A Conversation with Andy Crouch on Mammon, Generosity, and Redemptive Investing

Transcript

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, Andy Crouch, great to be with you. It’s been a little bit. So thankful that you’ve wanted to do this, and we look forward to sharing your insights and your wisdom with our listeners.

Andy Crouch:

I’m grateful to be with you.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

And I suspect that a good number of them will probably identify you with the book, Culture Making. Not that that’s the only one you’ve written, but-

Andy Crouch:

First impressions matter a lot.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

But you did such great work in that book, Andy, to really help Christians think wisely and biblically and well about culture. And I wonder if you could just, let’s get started by, how do you think people often think about culture and how maybe out there thinking to be deepened or made more biblical as they consider this somewhat amorphous notion of culture?

Andy Crouch:

Oh, wow. Yes, I think sometimes there’s two misconceptions about culture. One is it’s something cultured people do, it’s the opera or the museum or something, or that a small group of society, a kind of elite group does. And that’s mistaking high culture for all of culture, and high culture is part of culture or art, the arts are part of culture. The other thing is to think it’s something other people do mostly in media industry. So often when people talk about the culture, they’re really talking about what’s mediated to us through entertainment, sometimes through news, through social media. And there too, you kind of feel like other people are doing the important stuff, the stuff that gets on screens, the stuff that influences everybody, and that’s the culture. And both of these, I think for most of us, make us feel like it’s something out there, not in here, and something for others, not really for me and I’m more affected by it than I am affecting it.

But I see it very differently. I see culture as what we make of the world. All of us, all of us all the time are shaping the world around us, not necessarily the whole world. In fact, no one shapes the whole world, but we’re all reshaping some part of the world and we’re doing that by making something. We are actually every day, almost all of us actually rearranging material. Even if you work at a screen, you are rearranging electrons and how they’re stored in a computer, and it’s coming out in the form of light into your eyes on the screen and someone else’s. And you’re rearranging material even if you work in the most abstract kind of industry. So we’re literally making things, the world, the material world is being shaped by us. That is culture.

And then what we make of the world also includes, we’re making sense. We’re always trying to make sense of the world and often to make the world make more sense. Something doesn’t work in your business or something doesn’t work in your home, and you’re like, we got to figure out how to change this, and that’s a lot of the work of culture. And that belongs to everyone and it is, I think what God intended human beings to do. I think God made us to make something of the world that he graciously created and gave to us. And now our role is to kind of feel our way through that world together and find out, what can we make of it? It turns out human beings can make a lot of the world. A lot of beautiful things, a lot of broken things, and a lot of repaired things, and that’s kind of what we’re doing every day with culture.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

I think about the connection between the word culture and the word cultivation.

Andy Crouch:

Exactly.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Right, right? Which is that making something of it.

Andy Crouch:

Yes, yes.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

And as you just alluded, the Lord gives us this invitation to participate in this cultivation and we make good things and we make bad things, because of our sinfulness. And I think that mixed performance that humans have is-

Andy Crouch:

Decidedly mixed.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

It’s decidedly mixes, and in every sector.

Andy Crouch:

Yes, it is. Exactly.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Right, every sector. But I’m curious, and I think our listeners may be too, certainly we see it in business. Not exclusively or only in business, but you were a journalist. Your kind of people think of you as a theologian, certainly a writer writing all these books, and yet part of your professional journey has been kind of into the business world. And you are at Praxis, and so would you talk just a little bit about Praxis and especially about why you as the author of culture making ended up working at a place like Praxis?

Andy Crouch:

Yeah. Praxis’s work is to come alongside what we call redemptive entrepreneurs, people who are starting new ventures and who are trying to do that in a way that really maps onto God’s purposes for the world, God’s creative and redemptive or reparative purposes. And yeah, we work with a lot of people who are in for-profit work, though we also work with not-for-profit, we are sort of agnostic about your tax status. We think most nonprofits should have a better idea of their bottom line and their business model than most do, and most for-profits should have a deeper sense of mission like nonprofits often do. So we work with both.

But yeah, a lot of folks who are using, in some ways the most powerful, modern way to organize human activity is a corporate structure. And it’s a way to get a whole bunch of people aligned on a goal and often to scale that work so that it’s one thing to do this just in a small shop, but how do you grow it until it actually can work at scale? That usually happens through a corporate structure. And I’ve just come to believe this is a tremendously valuable way to organize people and actually serve people and care for people. It is also implicated in a lot of what’s broken, but so is everything else, including nonprofits have their own kind of failure modes.

So we actually talk about nonprofit work as susceptible to what we call the nobility trap, which is there’s this idea if you work in nonprofits, because you often do sacrifice maybe some compensation or whatever, that you are just obviously doing something good for the world. That’s actually not as evidently true as we would hope. Yes, you are getting tax breaks, yes, you are not serving the bottom line in the same way that a business does, but we actually think business can be just as redemptive, and business has more ability to scale almost always than donation-dependent nonprofits.

