A Conversation on How Our Investments Form Our Hearts with James K.A. Smith

Amy Sherman

So Jamie, let’s start with you just talking for a couple minutes about the basic thesis of your book, You Are What You Love, for listeners who may not be familiar with it. One way that I’ve heard you talk about that is that human beings at their core are defined by what they love or worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. And then you go on to argue that this is critical to how the Bible understands the nature of human nature.

James K.A. Smith

So in a way, the kind of thesis of You are What You Love is that our lives are governed much more by our wants than our thoughts and our beliefs. In other words, we live out ways of life that are animated by our longings and desires and our loves more than we might think. In fact, we might think, oh, well, I live by principles or beliefs or systems or worldview. Whereas, and all of those things are important and significant, but at the end of the day, it’s our kind of being in the world and our living out a way of life bubbles up from our longings and desires and loves (our wants) more than it trickles down from our beliefs and convictions. And I understand why a lot of Christians can feel a little bit unsettled by that because we spend a lot more time curating our convictions than we do curating our affections.

And so you are what you love means you kind of live out these longings and desires, which are habits of the heart. And I do think that helps people to see a biblical theme with a new sort of eyes, which is why does scripture always seem to talk about the heart as the center of the human person? And it’s not just about emotion or the kind of warm fuzzies, it’s the heart is this seat and center and core of the human person because that’s the place of our deepest longings and desires. So if our loves—our desires—are habits, what that means is they are these kind of inclinations, dispositions, that are sort of shaping us, driving us, leading us. But because they’re habits, they are not things that you choose as much as you might think.

So these habits of the heart, these habits of longing are formed in us by practices, rhythms, and routines and rituals that we give ourselves over to including, as you say, all kinds of practices that we might not have been conscious of. So this is why I call them liturgies, just to help people get a sense of the kind of religious stakes of what we’re talking about here. So there can be all kinds of cultural rhythms, routines, and rituals, liturgies that aren’t just neutral things that we do. They’re doing something to us. And if we don’t see them with that set of eyes, we don’t realize, oh, these are formative practices and they could also be deformative practices. They could be teaching us to love something other than what God wants us to love.

Amy Sherman

And what we think we ought to be loving. And what we think we’re convicted to be loving, but then we’re doing something that’s in the wrong direction.

James K.A. Smith

Exactly. We can end up with this deep misalignment between our convictions, our worldview. We’re like, oh, no, this is what I believe. This is what I’m committed to. But if we don’t realize that, in fact, we’ve been sort of apprenticing our heart to all of these other cultural liturgies, we don’t realize that in a sense our heart is longing for one thing, even though our convictions tell us that we’re chasing God’s kingdom. And I think it’s living into that. It’s not meant to be a debilitating awareness, it’s just meant to wake us up to new intentionality then about how we curate these habits, how we curate and embed ourselves in practices that we’re immersed in.

Amy Sherman

One of the disconnects that I’ve seen among many Christ followers when it comes to thinking about money is that they’ll embrace this mantra that it’s all God’s, but then when it comes to investing, that primarily means growing God’s money. In other words, getting a high return on the investment, but they’re not really thinking so much about what it is that they’re investing—in other words, the businesses that they’re supporting and profiting from. So this often means that they end up investing in companies that are at odds with God’s purposes in order to get a return on God’s money. So what do you think is going on here?

James K.A. Smith

Let’s think a bit about our practices, our financial practices as it were, and our practices of investing and so on. First of all, I think it’s really important that we have this deep sense of creaturely affirmation that these facets of being human are good facets of being human. In other words, we’re pairing this sense of the kind of habits of the heart with our sense that as creatures, we are embodied, we’re communal, we’re responsible to sort of live out creaturely lives. That obviously includes managing our resources and being stewards of financial goods and so on. I think what happens, so let’s put on our, let’s imagine we’re putting on these x-ray lenses to look at the rituals, routines, the liturgies that surround finance investing and so on and so forth. I think one of maybe things that we become unconscious of until we put on these lenses is very, very sincere Christians with deep, deep convictions might not recognize the extent to which that they have practiced their way into a kind of individualism about how they think about these things. So we don’t realize how much we have drunk up just the kind of default American autonomous individual kind of perspective that we think, oh, I’m just this individual actor who’s putting a coin in the slot machine and I’m waiting for the return. And we’re not attuned enough to the fact that no, no investing is about participating in systems. You’re participating in entire structures in society.

Amy Sherman

And in a web of relationships. And a real embodied relationships with real consequences for real people.

