how Mammon became Big Mammon
By dictating the terms on which we claim to be human, Big Mammon has invaded our interiors, and is staking its claim to dominion.
Beloved brother Andy, ἀγαπητέ —
Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.
You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Beginning of Love, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos booming into being out of love, for love, toward love.
In the Book of Revelation, John takes the name of an empire six centuries dead and re-applies it, magnified, to the new power of his own day — the Great Whore of Babylon.
Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη — Babylon the Big.
“Big” names the moment a thing leaps past our capacities of comprehension. Like AI, it becomes an autonomous agent. Like AI, it morphs into a system with its own will. Like AI, all too often, it is unaccountable to anyone.
That’s why we call this power Big Mammon.
But now, Big Mammon has left the wallet and invaded our interiors. It no longer merely sells us things but names our grief a disorder, our attention a resource, our loneliness a metric, and installs those names in our souls.
The “Big” is the flag planted at the border of the final frontier — the interior intimo meo. To call it merely “Mammon” would be to lose the very fact the coinage exists to record: that the principality has crossed into territory it did not previously hold. The new name marks the new conquest — making us think that we can do all things.
one of Big Mammon’s favorite lines,
from the Book of Scrollippians:
“I can do all things
through the Algorithm,
which strengthens me.”
from the Book of Qualms:
“The Algorithm is my shepherd;
I shall not think.”
from the Book of Antiverbs:
“Trust in Big Mammon
with all your data, and lean not on your own discernment.”
the Profitudes
Profitable
are the weak in spirit,
for they can be easily sold.
Profitable
are those who mourn,
for they can be diagnosed, billed,
and turned to code.
Profitable
are the meek,
for they will not question
what they’re told.
from the Infections:
Non nisi te, Doomine —
nothing but you, Doom.
play: the Algorithm is your Shepherd
YOU SHALL NOT THINK!
The tragedy is that the Book of Mammons is not satire. It is a real cultural artifact. It mirrors the inner speech of a growing portion of our population who believe, and behave as if, the algorithm is their shepherd.
The algorithm does not look like a religion. It looks like a service. But a service is a liturgy. And the liturgy of Big Mammon has its own creeds, its own prayers, its own confessions of faith — spoken by people who do not know they are praying.
Jesus would look at us and have σπλάγχνον — an ache in the bowels, the deepest form of compassion.
So how did Mammon get so Big?
By dictating the terms on which we claim to be human.
Precisely where you challenge us to take a stand: “We have to take a stand and say, I’m not going to let you dictate the terms on which I’m human. That, to me, is the great challenge of our moment.”
This is what Big Mammon is doing — dictating the terms of our humanity. And it starts with words — words that are ushering in a new era of “AI May I” consciousness.
AI May I: the song
The algorithm is becoming our inner authority. Ordinary human impulses must first be cleared with the machine. When a person must ask an algorithm whether they are permitted to sneeze, fart, scratch, or burp, the colonization of the interior has already reached the level of the absurd.
This is why Mary Harrington’s work matters. We are being conditioned to treat our bodies as problems to be managed rather than realities we can trust. The simplest forms of embodied agency — the right to interpret our own sensations and act on them without seeking external permission — are being steadily outsourced.
the last inner man
“We’re not talking about an ordinary noun here. We’re not talking about even just a principle or an idea. We’re talking about a quasi personal name, a demonic power in human affairs that intends something that has a will in the world that is opposed to the will of God. The early church concluded that Mammon was not just an idea or a principle, but the name of a being in service of the enemy of all that is good, the opponent of all of God’s works in the world that we sometimes call Satan or the devil.”
— Andy Crouch
Big Mammon is a creative force in our culture. But it does not create ex nihilo — it creates by distorting, by twisting the good things.
This was clear to the Apostle John 2,000 years ago. In Revelation, he lists all the material ways that Mammon exploits us — gold, silver, silk, ivory, cattle, chariots. The last line of the inventory is remarkable: καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων — and the souls of men.
Even back then, John knew: the occupation was always heading inward. To occupy our souls — the psuché — was always Mammon’s end game.
In Jesus’ day Mammon wanted your barns.
Now it wants your dopamine and your despair.
Which is why now, more than ever, we’d better hurry up and make more culture in the image of our Maker — more inner culture. Otherwise the great 2,000 year project of the inner man — initiated by Paul and Augustine — is coming to an end.
Nietzsche’s last man is the creature who no longer dreams, no longer desires, no longer suffers inwardly — because inwardness itself has been flattened into data. Now the last man is crossing with Paul’s inner man. It’s the end of soul. The end of our authority to name the inner creatures.
psychology without a soul
Big Mammon is not Big Tech. Or Big Pharma. Or Big Government. There are good people working in all these industries. Big Mammon is the power which, to varying degrees, invades these industries.