So I’m at Praxis because I love entrepreneurs and because I really believe if we’re going to change culture, we have to create more of it. And that’s what entrepreneurs do and it’s especially what for-profit structures in our world are able to do.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, I think those of us at Eventide share your understanding of culture and culture making and the cultural mandate. And at the foundation, I think there’s this conviction here that the purpose of investing is to supply capital to those entrepreneurs and businesses to enable them to make good things in the world. And I’m wondering whether that would align with your own kind of fundamental assumption about what good investing is, but help us think a little bit about, what makes a good business and what makes a good investment?

Andy Crouch:

Wow. Yeah, so I would say investing is another culture-making activity. It’s a way that we participate in making something of the world, often slightly indirectly. It’s slightly different from complete ownership and control. Usually, investors are at a distance from the day-to-day activities of the company, that’s why we call them investors rather than owner-operators. And often in a retail environment, they have a minority stake, they’re not necessarily the whole owners, but it’s still participation in, well, what are we meant to do? I think we’re meant to find value in the world, that is find some area of potential, whether human or created in the natural world, in the properties of the world. This is where a lot of technology comes from. Just find a possibility and develop that possibility usually through building systems around it, that unlocks value for human beings, that adds to the store of commonwealth that we are able to share in more good because someone figured out how this could work better and or just how it in the first place and brought it to market.

So investing is a foreign participation that I think has to pay attention to three aspects maybe of culture making in particular, and I would call them value, time and risk. So investing as, is value being created by this work being done, and is this a kind of value I want to accelerate in the world? Now, money is a way we measure that, but it’s only a measure. The underlying thing is what value is being created. The money itself is just a counting mechanism.

Then there’s time. So all finance is about matching different time horizons. So I don’t need my money today and you have a productive use for it today. I should hand it to you, but I may need it later. So it’s about matching mismatched time expectations and handling then the risk that comes in waiting, because the third thing that you do when you invest is you wait. You plant a seed or you make an investment and you don’t expect it to pay off tomorrow, hardly ever. You expect to have to wait some time and that means there’s uncertainty and that means there’s risk. And all of this adds up to what you most deeply need to have to create value to actually be able to handle the time duration and to take the risk, is you need trust. And so a lot of our business systems and financial systems are about creating and sustaining trust. That when I entrust something to you, you will do your best to create value with it and then I’ll get to share in that.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Which is a much more sophisticated way, I think, of looking at all of this than kind of at a popular level. There’s this sense, well, a good business is a business that makes a profit and a good investment is an investment that makes a good financial return.

Andy Crouch:

Yes, yes.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

So help us think a little bit about profit and return.

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, so let’s start with return, maybe. Yes, I think most people, if they are sort of ordinary investors, and this can be up to people with a lot to invest, still can think like an ordinary investor. They basically just think, I want my money back having grown, and it’s just about the financial return. And of course, we understand why people want that. It would be nice to beat inflation, it would be nice to have more later when I may need it more. But you can never get an accounting of value without creating some kind of value. In other words, all money is is counting up value created for the world. And you really need to be interested, even as just a prudent investor, let alone a redemptive investor or kind of a god-minded kingdom-minded investor, you need to be aware of what value is created, how sustainable that is, how real that is, and really, what’s the truth of what’s being created? Because there are ways to create apparent value in the world that do generate intermediate financial returns and somebody gets to siphon those off and maybe take them home.

But actually what’s been created is it’s like a sinkhole underneath that is actually destroying value in human communities, in employees’ lives, in vendors upstream from maybe the company you invest in. And you are creating more destruction than you are creating value. You’re creating basically a bubble on top of a sinkhole and if you get out at the right time, you can take your winnings, but you didn’t participate in creating value. So there’s a difference between realizing a return and creating common good wealth. It seems to me that my responsibility as an investor is as far as I can to be sure that I’m actually building something real, rather than profiting from a bubble on a sinkhole.

So on the profit side, profit is a measure of sustainable value creation. It’s just a way of saying we added more through our processes and people than the inputs cost, and that’s the ground rule for operating a business. You have to have a way to do that. But I will say when there is really excessive profit, it’s often because some cost is not being accounted, is not being accounted in the ledger. And it may be legitimately off the books of that company and that company may legally have no responsibility, but good things grow organically and organically is not 200% a year, organically is not a wild outsized return.

