfer the money is moved (either virtually or literally) from our vault to the recipients’.
Of course, we know this does not happen.
Any money that we may be fortunate enough to deposit in our bank account is held with all other deposits. Or more accurately, it is loaned out by our bank to creditors who pay interest to the bank. Very often, the bank that we think holds our money for us does not even have that money (which of course can cause very really problems when a bank fails, such as in 2008).
Unless we ‘take out’ some cash from an ATM (and perhaps stuff it for security in our mattress), our money has no substance or reality. It is simply what the banks’ records tell us it is.
Money, therefore, is a number on a statement, a figure on a screen, an idea in our head. It has importance because we believe in it, as does everybody else.
Money depends on value, not just my own sense of value but a shared sense. People agree that money can be measured and used in particular forms, as dollars, pounds, euros, and many other currencies, which have values that can change in respect to each other. We rely on a shared acceptance of such values, a shared currency of belief in the reality of money — even if we do accept that this money is not really real.
The denial of money — on lacking belief?
It is very hard to be a money atheist, a non-believer.
If I went into a supermarket for some food, I would not get very far if I told the till operator that money is irrational and foolish, and refused to pay. If I decided to take my groceries from the shop whilst asserting my money atheism (that is, if I did not provide any money) then my actions would be policed, literally. I would be stopped, perhaps arrested, possibly charged — not for my lack of belief in money, but for my failure to pay money for the goods that I have taken.
If I told my landlord that money does not exist, then it is likely that I would become homeless. If I told my employer that I did not believe in money then they probably would not stop paying me.
Money is cultural. It is something that does not exist beyond the human — it is something that functions between humans, in a social and political world. Money is imagined, but by being imagined it becomes very real.
Money is gendered. Historically it was seen primarily as part of the male world — men as ‘bread winners’. It was within my lifetime, in 1975, that legislation was passed in the UK to protect women’s rights to open a bank account in their own name or to have a bank card without seeking permission from their father or husband. The significant pay gap between women and men in 2017 indicates that even for the same work, monetary value is strongly gendered. Literally, men are valued higher than women, as measured by the money provided to them in their salaries.
Money is racialised. Most obviously, there is the (now old) British terminology of ‘guineas’ as a measurement of money. The guinea was a coin which had a value of 21 shillings (that is, one pound and one shilling) — in contemporary terms that is £1.05. First circulated in 1663, the guinea was named after the Guinea region of West Africa, from where the gold for the coins was taken. The coin was an important part of the trade monopolised and policed by the British Royal African Company, which developed on the basis of gold and silver from the African ‘Gold Coast’, and from the trading of slaves from Africa to America. That is, the guinea was a significant currency both for trading humans as slaves and for the colonial plunder of mineral resources from West Africa.
On another level, there is a significant argument that the development of capitalism — and thus the twenty-first century monetary system — was itself a product of the economy of industrial enslavement as the basis for wealth production. That is, the vast dominance of the slave-reliant economy was the motor through which capitalism emerged in Europe and north America, and eventually had the power and wealth to dominate the global economy. Both the distribution of wealth (money) and the philosophy behind the monetary system are the result of Britain’s and the US’s racialised economy of industrial enslavement.
And as with the gender gap on pay, there is also a very significant racialised gap in wealth and capital in the US. Thus,
“The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid.” (quoted by Charles Larson, 2014)
Is money like religion?
I am not attempting to say that we should view religion and money in similar ways.
[I am reminded of the joke I once heard that when a plane was nose-diving to crash, a passenger said ‘we are all about to die, we should do something religious’. And so, in response, an air steward went round with a collection plate. (Boom boom.)]
But the cultural function of money is very different from the cultural function of religion.
What I am pointing to, though, is that the ways in which we think about and analyse money and religion do significantly overlap.
Both money and religion are not things that exist beyond human life. They are both cultural, they are imagined, and in being imagined they are very real.
Both religion and money are embodied. They have physical form, in people’s bodies. Money is material not only in forms such as coins, but also in the work and the lives of people for whom money is a necessity.
And both money and religion are imagined, cultural ideas that are done. Money is what it is because it is always in action — being spent, being saved, counted, regulated, traded, invested, and dreamed about.
Our sense of what money is — how we understand it, in a very everyday sense of why we carry it in our pocket or on our phone or card — is because of this active value that we put onto it. We make money do things, get us things, influence people, reassure ourselves, and this is because we think that money is doing something.
We do not need to prove or disprove the existence or reality of money in order to try to understand the cultural value and practice of the idea of money.
It might also be helpful if we could try to do this when we talk about the cultural value and practice of the idea of religion.
Religion Bites is edited by Malory Nye, an academic and writer who teaches at the University of Glasgow. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015).
He is the editor of the Routledge journal Culture and Religion.
