The Distinction of Spirit

Jesus made an emphatic distinction between wealth and spirituality when He drove the money-changers 

from the Temple.  He also distinguished religion from politics when He told Pilate that God’s kingdom is a 

“kingdom of Heaven and not of this earth”.  Spiritually mature people understand that, by setting the 

marketplace and the assembly hall apart from God’s house, Jesus makes us responsible for our own 

collective and individual life in this world.  He does not and will not become directly involved in, let alone 

sanctify, human wealth and power, and the consequences of their exercise and accumulation are on us. 

We are hardly forsaken, however, because Jesus gifts us, through His life and teaching, with a model of 

thought and behavior that guides us in our responsibilities and orients our hearts toward the sacred.  

The guidance provided by Jesus’ example must surely, then, include the respectful acknowledgement and 

observance of the separation of the sacred, the social and the material. The work and logic of securing 

material and social existence, including provision for the improvement of life, must, accordingly, be put 

aside when we enter the holy space, whether figuratively or literally.  Only then can the true value of the 

love, kindness, dignity and humility that constitute the spirit of Christianity be apprehended, embraced and 

become the operative ethical principles that we retain as we move from God’s presence into the secular 

realms of life.

But instead of expressing this spirit in the way that we organize ourselves and conduct our business,  we 

seem to be committed to making expressions of disdain for one another. They include separating 

immigrant children from their families, undermining public schools to deny access to education, using 

public toilets to humiliate those who are different, disenfranchising fellow citizens with absurdly redrawn 

legislative districts and unnecessary identification requirements, driving the poor away by leveraging the 

cost of housing, humiliating welfare recipients even to the point of denying them assistance altogether, 

holding the health of the many hostage in order to enrich a few, militarizing the police, creating the 

conditions for the degradation of opioid addiction in the name of profit, proclaiming racial bias and hatred 

with vicious pride, forcibly imposing religious belief, and, finally, pretending to act heroically by taking up 

arms against the threats created by these and countless other acts of debasement.

This is so precisely because we choose to ignore or dismiss the truth of human fallibility and limitation 

embodied in the separation of the church and the state and the marketplace.  Our clamorous insistence 

that national greatness and personal wealth are manifestations of God’s favor, authority and will 

disregards these distinctions by forcibly and artificially uniting religious feeling and significance with 

secular life.  Rather than accept the opportunity to give expression to the ethical spirit of Christianity that 

is afforded us by the chores of making a living and living together, we distort faith into a falsely confident 

claim to the certainty that attends a thoroughly sanctified form of being.  Thereby, we implicitly deny the 

fact that the level of certainty at which the religious, economic and political are indeed united is the sole 

province and possession of the Almighty. The brazen invocation of God’s name with the same breath 

used to reject the individual’s responsibility to his fellows and to trivialize the true, spiritual nature of 

human dignity is necessary to legitimize the ethical inversion whereby the successful imposition of human 

will must be God’s will because of its success.  The distinction between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, with its 

instrumental “objectivity” of realpolitik and the market, can obviously succeed in displacing the the 

distinctions that make possible the articulation of spiritual value, but the actual meaning of that victory is 

the facilitation and justification of the disdain for humanity that takes the form of domination.