And so I think actually, excess profit is a sign that something’s out of whack and sometimes you’re responsible for it and sometimes you’re not. But investors and operators of companies need to be asking, what’s the sustainable value creation here? Because if we have, as I believe, we have a good God who created a very good world, and when we operate in line with God’s purposes, the world is abundant. I don’t think we have to worry about internal rate of return in a way, I think it’ll be adequate for everyone. But if we operate in a way that’s at cross purposes with how God’s designed the world, we will start telling and believing lies about what’s happening and that’s what creates the bubbles and the sinkholes.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

So you’re helping us because you’re nuancing these ideas around profit and return. And I loved the recent Praxis playbook on redemptive investing, and I thought I might just get you to riff a little bit on this paragraph here because I think it seems to capture a lot about what you were just talking about. It says, “The naturally ordered relationship between purpose and return gets reversed.” This is sort of the heart of what the playbook was trying to… “And money always finds a way of improperly anchoring itself to the primary place in our imagination, heart, and self-assessment of success. So, nearly all investors, even self-proclaimed impact investors ask this question, what impact can we get for the returns we are seeking? Instead, the governing question for redemptive investors should be closer to, what return can we get for the impact we’re seeking?”

Andy Crouch:

Yeah. This is the kind of contradiction or complexity at the heart of the capitalist economy, which has generated a lot of commonwealth. I would say good things have come from this way of organizing our work and finance. So there’s this very well-known kind of law in social science, it’s called Goodhart’s Law, that says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, you are trying to measure something good that you’re creating and you’re like, oh, we’re getting more of it. But if the moment you say, “Our goal is to increase this measure, it’s now a target,” and then people start adapting their activity not to create the original good, but to just hit the number, and that’s when it becomes a problem. And of course in business, the number is your gross and net profit, and that, it’s baked into the structure of how businesses are incentivized to operate, how managers are incentivized to evaluate their work, and there’s parts of business that operate purely on what’s the number at the end of the quarter.

Behind that though is always the creation of value or else it’s not sustainable. And the problem is that we let the measure become a target. The thing we are in the world to do is create good. That’s the thing for all of us, and that’s true whether you’re running a sales organization or running the whole company or running customer service or engineering or you’re the investor investing in those things. You are working together with other people to create good.

The problem is you’ve got to measure of the good you’ve created, which we have to have because among other things, money can’t be allocated to things that return less money. That doesn’t work for very long, right? So you got to have a measure that keeps us all honest. This is the great value of tracking profit and balance sheets and cash flows, is it keeps you honest about the value you’re creating. But we have to somehow really have the discipline collectively to keep in mind, we are not here to maximize this number, we’re here to maximize the good that it represents and trust that if we maximize the good, the number will follow in a way that’s appropriate and just,.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, we’ve been talking about profit and return and I think that’s a good segue because you have done some really interesting teaching on the biblical idea, this biblical notion of Mammon. And I wonder if you could, let’s just get into that a little bit. So, start maybe with just, tell us how you understand this biblical concept of Mammon.

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, well, I understand it only to the extent I do by trying to ponder the words of Jesus, and it’s one of Jesus’ more famous things that he says, which is, “You cannot serve God and…” and then there’s kind of a mystery in a way about the word he uses, because a lot of English translations just say money and that is a way to translate Mammon. But the funny thing is that the gospel writers who translate all of Jesus’ words, Jesus did not speak Greek, which the gospels are written, he spoke Aramaic. They translate his Aramaic into Greek, except this word Mammon, they don’t translate. It’s just transliterated, just the letters are spelled out. And the only thing that you leave untranslated when you’re translating from one language to another is names, proper names like Amy or Andy, you wouldn’t translate that. And that implies, and the early church concluded, that Jesus is not talking about money, the abstract concept or money the economic unit of accounts, store of value, etc. That he’s actually talking about something that is best dealt with by naming it as if it were personal.

And in fact, I think it is in a way, it’s a will in the world that when we encounter these wills, we kind of feel like we’re dealing with persons, we’re dealing with something personal, not abstract. When you say money, that’s just an abstract thing. If I say Amy, which by the way, it comes from the word for love, I’m not talking about love generally, I’m talking about a person who maybe embodies something, right? Maybe the spirit of something. That’s I think what Mammon is.

Now, the way we talk about this, it’s something we’re not super comfortable with in a lot of Christian circles, but is using the language of the demonic. The demonic represents powers that we have been told by scripture or at work in the world that have a will. They aren’t really persons exactly, not like we are, not like God is, but they’re at least quasi-personal and they insinuate themselves into human will expressed in individual choices and collective choices, and invite us or lure us or tempt us to reorder our lives away from the way God created the world.

The two things, it seems to me that the demonic world wants to lure us away from are our relationships and also our responsibility for the material world, because the demons have rejected love, that they don’t ever want love and they don’t want us to love and they were not created with bodies the way that we were and they don’t have direct access to the material world as best as I can see in Scripture. All they can do is whisper in our ears. “Do you really need to think about that other person? Don’t you want to live for yourself? Did God really say?” And then they want to actually get us to dream of a world where we’re not responsible for this planet, because God put us as image bearers here to care for this amazing abundant place and the demonic world would like nothing so much as to see us neglect every aspect of the creation that’s not us and just serve ourselves and not even serve our own bodies, honestly.

