For the Christian Abolition of Capitalism

There’s no point in talking about democracy in such times as ours if we’re not talking seriously about the abolition of capitalism. No fully democratic future — indeed, no democratic future in any form — is possible without the wholesale abolition of capitalism. This is because capitalism’s inherent operating logic is inimical to democracy. So Christian communities who care about democracy must take up the work of abolishing capitalism. But even more importantly from a theological standpoint, capitalism is incompatible with fundamental moral norms of Christianity, so Christian communities have a properly Christian duty to endeavor to abolish capitalism forever from the face of Earth.

Wherever capitalism operates qua capitalism, it operates through four core mechanisms that have defined it for centuries, in diverse geographic and cultural contexts. These aren’t what business leaders and economists usually bring up in explaining capitalism — the minutiae of supply and demand, price elasticity, trade imbalances, and so on — but they are nevertheless what mobilizes capitalism and what maintains its inequalities. (Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism (Verso, 2022), is a key resource for understanding these mechanisms.)

Capitalism is a system characterized by the operation of these four mechanisms:

(1) violently forcing most of us to work profitably in order to afford the necessities to care for our loved ones;

(2) ingesting the profits we make in order to endlessly maximize the investment portfolios of a tiny fraction of humankind;

(3) endlessly depleting the Earth’s regenerative capacities and thereby breaking the holistic relationship between humans and Earth; and

(4) perpetually pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy through confederation with social hierarchies such as racism (and its affiliates colonialism, ethno-nationalism, and nativism, among other things), patriarchy (and its affiliates cis-, hetero-, and amato-normativity, among other things), and ableism.

Given that this is how capitalism intrinsically operates, it violates moral norms that are prioritized differently in different Christian traditions. Capitalism violates the sanctity of life through its demand for ever more eco-material and human labor to exploit, which it has repeatedly obtained through violent conquest, dispossession, enslavement, and other physical coercion. Even in the present day, tens of thousands of workers around the world die every year due to unsafe working conditions and billions have many years shaved off their life-expectancy due to the physical and mental tolls of labor under capitalism.

Capitalism also violates the inherent dignity of each person. The structures of inequality necessary to keep the vast majority toiling in labor condemn so many to live without reliable access to even the basic necessities for living — even ifthey work in jobs that yield profits. In this way capitalism transforms human dignity into something that must be bought and that many cannot afford. Make workers desperate enough to afford the basic necessities of life, and they’ll have no choice but to produce more efficiently, no matter the detriment to the imago Dei they bear within. Relatedly, millions of women and queer and trans people stay in abusive relationships (reproductive labor) because that feels like the surest way to maintain access to the basic necessities of life.

As capitalism moves from one ecosystem to the next, forcefully extracting whatever matter and energy it needs for production, it violates the order or wholeness of creation. While this obviously violates theological traditions of humans as stewards of creation, even for traditions that celebrate human dominion over creation, capitalism still poses a problem. For Genesis 1 cannot be read without Genesis 2, where humans are reminded that at death we return to the very same ground from which plants grow to feed animals. Thus, even if humans rule over creation, we are to do so within a holism in which all of life nourishes the rest of life, cyclically replenishing the fullness of creation.

Finally, the Christian moral principle with which capitalism most obviously conflicts is God’s preferential option for the poor. Capitalist profits and wealth cannot be maximized unless there is always a large portion of humankind trapped in poverty, because otherwise they would not accept wages low enough to guarantee high profits from which they will never benefit. One can say capitalism is built on a preferential option for people to be poor.

Because capitalism inherently violates fundamental moral tenets of Christianity, it is not enough to decry the results of capitalism: poverty, economic inequality within and between countries, the perpetuation of hierarchies of race, gender, and many other identities, climate change, and more. Rather, Christian theological education needs to equip the Body of Christ to contest capitalism itself as a pervasive structure of evil. As I have recently proposed in an essay in the collection Liberating People, Planet, and Religion, edited by Joerg Rieger and Terra Shwerin Rowe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), the time has come for Christians and churches to unambiguously confess, teach, and put into practice this conviction:

Whereas capitalism per se is constituted through the wholesale degradation of both the web of life and the web of care and deformation of their natural relationship, therefore, we hold that capitalism violates God’s holy purposes in creation and is intrinsically disordered against the created world. Wherever capitalism operates, by its constitutive structure it undermines and prevents the realization of the justice God desires for all of creation: thus, capitalism is repugnant to the Gospel and a scandal to the faith. This means it is impossible for Christians to promote capitalism and still remain consistent with the Gospel. Nor is it sufficient to pursue the least harmful form of capitalism, because the practices of capitalist power are inherently incompatible with Christian living. Rather, Christians have a sacred duty to resist, dismantle, and supplant capitalism in every way possible and to strive endlessly to eradicate it from the Earth.

For such times as ours, Christian theological education will be flagrantly anti-capitalist or it will not be properly Christian or democratic at all.

This is adapted from a paper given in January 2026 at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics.