“Remember,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in Advice to a Young Tradesman, “that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. . .. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation.”

These words are not as well-known as Franklin’s preceding admonition – “Remember that time is money” – but the prospect of “prolific” and endless growth has inspired various Americans for generations. What “Poor Richard” did not mention was the accompanying and equally potent sense of anxiety. What if it doesn’t happen? Can I really trust that future? If money and growth go together, so do money and anxiety.

Perhaps there is reason to be anxious about money. Surely that is true if it is as powerful as we make it seem. In his spirited and provocative book, James Buchan reminds us of Schopenhauer’s estimate of the place of money in our lives. “’For money is an inexhaustible Proteus, ever ready to change itself into the present object of our changeable wishes and manifold needs. Other goods can satisfy only one wish and one need. Food is good only for the hungry, wine for the healthy, medicine for the sick. . .. They are all goods for a particular purpose; that is only relatively good. Money alone is the absolute good.” James Buchan, Frozen Desire: the Meaning of Money (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). Read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, “Mineral Stones” and “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” pp. 17 – 49. (The quotation above can be found on p. 31.)

“Money alone” as the absolute good?’ That claim comes very close to the interpretation of money as “Mammon” in the writings of such interpreters as Washington Gladden, a minister and Social Gospel leader in the “progressive era.” “The worship of Mammon is the one stupendous social fact of this generation,” he wrote. Although not universally true of all Americans, Gladden acknowledged, “it is the religion of the multitude. Men do believe in him; their faith is sincere and unwavering; they are ready to prove it, every day, by their works. . . . Like every other natural passion it [Mammon] is a good servant but a tyrannical master. We are suffering now from its domination.” Read more about Gladden’s perceptions in Resource 4.12 - Washington Gladden, Money: Tainted and Consecrated.

This “tyrannical master” makes it hard for us to see what is happening below the surface in our own lives. John Haughey writes about a sickness at work deep within us. Mammon “is not simply money. It connotes disorder. It means ‘that in which one puts one’s trust,’ from its root meaning. Mammon becomes then a source of disorder because people allow it to make a claim on them that only God can make.” . . . A sign of “mammon illness” is “numbness.” “One is not present to people. One’s own economically related concerns make others remote, even invisible.” For more of Haughey’s insights, read his book, especially Chapter 1, “Naming the Illness” (pp. 1- 45) in The Holy Use of Money: Personal Finance in the Light of Christian Faith (New York: Crossroad,1989). (The quotations above are from pp. 10-11 and p. 12).

Another fine reflection on “money anxiety” is Philip Zaleski’s essay, “The Test of Giving,” Parabola (Vol.XVI. Number One, February, 1991). This issue is entirely devoted to the theme of money.