Just imagine that we can become just spirits who finally realize our desire to be God of the whole world. That’s sort of the drive. And the idea of Mammon is that it seems to me Jesus is telling us the name of the demonic power that has attached itself to money, that when money comes into play in human societies, there’s this whisper that comes with it that says, “If you have money, you don’t need love. If you have money, you don’t need relationship.” And money itself is a dematerializing of the world. It’s not material, it’s not a fertile land. Most wealth used to be in the form of fertile land, now most wealth is in the form of ledger entries on computers. And when you shift from, my land is abundant and I care for it, to, my bank account has so many dollars in it and I care for it, you are no longer caring for the material world. You are caring a number, and I think Mammon love this.

To have people think about the numbers all the time is like, that’s Mammon’s dream. Not to think about people and not to think about the creation that is being reordered or disordered to create those numbers. That’s the drive of Mammon and that’s why Jesus says you just can’t serve God in both because what does God want for you? God wants your life to be more and more characterized by love, be ever more interdependent with people, to be more and more creating good in the created world that God called very good and put you and me and all of us in charge of. You can’t serve God who wants those things and serve Mammon who wants these other things, and it’s all channeled through your relationship to money.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

How do you see the relationship between Mammon and greed? Is it just that whispering of, you don’t have enough, you need more?

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think human beings have all kinds of internal drives that are always rooted in something good, the desire to have enough, and the desire to have enough knowing that I’m insecure, that I don’t know what tomorrow holds or that I’m in a vulnerable position as a human being. That’s like a legitimate thing. Greed harnesses that and twists it to think, I never have enough and the world is full of risks and therefore I just need to accumulate. And I would see Mammon as the name of the entity whispering into your imagination, sort of fanning the flame of greed. Greed’s a human thing, Mammon is a demonic power.

Mammon’s the whisperer that amplifies that human, that natural human uncertainty, risk, desire to make sure I have enough, but it’s distorted even inside me but when it comes into contact with this external whisperer, especially when that whisperer’s not just like a bad angel on my shoulder, but is every bit of advertising, I encounter every message of who’s valued and valorized in my world and who’s image do I see all day? I mean, that’s an enormous amount and that’s all Mammon at work, not just… I don’t want people to over-spiritualize this in the sense of imagining that it’s like this, you hear a demon in one ear and an angel in the other. It’s every message as you walk through the train station, as you walk through the airport, as you turn on your TV. You’re getting the story that Mammon wants to tell.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

So we’re doing this conversation in Eventide’s Boston offices and Finny Kuruvilla, he was asked, “Who is the villain in the modern story of investing?”

Andy Crouch:

Oh, wow, wow.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

And his response was, Mammon-olatry.

Andy Crouch:

Yes, I completely agree.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

And so he takes this clever sort of new word combining Mammon and idolatry, and it seems like Mammon-olatry really is very much at work in the quote that we read that we talked about earlier from the playbook in which-

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, that’s right.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

… the impact of the return get distorted. So I wonder if you could, yeah, respond a little bit about how you think about this term Mammon-olatry and how that further illuminates some of these things we’ve been talking about.

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, I think it’s very helpful to clarify, and this is an anchor kind of principle. When we deal with these spiritual realities, we are not wrestling against flesh and blood. It’s actually not the people or the individuals or the groups of people that we sometimes, that do get demonized. I mean, finance gets demonized, CEOs get demonized. It’s not the people, we’re not wrestling against the people.

We are wrestling against principalities and powers in the heavenly places. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians. And I take that to mean that there is this larger drama playing itself out, that essentially the final question is, who will humanity worship? And that olatry part of Mammon-olatry comes from the word to worship. Latreuo means, it’s the Greek word for worship. So in the strictest sense, Mammon-olatry is the worship of the things Mammon cares about and maybe ultimately the worship of that force, and that is absolutely what we are up against. And how do you know what you worship? It takes a lot of your time and attention. It’s what you think of when you wake up in the morning. It’s who you start your day kind of addressing and attending to. It’s who you sacrifice to and who you sacrifice for, and who you render other things unto it.

So you decide, I’m going to give up this thing so that I can have this thing or I’m going to give up this person so I can have this thing. And all that can operate in very evident ways and kind of very extreme ways and we see those, and often that we let ourselves off the hook because we think, well, I don’t do that. But it also operates in subtle architectural ways, and that means that when people, individual persons made in the image of God step into these systems, it’s like they’re on this tilted plane where all the gravitational energy is to move or in a groove, maybe all the energy is to move in this direction. Everyone around you is moving in that direction. All the stories you hear validate that direction, and as good a person as you may imagine yourself to be, when you’re confronted with all this evidence that this is the way the world works, this is who we need to serve, these are the blessings we get by serving this God.