James K.A. Smith

Exactly. So your investment is not just this magical coin that comes back to you. You’re actually kind of participating in systems that affect the way people are treated, the way the creation is treated, the way we set up all kinds of relationships. I was thinking too though that another sort of aspect of let’s say disordered formation that can maybe come with this aspect of our creaturehood is a bit of an “ends justifies the means” mentality. So we know that we want to grow our wealth so that we can do things with it for God. And so what happens is I want to grow my wealth in the biggest possible way. You can tell I don’t have much wealth the way I’m talking about this, but we want to grow our wealth and then we have strong convictions about what we’ll do with that wealth.

Amy Sherman

But not very strong convictions about how is it that it’s growing exactly what’s happening to make it grow.

James K.A. Smith

Exactly. What are we benefiting from? We’re not thinking about the means by which I’m going to achieve that end. And we are a bit naive, maybe willfully naive about what that means for my participation, maybe in systems of injustice, exploitation, or a denigration of God’s creation. So I think that subtle tendency to imagine that, well, if I do good things with the ends, it justifies the means. That is not a sign of a robust Christian ethic. I mean, we would roundly condemn that in all kinds of other moral spheres. So I think it’s maybe appreciating the morality of markets is not something to which we are immune. Does that make sense?

Amy Sherman

Yeah, it really does. And it strikes me that the very fact that we’ve got that individualistic mentality is kind of endangering us to go in the direction that you’re talking about of the end justifying the means because I’m not actually having a conversation with you as my Christian brother. How do you think about these things? How should we think about these things? So there’s kind of no accountability, and if anything, we don’t even talk about money so often. So if we’re not talking about it and really trying to have a Christian way of thinking about it, then we’re just going to default.

James K.A. Smith

Yeah. I think that is so true. It’s something we’ve talked about honestly, only with our closest and dearest friends, because as you say, this is not something that we talk about. And I think that itself is a sign that we are probably captive to some other story about money. Do you know what I mean? And if we can’t have spaces within the church to have conversations about something that is, let’s be honest, so, maybe not invasive, but is so clearly significant in all of our lives—

Amy Sherman

—and so pervasive in Scripture.

James K.A. Smith

Yes. And the fact that we don’t really have comfortable ways to talk about uncomfortable things to me is a sign that we haven’t figured out how to really integrate this into our understanding of the biblical story.

Amy Sherman

When you think about the story of modern investing, and when you think about the associated practices, whether it’s this constant financial news that’s running along the bottom of the screen as you have the television on, or everybody’s got their little app on their phone to be checking how their portfolio is doing, there’s these different habits and rituals. What do you see in that world of modern investing as deformative practices that we better wake up to?

James K.A. Smith

I think it’s a really important question. And what we’re doing in a way is this kind of liturgical analysis of financial investing culture. It is intriguing to me, a Christian university’s business school nearby that shall go unnamed was recently rebuilt, and it features the stock ticker constantly running in the lobby space of the building, which has been celebrated. But I actually think is a curious story that’s being enacted in that practice. And so if I try to, and I should say I’m kind of an idiot about money, so this is slightly, my wife will think this is hilarious that I’m being asked such questions, but—

Amy Sherman

We won’t ask if you know how to balance a checkbook, Jamie

James K.A. Smith

If we’re just doing this as sort of cultural analysis. I think part of what intrigues me is the way that these scripts and rhythms are religious in the sense that they are subtly, but constantly, telling us that this is what ultimately matters. Do you know what I mean? That return is all, and we are living for the return. And I just think we need to ask ourselves, what does it do to us when that becomes the dominant governing story, not just for the way business or finance works, but for how lives work? I mean, when you say that people have the app on their phone so they can track it, it’s not just that this governs their financial life, it’s that their investing governs their life. And I think of that as a, it’s a form of idolatry. Now what do we mean? Let’s have a little more sophisticated account of idolatry.

I don’t just mean that, oh, we want the wrong things. What I mean is we’ve taken what is a good and just and meaningful facet or aspect of creaturely life, and we have inflated it. Or a Dutch philosopher that I am indebted to named Herman Dooyeweerd would say, we have absolutized it, right? We’ve taken what is a good and fitting and meaningful aspect of creaturely life, but now we’ve sort of blown it up and set it up as if it governs and drives everything. And that kind of absolutization of something that is good into something that is ultimate, that’s idolatry. Because now you’ve taken a creaturely thing and it functions as if it’s your creator, right? It’s driving your life, it’s dictating what you’re doing. And I think that sort of analysis wakes us up to why this is, there’s a lot at stake in how this gets disordered for us.

