Capitalism and the New Spiritual Warfare

This last year has been a whirlwind for many of us.  Trillions of dollars of wealth, savings, and income have disappeared.  Many people speculate that it's just the beginning.  Oddly enough, all of the economic turmoil has metamorphosed me into a deeper believer of Spiritual Warfare, but not in the way you think.  Spiritual Warfare is typically portrayed as an epic battle of prayer and discipline fought by demons and angels who are controlled and ordered around by our wizard-like religious spells.  We pray for, against, and with angelic beings we've never seen or understand beyond metaphors and fables.  This is the most traditional and common definition of Spiritual Warfare.  While this is valid and mysteriously attractive, I don't know about it, and frankly I have yet to be convinced of the presence of this type of Spiritual reality in our culture but I have, as of late, become increasingly aware of different Spiritual reality within our secular, post religious, capitalist culture that is even more pressing and urgent.  

I'll start by explaining the spiritual reality of a middle-schooler.  For some reason many kids between about the ages of 12 and 15 come to a life threshold where they must choose between becoming good or bad.  No matter how fantastic of a support structure they may have, the complexities of their heart come down to what they find more entertaining and compelling.  If a student finds the adrenaline of getting into trouble more magnetic than the fulfillment of doing the right thing often enough kids will go down the road of destructive, negative behavior.  It may start with goofing off in class but it potentially leads to damaging activities like deceitfulness, delinquency, and drugs.   A youths life direction can often hinge on wether or not they are drawn to the right activities.  It all comes down to what their heart longs for and desires to do most.  If I, as a youth worker, can convince a student to love making productive, positive, and redemptive choices they will likely lead a life of good rather than bad.  What I'm describing is an invisible battle over kids hearts'.  It is, in itself, a spiritual battle.    

Apply this battle of hearts to adults on a larger scale and you have the modern state of our economy.  The current recession was not spawned by a famine, global war, or natural disaster,or any other physical event or movement, but by the very ambiguous direction of mans' heart.  You see our capitalist system, which I'm a firm believer in, allows great freedom and liberty.  It provides the forum of creativity for people to accomplish historically unprecedented feats like modern medicine, technology, and philosophy while at the same time offers the same freedom for tragically negative movement and trends.  Our current economic meltdown was ignited by nothing more than greed, which is a state of man's heart, a state that is in essence spiritual.  People exploited one-another over and over until the system broke.  It was greed that caused investment bankers to package risky home loans together and greed that caused banks to give loans to people who didn't qualify.  As mass community, our national heart was corrupted by the intoxicating temptation of money, power, influence, and success (Don't we learn anything from the past?).

The challenge for us is to change our hearts.  The change of hearts is not a physical struggle.  Our hearts are invisible, they are spiritual.  I've become convinced that our current economic wake-up call is a lesson in Spiritual Warfare, to win over the hearts of men and women for things that are good, not bad, loving, not selfish, and giving, not greedy.  The warfare we are being called to engage in is a battle of hearts, a battle that is more spiritual than we may understand.  This is a moment of great opportunity as once calloused hearts have become softened to the uncertainty what may come next.  Let us begin to wrestle with the very core of the Spiritual reality, a mans' heart.