You end up accommodating that and then you become part of a system much bigger than you that does do a lot of damage and sometimes very extreme damage, or sometimes just long-term chronic damage. I absolutely believe that’s what’s happening in the kind of triumph of capitalism in the world. We’ve always had markets, we’ve always had trade, and we’ve always to a small extent had money. Human beings have not always lived in a society where no one gets to overrule the market, where the market is the only thing that we can count on to assess value, and where everyone every day has to worship and serve financial return. That is a very new thing in human history, and it didn’t have to be that way. Choices have been made to build the systems that we have. And can you be human and Christian? If you’re Christian, let’s say in this world, yes you can, but you have to understand how much you’ll have to be climbing against the gradient of your culture to stay human and stay in a sense, a follower of the God who made you.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Yeah, and I think part of that, so part of that is all these forces pulling us into the groove, but also maybe some of our own self-deception because we begin maybe walking into that groove because there is some actual real good, but it’s not the ultimate good, which os again part of idolatry, taking a good thing and making it the ultimate thing.

Andy Crouch:

Totally, and I think very broadly, it’s probably two things that we get out of participation in the financial system initially, and it’s some combination of security and significance. So if you have lived with insecurity, you know how valuable it is to know where your next meal’s coming from, to know how your house, the roof is staying over your head. And lots of people either themselves or in a very formative way for their family, they kind of enter into the financial system and maybe for the first time they’re like, oh, I feel secure. And that’s a good, human thing to feel. And our economy should provide that for people and can provide it in financial ways, that’s legitimate.

The other thing is significance. Do I matter in the world? And if there’s a measure that can tell you I matter. And this is, you make your first big sale and you get that commission and you’re like, I matter, I matter to this company, but I also have this record that I matter. I think those are basic human needs that are meant to be met by our work together in the world as we create value.

The problem is then you start chasing those things for themselves and money says, I’ll give you these things with no intermediaries, with no relationship, with no hard work even necessarily, or without having to take mutual risks. It gives you shortcuts, and when you start taking shortcuts to serve the money, that’s where you start serving them, I think.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

So you’ve already said that some of these things are hard to spot. What are the signs and signals do you think that we are worshiping, Mammon-olatry? And how do we learn to see those things when they’re hard to spot?

Andy Crouch:

The first thing I think any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships. I mean, I think the thing that the demonic world hates the very most is love. The thing it really wants you never to do or feel like you need is love. So the early warning sign is, what are the quality of your relationships? And just to give a little more texture to that, I think in relationships of deep love and trust, there’s kind of two things that happen not all the time by any means, but that do happen.

And one is that you weep deeply together, and the other is that you laugh uproariously together, you just laugh until you’re almost weeping. And that’s a healthy family, that’s a healthy marriage, that’s a healthy workplace, it’s a healthy human community. And let’s ask ourselves honestly, and the answer will be different for different people. How much do I have the kind of relationships where there’s that range of heart? The fullness of the tragedy that we all have to bear together, and the just absurd wonder and surprise of the world that is what laughter’s about. And if you feel like you live in a little tunnel vision where you really never have that depth of sadness and mourning together and you never have the hilarity together, something has come between you and the life you were meant for. And in a world where Mammon runs the show, I’m going to say eight times out of 10, it’s probably Mammon. So that’s how you know.

And then it’s not just static, it’s direction. What’s the directionality of my family? As my children grow older, we are we growing more in the ability to weep and laugh together, and then to make something together also? Like true productivity. It’s true for business. You assess not just where are we today, but where we come from, because all of us come from tough places, but where are we going as our lives unfold? And if you’re heading away from fullness of life, there’s an idol somewhere in the room and then it’s just a question, what’s the name? And Jesus very hopefully gives us one of the names.

And then the question is, what do you do? Oh my gosh, the idol’s in the room. With Mammon, it’s almost unfair how easy it is to… Actually, I can tell you there’s one thing you can do that will both help you find out if it’s an idol and will begin the cure for the idol. It’s actually amazing. I can give you a prescription, a thing that’s both diagnosis and prescription in one fell swoop. That is to give it away, give money away. When you are generous with money specifically, because another way of thinking what Mammon promises or whispers in our ears is control. Like, I’m going to give you control, security, and control over your security, control over your significance, control over what you want.

When you give up control by giving, which is by the way, the only way, there’s only four things you can do with money. You can spend it on something you get to keep, you can save it, which means keep it safe for later, you can invest it, which means take risk in the hopes of high return later, or you can give it. The first three, spending, saving, investing, you all retain control either of the money or the thing it got you. Only in giving do you say, “I’m letting go.” And I will tell you, if you do that with 10% of your income or 10% of your net worth, then my wife and I had a couple of times have decided it wasn’t enough for us to do this diagnosis just to give away 10% of our cash flow so we gave away 10% of our balance sheet over a couple of years. You find out how attached you are. So it will absolutely diagnose.