So I think if Christians can sort of wake up to that, the irony is that the flip side of this kind of absolutization of the financial aspect, if you will, is at the same time a reduction of who we are. It treats human beings in a reductionistic way as if we are only consumers, as if we are only monetized animals, and that’s not who we are. We are called to this much richer, full orbed, holistic life that will include a financial aspect, but include so many other things. So I think I would love it if Christians had an increasingly sophisticated account of what exactly is going on here. I mean, I was thinking of the app again, I’ve been reading a lot of Blaise Pascal. I’m here to evangelize for Blaise Pascal. So for those who aren’t familiar, he was writing in the 1600s, wrote a famous little book called the Pensées. Some people have heard of Pascal’s Wager, an argument for the existence of God. What I’ve been intrigued by is, Pascal has this really prescient and trenchant analysis of distraction. Pascal says, the hardest thing for human beings to do is sit quietly alone in a room

Amy Sherman

With their own thoughts.

James K.A. Smith

Because if they do that, they are going to face ultimacy. Do you know what I mean? They’re going to come face to face with an abyss, which can be terrifying, but actually at the bottom of the abyss is a God who loves them. And he says, because we are so almost terrified of that encounter, we distract ourselves incessantly. And he says, we prefer the hunt to the kill. And interestingly, gambling is his dominant metaphor for this. Oh, wow. I have wondered if maybe Pascal had his own problems in this regard. It’s a little bit like Augustine on sex, Pascal on gambling. It’s like, okay, I feel like I know something. But what he’s intrigued by is the way in which it’s not even about winning. It’s about risk. It’s about the dynamics of distraction. And I do wonder if that’s also part of the culture of finance, maybe especially of late.

Amy Sherman

Right? Yeah. This whole almost gaming-ish mentality.

James K.A. Smith

Exactly. Which then it’s now, it’s not even maybe just about maximizing profit, it’s also about a win, which is also about a certain kind of domination. It’s about a certain power dynamic. I think there’s something existentially going on in this that is even bigger than just greed in that regard.

Amy Sherman

It seems like our concept of time also is something that can be warped in the kind of world’s story of investing because of this incessant attention to almost a minute by minute accounting of what’s happening in the market, what happened in the market today, and then there’s the pressure on companies for their quarterly reports. You don’t have this sense of, well, I’m going to invest and over a long horizon, let’s kind of see what happens.

James K.A. Smith

So it’s interesting to think about a kind of maybe core, very familiar ritual within investing, which is the kind of first meet with the advisor. And in the first meeting with the advisor, the advisor maybe without even realizing the stakes of this, is really asking ultimate questions. What do you want? The question is, what do you hope to achieve? What are your goals? Maybe what’s your risk exposure that you’re willing to live with and things like that. I think it would be great to bring this kind of liturgical set of lenses to that encounter and to see first of all that there is a story or a script being enacted here. And in a way, the investors, the advisees could be equipped if they’re Christians, to think through, okay, wait, what do I want and how does what I want align with what God wants to see in the world?

Right? There is an opportunity for a financial advisor to be a kind of spiritual director because you are asking people to become intentional about ultimate things. So there’s a huge opportunity there. There’s also a huge risk because if there’s not alignment on both the advisor and advisee side, we can all end up chasing things that aren’t aligned with God’s kingdom. So we can talk about the big systemic issues, which I think we have to, but then if we want to zoom in and think of this kind of one-on-one encounter, it’s also pretty ripe for doing this sort of liturgical analysis of it.

Amy Sherman

So do you think that there are aspects of modern investing that are basically forming us to be impatient people who aren’t inhabiting time in a very Jesus centered way?

James K.A. Smith

Absolutely. And I mean, in that sense, it mirrors all kinds of other aspects of our culture. Do you know what I mean? So your investment app and your Instagram app do the same thing in the sense that they just constantly invite you to live for the next moment in a very short term-ist kind of way. And so there’s no cultivation of patience. I would also say there’s no cultivation of actual hope. There’s all kinds of demand for return and expectation, but it seems to me that hope is a very, very different way of relating to the future because it has a certain kind of patient expectation about it. But hope is also a deeply dependent way of looking towards the future when you hope that you are in entrusting yourself to something outside of your own ingenuity, your own kind of research or whatever it might be. And it strikes me that finance investing culture, maybe especially at the kind of popular level, if you will, the sort of day traders sort of level is much more predicated on instantaneous return rather than that kind of long-term sense of entrustment to a future. And it’s also, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but there’s something deeply communal about hope, whereas this other one is me pulling the levers of the market to try to wait for a kind of return. So I think thinking about the dynamics of time and is worth pursuing.