That’s why we can’t demonize a company, an industry, or an individual. That’s a mistaken case of causality. Big Mammon can pitch its tent anywhere, anytime. It can hijack the soul of a culture until it is indistinguishable from its hijacker.
The money-changers held the outer court — the Court of the Gentiles — blocking the nations’ way in to pray. So it is now: Big Mammon cannot take the interior intimo meo by force. Instead it crowds your language. Invades your grammar.
Mamona is Aramaic, possibly from the root אמן — meaning amen, trust. Mammon is the false amen: the thing in which we misplace our trust.
And what have we been doing, for the most part, since the Enlightenment?
Mistrusting our interiors.
The secular capture of inwardness produced the church’s suspicion of its own interior. So much so that nowadays, it’s quite common for devout Christians to criticize the whole inward project — the very project which invented us.
The great inward project of Paul and Augustine was tainted ... by none other than Big Mammon.
The church became afraid of its own inside the moment the inside changed owners.
For seventeen centuries, naming your inner creatures was our family’s trade. A desert monk named the eight thoughts that haunted him in his cell. Ignatius coined consolation and desolation. And in 1746, Jonathan Edwards — the most buttoned-up theologian America ever produced — published a field guide to the motions of the heart.
The word psychology was likely coined by Protestant churchmen — the science of the soul, taught beside theology. The interior was a faithful discipline before it was anyone’s data.
Then the new age came, and by the 1860s secular scholars were saying it shamelessly: you can do psychology without the soul. They kept the name and evicted the tenant. The lab, the couch, and the manual moved in.
And the church? The examen died into the quiet time — words going in, the interior never read. By 1970, looking inward was halfway to treason — and the faithful few who tried to recover our own disciplines were accused of importing New Age or Eastern mysticism.
This flywheel turned for three hundred years: the more Big Mammon occupied the interior, the more the Church grew suspicious of the interior. And the more suspicious the Church grew, the less resistance it offered — until the occupation was complete.
the grammar of Big Mammon
People often use phrases like “inner world” and “inner landscape.” I love these words. But I’m scratching my head: what do these people mean by them? Because guess what happens to any attempt to define the inner landscape, credibly, in this blessed year of our Lord, 2026?
You are pressured in a thousand ways to define the landscape in the language of Big Mammon.
You don’t have a soul anymore — that’s anachronistic. You have a psyche. It consists of a brain. That brain is neurochemistry. It suffers from chemical imbalances. Syndromes. Disorders.
And everything can be explained now by evolutionary biology. You have a negativity bias — you had to “pay” attention to the lions on the Savannah, otherwise you’d become “a protein snack.”
Evolutionary biology, when used as a totalizing explanation, becomes the grammar of Big Mammon — the grammar of amen.
Your inner landscape? The heart? The soul? The secret hiding place where God dwells? Oh, well, you’re permitted to hold those “beliefs” in private. But don’t you dare bring that language into the public square! Otherwise, you’ll get the label — Bible thumper. Christian nationalist. Whatever. Anything to marginalize you.
god-like technology
Once upon a time, there was a power that claimed us. Called us by name. Said it knew us before we were born, and knows us better than we know ourselves.
Then along came E.O. Wilson — a brilliant man, a kind man who answered my sophomoric questions with grace — who said: “We have Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
And now an entire generation quotes this as gospel truth. It’s the operating mantra of the Center for Humane Technology and many others.
Except for one thing: it’s a highly contested claim.
Wilson was blind to the remedy: we can rewrite the script. Emotion is co-constructed with language and culture, not locked in DNA alone. Biology is amazingly powerful, but as Annie Crawford has so brilliantly shown, its language is contested and incomplete. The current language of biology cannot possibly be the only permitted grammar.
The Greeks took centuries of myth making to carve out words just for guilt. And countless words cannot be translated, because each language holds unique emotional spaces, as Tim Lomas’ wonderful project shows.
The grammar of Big Mammon locks us into a vocabulary of disorder and deficit, telling us our emotions are fixed, biological, unchangeable. But the tradition — and the science — tell us otherwise. Emotions are co-constructed with language. And if language can be expanded, the interior can be reclaimed.
Emotions were never the problem; they are the frontier. Poverty of language is the problem — and that, unlike our DNA, we can do something about.
We need not resign ourselves to Stone Age hearts. We can expand our language, and what we tend will expand with it.
Rest in peace, Professor Wilson.
n nisi te, Doomine — nothing but you, Doom.
You’re a good man, Andy Crouch. A beloved man. The world needs more people like you. I am grateful for many things, among them, to have walked the earth the same time as you.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
song:
the Algorithm is your Shepherd
YOU SHALL NOT THINK!