And by the way, the numbers are in for our society, Americans give on average something around one to 2% of their income and Christians give half a percentage point more. And that just says to me… And we are in an environment of abundance that our grandparents could not have imagined and that just says to me, the numbers are already in, Mammon is running the show. We’ve already got the diagnosis. And by the way, the more you make, the less you give as a percentage, up until you get to massive amounts of money where people do start to feel like they need to at least look generous. So, giving will disclose. How? Is it easy, natural, just the most natural thing in the world to give? Then you probably don’t have, Mammon is your idol. You might have other idols, but Mammon’s not the one.

Or are you like, oh, I can’t do that. What about our savings? What about our retirement? All the things that God’s promised to take care of for you as a human being and one of his children. If you feel that tension, then the idol’s in the room and the giving is the cure because as you give up control, you actually discover that you’re less dependent on this thing than you thought, and God is better than you thought, and there’s joy available to you and relationships because good giving happens in relationship with other people and you are able to release control of money to them so that they can do something in the world you couldn’t do. And you’re so thrilled to be part of it and to know them and to be honored to be part of their story and joy expands and you’re like, oh, what did I want that stuff for anyway? It’s amazing, it’s amazing what generosity does.

And for me, I’ll just speak for myself that my wife obviously had to be involved in this, but for me, when we decide we’re going to look at our net worth and calculate that and take 10% of that and find a way to get it liquid enough to give it. It both revealed I was more dependent than I wanted to admit on Mammon because we’d been tithing, each of us since we were like 18. So that was established and easy, this just revealed another level of dependence, and I just can’t tell you after having done that a couple times, the sense of freedom and like, my gosh, we don’t need this stuff because we have 100 houses. We only have Title I, but there’s 100 places where we have the kind of relationship where if we need a place to stay, they’ll take us in. And we’ve got a hundred fields, and you just start to realize your life is full of abundance when you live the abundance that is generosity.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, Andy, let’s shift a little bit and have you kind of speak more directly to those listening who are financial professionals. What do you think they can be doing in their line of work to really practice this kind of biblical vision of investing that we’ve been talking about and to resist that very, very, very strong pull of Mammon-ology? I wonder what thoughts you have around that that would be particularly relevant to financial advisors and folks in those sorts of roles.

Andy Crouch:

I think one of the funny things you learn when you get close to almost all sectors or segments of the financial industry is that it’s almost never really about money, it’s about people. And even though money kind of runs the show, it’s people that matter in the show and it’s relationships that matter.

And I certainly think you do really need to understand if you step into a kind of a financial consulting role for other people, whether individuals or firms, that while you’ve had to acquire a lot of technical knowledge to be qualified to do this, in a way, all that technical knowledge is the backdrop for building a relationship where someone trusts you enough to change the way they relate to money. Because if you think about it, if you are a financial professional, if there’s someone you meet who doesn’t need any changes in how they relate to money, it’s actually not ethical of you to take their money to do something that they clearly can do for themselves, technically and spiritually you might say.

So every financial professional who’s retained by someone else needs to believe that there’s some change that needs to happen for that other person. They need to see risk more realistically. They need to have patterns of spending and saving that are better suited for their own needs and the needs of those that they support. There’s all these, and that’s relational work. So to qualify, you have to do a lot of studying and ideally take a lot of exams and fail some of the exams, take them again. And once you’ve done that, you need to realize now the real work begins of becoming someone who can be trusted by other people. So that’s the deepest thing I think is trust matters a lot.

I think financial professionals are in a tough spot because the law in many of though not all cases, requires them to act as fiduciaries, and fiduciary is defined very narrowly. It is defined for practical purposes almost entirely in terms of the target of the number and what’s a prudent way of kind of achieving a target. And that has to be honored and even those who aren’t legally fiduciaries probably need to in many ways have the spirit, that spirit. But I would say if the kind of conversation we’ve been having appeals to you as a financial professional, I think you have to realize your calling goes way beyond the kind of legal floor of fiduciary, to the kind of spiritual health that comes with a right relationship with money.

And very often you have to realize you are the only person that your client will ever entrust with enough information to even have any sense of the level of health. I don’t think this is a good thing. I think most people should be much more open with their family, with their friends, with their religious community about their own financial situation, but the reality is most people are not going to disclose that to anyone else. They will probably tell you, and that means you are entrusted with having to be willing to challenge the role Mammon plays in their life. And how do you do that? I think by building generosity into every financial plan and asking questions about that, and kind of assuming that it’s good rather than a sort of optional extra like, well, if you want to be charitable.

But no, no, you might consider the possibility that the most important thing for people to do for their financial health is to begin with generosity and that if you could help people structure that and imagine that and imagine having enough margin in their financial affairs for that, that you would be doing more for their lasting, even their financial wealth will increase.

