Does America Worship “A God Of Money”?
The one that you serve the most is the one that you really worship. In America today, we don’t actually get down on our knees and pray to our stock market portfolios and the money in our bank accounts, but has our wealth become more important to us than anything else? It is well known that material comfort greatly motivates most Americans. We tend to vote for the politicians that we perceive will be the best for our economy, we religiously track the performance of our investments, and for many of us our financial goals are more important to us than any of our other goals. We desperately want to “do well”, and we tend to exalt others that are “doing well”. Of course “doing well” is defined primarily in financial terms in our society, and that is extremely unfortunate. A poor man that has greatly loved his family and those around him his entire life is generally not considered to be “successful”, while a billionaire that may actually be living in emotional misery every day of his life is lifted up as an example for all of us to follow. Our priorities are all messed up, and I believe that we will ultimately deeply regret the great love that we have developed for the debt-fueled “prosperity” that we have been enjoying for so many years.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned us that we cannot serve two masters…
“No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
Unfortunately, most Americans gave up on trying to serve God long ago. Today, most of us are primarily interested in pursuing money, and this has created a society that is filled with endless greed.
In such an environment, it is easy to understand how the stock market has become such a national idol. We take great pride in the performance of the stock market, and on Tuesday headlines all over the nation gleefully trumpeted the fact that the S&P 500 closed at an all-time record high…
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 rose 0.2% to 3,389.78, eclipsing its previous Feb. 19 high to finish at the highest closing level on record. That means this year’s bear market, or a drop of more than 20% from a peak, from the February high to the lows on March 23 was the shortest in history, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Of course it doesn’t actually make any sense at all that stock prices are hitting all-time highs right now.