America Sold its Soul for Money. Now we’re Losing Money

The Dow fell another thousand points today.

I don’t own any stock. I don’t have any money. I don’t usually pay attention to the stock market, but nobody can look away from the financial world just now. It’s not as though this mess is only going to hurt rich people.  Last week, talking heads were saying that everybody should stock up on toothbrushes and other disposable goods before the tariffs hit and prices soar, and I just blinked at the phone. I can’t do that. Most of the people I know can’t do that. We’re Americans. We buy the things we desperately need on pay day and hope nothing goes wrong.

I know that people with money had lost lots and lots of it for a few days.

And then Trump made a surprise announcement that he was putting his barrage of tariffs on a 90-day hold for 75 countries, though he didn’t specify which countries– all while increasing the tariff on China to 100%. China is where we get a whole lot of our plastic bric-a-brac. All other things being equal, I think Americans should use a lot less plastic bric-a-brac, and I think that there’s a great deal of injustice in the way we get it for cheap. But randomly and capriciously yanking the chains of the entire world’s economy with ever-changing threats isn’t a good way to accomplish a change. The prices of countless goods are about to skyrocket, and it’s not going to make anything better for the workers we exploit.

The stock market rallied a bit yesterday, after Trump’s announcement.  Trump’s acolytes claimed this was all a masterful plan on Trump’s part. And then, today, the Dow and the Nasdaq and all those other things that people with money watch closely fell like stones again.

Saying “I changed my mind” is not going to fix this mess, apparently.

It’s not really the stock market I care about. What I want to draw your attention to is the way Trump’s cronies are responding to the financial chaos. Professor Heather Cox Richardson gave a very good breakdown of their reaction a couple of days ago, before the 90-day pause was announced. Several billionaires called Trump’s actions “stupid,” and Elon Musk got more and more frustrated. Charles Koch and the National Review don’t like it either. Even a few Republican Senators had started to grumble.

I’m writing this at midnight Friday morning. I’m not going to pretend I know what happens next. I have no idea whatsoever. Maybe everything will be just fine by the weekend.

But whatever happens, I’ll never forget that when Republicans FINALLY, finally began to turn on Trump just the tiniest bit, it wasn’t because of his botched handling of a respiratory pandemic. It wasn’t because he nominated a narcissistic quack to run the health department. It wasn’t because state secrets were shared with a reporter on Signal. It wasn’t because he sent hundreds of innocent men to a brutal concentration camp in a foreign country. It wasn’t because he was found guilty of thirty-four felonies in criminal court, for his financial misdeeds covering up his dalliance with a porn star. It wasn’t because he was found liable for digital rape by another name in civil court. It certainly wasn’t because of the January 6th coup attempt. None of that was the last straw.

The last straw was when they started to lose money.

That’s all this was ever about: money. Just money. And now everyone is losing money.

Remember all those smarmy Evangelical Christians who used to hang around Trump, during his first term? Do you remember a milquetoast little sycophant named Mike Pence? The Republican Party used to bear the trappings of conservative Christianity. A great number of those Christians ascribed to the notion of the Prosperity Gospel, a notion directly contradicted by the actual Gospel. The Prosperity Gospel preaches that if you’re a certain type of ostentatious Christian and follow all the rules, you will see wealth and prosperity in your own lifetime in some kind of one to one ratio like getting paid by the hour. The notion is an offshoot from Protestantism, and contested, but plenty of Catholics ascribe to it. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is riddled with it; that’s why I’m confident in saying the Charismatic Renewal is not of God. Thanks to the Charismatic Renewal, the Diocese of Steubenville tends to be rank with it. And it’s lies. Christ Himself proclaimed that it was nonsense.

Most of those Christians are gone now.

In the second Trump term, there are few performative Christian figureheads. There’s a dour Catholic, J. D. Vance, but nobody likes him, and his Catholicism is beside the point. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist of some sort, and Karoline Leavitt is a Catholic who always wears that shiny cross. But there aren’t Bible-thumpers. There isn’t that air of performative piety anymore. That’s gone. What there are, are rich people. Trump has surrounded himself with an entourage of extraordinarily wealthy multi-billionaires who dance attendance on him. And just now, they’re miffed.

There’s a metaphor in all this somewhere.

It seems that the first thing that happens when you turn to a heresy like the Prosperity Gospel, is that you lose the Gospel. If your faith in Christ was so that Christ would make you prosperous, pretty soon you crucify that middle man and just start worshipping prosperity.

The second thing, and the thing that surprises me, is that you don’t even get your prosperity. The billionaires are losing billions, and it’s not looking good for the poor either.

I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis, speaking as the demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters:  “To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return-that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.”

I don’t have any answers for any of this. All I know is that we ought to double down on the real Gospel. I hope you’re all planning ways you can be helpful to your neighbors in case we’re looking at another recession.

And hopefully it doesn’t come to that.