Really weird statistic is that the more people make, the less they give. That’s demonstrated like as a percentage, the absolute numbers goes up, but as a percentage it kind of trails down, as people get up into mass affluence and even high net worth. But I promise you this can also be true. The more people give in one moment in their lives, the more they make. So the more you make, the less you give in America, but the more you give, the more in the long run you make. And you think that’s a paradox, but it’s not because when you are generous in this moment, it sets you free to be more of the person you were made to be. And those kinds of people are entrusted with more, they’re entrusted with more business projects, they’re entrusted with more money often by others. And so their longterm earnings go up.

So of course you’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about saving and investing and maybe spending if that’s part of what you do. But the most important thing to help people imagine for their financial lives is how generosity will transform their relationship to all the rest of it.

Once you’ve built this foundation of generosity with a client, then you ask, how can we imagine the most good being done with the money that you don’t need today but that you wish to see a return on in the long run? And this is where I think rethinking just purely mechanical investing as well. This asset class has this risk ratio risks and whatever. Start imagining together, are there ways, yeah, maybe part of the funds go into very standard vehicles, but maybe part of them go into ways of putting your money at risk that actually could unlock much more value in the world than just kind of general participation in the markets would do. And I think there’s so much opportunity to actually differentially direct at least some of our assets toward things where we really have reason to believe the world will rejoice about this in a way that it won’t rejoice just because I was in the broad market index fund. And I think financial planners and financial professionals have a chance to introduce people to this idea.

When you look at your investment statements, you could not just see a number and be happy or sad about the number, but you would actually see even a list of companies that you’re like, I am so proud to own that company because I know someone has done the diligence to know they’re creating sustainable value. What an amazing… That’s a much better feeling to have when you open up your or download your quarterly statements, than just number went up.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, and its full circle back to where we began because you were talking about fundamentally God made us for this task of cultivating this world. And really what you’re talking about now is as an individual investor, I can be an active cultivator through the deployment, through the wise, careful deployment of the resources that God has given me. So, financial advisors get to be coaches of folks who are getting off the bench and they’re getting in the game of the active cultivation.

Andy Crouch:

Yes, exactly, exactly. And what will result from that is a rebuilding of the things that Mammon doesn’t care about. It’s going to result in more relationships, more real connections. And I think one of the greatest privileges of being a financial professional is the relationships you’ve got to build with people, but then also the relationships you can build at least over one bridge of separation perhaps with people running those companies that are really worth running and worth doing things worth doing in the world. And it’s going to restore the cultivation of the world to produce very goodness for everyone and not just for human beings, but for all the other creatures that we have dominion over and are meant to see flourish. And if everybody stays on the sidelines and just looks for the number, then that will not happen. Mammon will run the show.

I also think it doesn’t take everyone moving off of the sidelines. I actually think we’ve seen, and you can have opinions about these different movements, but minority movements with ESG and this kind of thing, which are other ways of thinking of this same basic issue and possibility and problem. Small numbers of people who start to think, we should be doing more than just hitting a number, actually do move the whole system. And Mammon is very vulnerable because Mammon doesn’t create good in the world, certainly not lasting good. So if just a few people start to seek something different, it can really destabilize and start to restructure the whole system.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

How exciting to get to be part of that.

Andy Crouch:

We get to be part of that.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Well, you’ve made clear that the primary strategy for fighting Mammon-olatry is that letting go and the generosity. I wonder though if there are additional practices you would recommend as we try to resist this phenomenon.

Andy Crouch:

Yeah, I think there are two others that are in one ways go much bigger than the role of money in our lives. But because it is such a deeply spiritual issue, these are spiritual practices that connect with the spiritual power of money and kind of dethrone the spiritual power of Mammon, and they are gratitude and lament. So gratitude is… And there’s really interesting evidence about this now. That choosing on a daily basis to just identify things you’re grateful for and by definition, a thing that you’re grateful for is something you did not earn and maybe didn’t deserve that just came into your life often through others, maybe just sometimes in some way directly from God or just out of the blue and you just say, “I am grateful. I was on my bike last night biking along a river, the moon was three quarters full and rising, and it was just so beautiful. I did nothing to earn it. I did nothing to deserve it, and I could have ignored it and I could have stayed head down in my anxiety and my pressure to perform or whatever.”

And instead, I had the presence of mind to look up at the world and just feel grateful. And every moment you’re grateful, the idol is not running the show. You are never grateful when you’re serving an idol ever, ever. Unless it’s like that desperate sense of thank you, thank you for taking care of me today, but what do I do to serve you next? But you never have that peaceful sense I’ve just been provided for beyond anything I could have asked.

