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THE ALMIGHTIER by Paul Vigna

THE ALMIGHTIER

How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin

by Paul Vigna

Pub Date: July 22nd, 2025
ISBN: 9781250343284
Publisher: St. Martin's

Money is a religion to many—and integral to many religious traditions, by financial journalist Vigna’s account.

A widely shared strain of Protestant thought holds that wealth is a sign of divine favor, a doctrine first voiced by John Calvin, who, Vigna writes, preached that “people who had money had it because God wantedthem to have it.” This thought is older than Calvin, though. Vigna’s study of how religion and money intertwine begins in Mesopotamia, where the invention of writing was, he holds, an innovation created in order to keep tabs on who owed how much to whom. Ethicists from Aristotle on down have debated the morality of usury, a running theme here, even as others figured out numerous evasions to lend money at interest without incurring divine displeasure; in this regard, Vigna points to the famed Medici family, begetter of popes and princes, who maintained a couple of textile businesses to launder money and “hide the fact that they were bankers engaged in usury.” Along the way, Vigna holds that Jesus was executed principally because, in a year of financial crisis, he dared challenge the imperial financial system, calling instead for a debt jubilee. Vigna chronicles case after case of squirrelly religious reasoning on the part of clerics and theologians to justify avarice: The Puritans, in his view, were all in on the accumulation of worldly fortunes while contending that “the use of that wealth for any personal pleasure…was sinful.” Adherents of the “greed is good” school of thought will take pleasure in knowing that there’s plenty of exegetical support, while devotees of Ayn Rand might exalt in the fact that while religion is losing its grip in most Western societies, money remains our golden calf. A final provocation: Vigna calls for that debt jubilee of old, erasing the ledger and rebooting the world financial system.

A thoughtful look at the role of money as religion’s close companion over the course of human history.