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Baptizing Mammon: What the Early Church Said About Billionaires and the American Church Forgot
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 16 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
One man holds half a trillion dollars. One in four Americans worry about feeding their families. The church that claims to speak for God has said nothing about it for seventy years.
That silence has a history. It has corporate funders, Cold War architects, and a specific decade when the American church traded its oldest theology for a blessing from billionaires. Before that trade, the tradition was loud. A fourth-century bishop called hoarding theft to the faces of the hoarders in his own congregation. He kept his job. He built a hospital with what they gave afterward.
Basil of Caesarea. John Chrysostom. Ambrose of Milan. For the first four centuries of Christianity, the sharpest voices in the church said the same thing: extreme wealth in the presence of poverty is a spiritual emergency. Charity is restitution. The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry.
The American church has quietly abandoned this tradition. Baptizing Mammon traces how it happened, who funded it, and what it has cost.
What you'll find inside:
- The Old Testament economic system God designed to prevent dynastic wealth accumulation, including the Jubilee, the seven-year debt release, and gleaning laws
- Six Hebrew prophets who blamed the wealthy, not the poor, for economic injustice
- The Patristic tradition on hoarding that most Protestants have never heard, sourced from verified translations
- The Cold War corporate campaign that fused Christianity with free-market capitalism, funded by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Pew family
- The prosperity gospel's origins in three streams that had never been combined before the twentieth century
- A steelmanned engagement with the strongest free-market Christian arguments, then the tradition's response
Written for Christians who attend church on Sunday and check the news on Monday and cannot reconcile what they hear with what they see.
Josh Kilen is a lay church leader who discovered the Patristic tradition by reading his way into it after forty years in the evangelical church without hearing a word of it.
The tradition was never silent. The church stopped listening. This book puts the microphone back in front of Basil.
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