And in some ways the flip side of that is this thing that also I think more and more is being talked about actively, even though it was in the Bible all along, about a third of the Psalms exemplify this, which is lament, which is taking the perplexity and grief and fear of your life to God. We’ve all got perplexity and grief and fear. And the question is not, do we have them? It’s, where do we go with them? Who do we take it to? And in lament and the Psalms give you so many patterns of how to do this, you go to God and you are not shy about complaining and making it clear how much this hurts, how afraid you are, how at risk you are. Asking God questions like, do you care?

And the more direct we can be in just really laying it out with God, including the emotion of that and the negative emotion that good religious people aren’t supposed to have. See, idols get really mad when you get mad at them. The true God doesn’t get mad at all. The true God is so glad you are coming to him in relationship. It doesn’t matter the content, he can work with it, and he understands and his own son has been there. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So there’s no lament you can bring to God that God would be like, whoa, why did you say that? And God understands.

When our children were in the middle of schooling, kind of late elementary school, we made one of our first big architectural decisions to give away a lot of what we had, more than 10%, actually. And then we were giving 10% on cash flow. And it was becoming clear that the school system where we lived was not the best place for our kids, not the very best.

And I remember walking around our neighborhood wrestling with God like God, look at our financial circumstances. Look at what it would cost to put our kids in private school where I believe they’d do better. And we never did put our kids in private school because we never could afford it without compromising on generosity and we didn’t want to do that. But I felt fear as I gave away more than a private school tuition every year to things I believe God was in and I believe I obediently had to give. I was like, I keep giving this money away and I’m not sure my kids are going to thrive. What do you do with that? That’s a very concrete financial anxiety situation, right? I’ve got the money but I’m not spending it on this thing.

You take it to God. You’re like, God, what are you going to do with this? How are you going to provide for us? How are you going to provide for my children? And we’re now 10 years plus after that decision, and I now realize God completely heard, God totally provided, my children are thriving as young adults. They weren’t in the best possible school environment. We didn’t choose to pay for it, and yet God totally met the underlying need. It could have been solved by money, but only at the expense of giving up on God. Instead, we doubled down on God through lament, through complaint, through all the emotion of it, and it’s just consistently my experience when you do that, God shows up.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Andy, I wonder if you could speak just for a moment more specifically towards financial professionals. What can they be doing in their line of work to kind of live into this biblical vision that you’ve been talking about and to resist that idolatry of wealth?

Andy Crouch:

I wonder if all the professions are ultimately about a set of technical areas where you’re expert, plus people. That’s what makes it a profession. So a doctor is a medical expert, but what you really want from your doctor is all that expertise applied to you as a person. In the legal profession, yeah, you need to know the law, but the law is about people. And I think finance is the same way. That if you’re a financial professional in a way, your entry ticket is knowledge of finance, but your job is caring for people. So yes, you had to go through a lot of technical training and study for a lot of exams, I hope, and pass the exams, I hope, at least eventually. And yes, a lot that your client doesn’t know and that’s of great value, but you also need to realize that technical knowledge is almost just the base or the ground on which you build a way of caring for a person or often persons in a family system or a company or whatever.

And in doing that, I think we need to have a much higher vision of what that professional responsibility is, than has been set by the kind of legal bar that applies to some though not all financial professionals, of being a fiduciary. The introduction of the idea of a fiduciary is a good thing because it sets kind of a minimum standard for how you should treat a client’s interest, right? And that’s very important. I also feel like sometimes it sets a ceiling. You do whatever any other prudent person would do so that you cannot be accused of not putting someone’s interests first, but that also means you just settle for the show that is already being run, the table that’s already been set, the story that’s already being told.

And if you have this broader view that we are here to create lasting good in the world to build and realize value together, and that money is just a measure, not a target for that, I just don’t think you can settle for being a fiduciary. You’ll never be less than that. Of course, if you’re legally required, you’ll never do less than legally required, but you will be responsible for inviting them into a bigger story with their money for their lives than they probably are inclined to tell.

I mean, the reality is, just like most people go to the doctor hoping the doctor will fix it quickly without them having really to change anything. Like, give me a pill, don’t tell me to exercise, right? People come to a typical financial professional wanting them to solve a money problem or tell them how to do the money thing. But just like the doctor knows, what you really need to do is get more sleep, eat better, exercise, all those things. All changes, they’re much bigger than just your little medical problem. You will know, what I really am here to do is help this person imagine a more flourishing life and the role that money can play in that and the stewardship of their money plays. And that means we, of course, we operate as fiduciaries, but never with that as the ceiling. That’s just the beginning point of a real relationship that discerns a way to create good in the world.

Dr. Amy Sherman:

Andy, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for just kind of reminding us about, we’re culture makers and this whole thing about money and investing, that’s part of that. And you’ve given us just, I think this broader, bigger vision of more active stewardship and participation in what we’re supposed to be doing. And thank you for the warnings and for the pieces of advice. So it was just wonderful, really appreciate being with you.

Andy Crouch:

It has been an honor to have this conversation. Thank you.