Amy Sherman

I wonder if there’s something in the spirit of the modern age around embodiment and disembodiment that also plays a role here. One of the things we’re concerned about is this notion that people have an understanding of investing as, “I invest in The Market,” instead of this recognition we kind of talked about this at the beginning, that, “No, you’re investing in companies that have real people and real practices.”

James K.A. Smith

It does seem like the myth of this market is conveniently gnostic. It turns out to be this sort of magical entity as if pushing a button in the market doesn’t affect people’s bodies, workers’ bodies, truck drivers’ bodies, that kind of thing. It’s intriguing. Just last night I was talking to an alumnus of my university who works for Goldman Sachs in their research division, and one of the things that struck me is when they are doing research on companies, they’re actually doing a lot of research on particular people. Because the way this company is going to go is very much hinging on what this person, what kind of person this person is who’s pulling levers of influence within that company. And it struck me as actually surprisingly embodied at a particular level because it’s like, oh no, it’s about these particular people. Whereas I do think this is probably part of the digitization of all of this too, the anonymity, the distance, the perceived ethereality of these things in the same way that when you go to the mall and it just seems like things magically appear.

No, somewhere somebody is sewing that or building that, and we just have the convenience of invisibility because we inhabit, let’s be honest, very, very privileged sectors of the world where we don’t have to encounter it. I think taking the incarnation seriously is part of us realizing that when we are investing in companies, when we are investing in stocks, we are actually touching neighbors on the other side of the world. What we really need to do as Christians is rethink what does it mean to love my neighbor when my neighbor is going to be somebody I’ll never see, and yet I am significantly influencing and they are giving things to me. I think there’s a lot of room for more robust reflection on that.

Amy Sherman

Yeah, definitely. Well, so we’ve kind of had the depressing conversation around, we have these practices, we have these realities that are kind of our hearts. What would you say about, I mean, the first practice of resistance is recognition. You calling us to very well put, be alert, wake up. But I wonder if you have suggestions about almost like alternative habits that Christ followers could adopt to resist the malformations that can come from the participation, at least the not very thoughtful participation in the world of modern investment.

James K.A. Smith

Yeah. I mean, this is where I do think people who are embedded in the world will be the best ethnographers of the practices of counter resistance. So I’m speaking a little bit from a distance and outside, I will always make the pitch for saying that the primary countermeasure for all cultural, deforming cultural liturgies is the church. So I’m just making a pitch to say, think of worship as the heart of discipleship, insofar as maybe part of the recognition is now saying, “Okay, what story is God enacting in the body of Christ and how does that story gear into what I’m doing in my investing life?” And this is what the institute exists to help people think through. So I think that’s kind of ground zero.

I’m a little worried that my thoughts about countermeasures are going to sound like a typical philosophy professor who’s not really in touch with the realities of the world. It does seem to me, to your embodiment point, I think it’s actually really, really crucial that Christians, and maybe especially Christians of means, cultivate practices of encountering the poor. And I know that might sound like a strange thing to talk about investing, but I actually think it is a really, really significant matter of attunement. Do you know what I mean? To sort of say, absolutely. Christians can be called to steward and grow their wealth. I think we need to be people who are doing that in a way that are attuned to inequalities and also doing that in ways that we think about the poor who are not always participating in those systems in the same way that we are.

And that’s not for us to just lay a guilt trip on ourselves. I just think it would transform the way we might then look at this company as a potential for investment and say, oh, well, what actually interests us is the way that they are raising up workers, right? Or they are catalyzing a workforce of opportunity. I just think that that’s a really, we need to enclave ourselves in as many ways as we can. A very simple way to do that, by the way I’ve discovered, is ride public transit. Yes. If you want a really, really easy way to get out of your bubble, just ride a bus. The other thing I was thinking of is become as intentional about your charitable giving as you are about your investment portfolio. So just one tiny practice that we do on the scale we have is as soon as the check comes in, here’s where the tithe goes. Here’s where we have our own sort of charitable account. Here’s where savings, and then we have this charitable account, and then we just kind of get excited about how we manage that charitable account. What do we want to catalyze? Who are we going to invest in? Think of the investment that we give with our charitable giving, with the same energy and intentionality as our sort of financial return portfolio. I do think that that’s all part of a kind of holistic approach, but I’m sure others have much better ideas than I do in that regard.