Matthew Arnold On Bourgeois Religion
"The fineness and capacity of a man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your middle class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your middle class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive. All sincere religion does something for the spirit, raises a man out of the bondage of his merely bestial part, and saves him; but the religion of your middle class is the very lowest form of intelligential life which one can imagine..." [quoted in Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939), 230].
posted by Sidi Hamid Benengeli | 11:36 PM
2 Comments:
I am always amazed at how completely forgotten or ignored are Jesus' teachings concerning wealth and money.
"Sell all you have and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. But when he heard this he was became sad for he was very rich. Jesus watched him go and said: How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God"Luke 18: 18-24
Yet the evangelical movement in politics never brings this up.
There's something called the "prosperity gospel" or the "gospel of wealth" that colleagues of mine in graduate school (whose focus was American religion) were studying and, by now, have written books about. It's a fascinating phenomenon and its proponents build megachurches and support right-wing political causes--all in the name of Jesus.
Post a Comment
<< Home