We are living in fraught times, as the very origins and destinies of America are controverted and convoluted. The 1619 Project tells us that slavery is the corrupt root from which the American tree of so-called liberty has grown. Various other initiatives offered with more or less sincerity—such as the National Association of Scholar’s 1620 Project, The Federalist’s 1620 Project, and the presidential 1776 Commission—challenge this revisionist origin story. Against this backdrop Lance Morrow’s God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money offers a timely and lively retrospective of the motives, passions, and interests of American experiments in ordered liberty and misadventures in disordered license.
As Morrow describes it, the book is about money and slavery: “The triumphs of American money have been great. I talk also about its failures and limitations—and about values that lie beyond money’s capacity to measure, meanings that cannot be grasped in money’s language.” So too does Morrow focus on slavery and its historical legacy: “the book is about a theological error—an evil, slavery—introduced an eon ago, when America was a garden, and about how to evaluate that long-ago sin and its effect upon the country now.” These twin concerns emerge from the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic and social unrest in the United States, and Morrow provides an exploration of all these earthly matters with at least a nod to the eternal. Both money and slavery have theological dimensions that Morrow not only acknowledges but also interrogates well.
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