What hath Bitcoin to do with Jerusalem?
G.K. Chesterton once said, “I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.”
Given the secularity of our current world, this might sound strange. You can think of many things that don’t initially seem political or religious. But whether we realize or acknowledge it or not, religion and politics define the playing surface and rules that govern our lives and actions. Everything is political. Everything is religious. And money is one of the most powerful tools in enacting the wills of both God and governments.
While Christians have done a great job articulating the moral dimensions of what we spend money on, there has been lamentably little done to expand on the ethical considerations and downstream effects of money creation. Although we all use money, few Christians have a Biblically-grounded, historically informed framework defining what money is and the principles that ought to govern it. This isn’t a problem without consequences. Christ laid “all kinds of evil” at the feet of a love of money. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, and disordered thinking about its design, nature, and end is equally destructive. This isn’t only true of the visible world under the sun. What you believe about money is directly connected to what you believe it means to be human, what you believe about the role of government, and ultimately what you believe about God.
While discussions about the nature of money might initially seem boring or better reserved for “professionals” and academics, nothing could be further from the truth. The ethics of money production touch every aspect of the lives of every person you have ever met. It’s incredibly practical. This has always been the case, but the economic events of the last sixteen years have served to put in stark relief the long-term effects of allowing the discourse around such issues to take place entirely in ivory tower lecture halls. Debates thirty years go about balanced budgets have given way to the normalization of multi-trillion-dollar airdrops of money and an accumulation of debt in both public and private sectors that is impossible to pay back. The amount of annual interest that the US will pay to service its debt will surpass the entire military defense budget later this year.
This is not normal. It’s not sustainable.
There’s a temptation for us to look around at the sheer scale of insanity and wickedness around us with a certain resignation and say with an orc-encircled, Helm’s Deep-bound King Théoden:
But just like Theoden, we need a word from our rightful King, who is no mere man.
We need to look at money and economics through new eyes; through the Eyes from which all eyes in heaven and earth were named. We are blind, and he alone can give us the ability and willingness to see the Foster-Wallcean water that we’ve grown all too comfortable swimming in. It’s not enough to see these things as frustrating or less than ideal. The solution is first to identify and repudiate the sins at the root of the insanity we see.
This isn’t a novel idea. It wasn’t until Luther said, “Indulgences are sinful, and I won’t recant,” that real change began to be seen. It wasn’t until Wilberforce had enough and said, “Continuing to tolerate and leverage skin-color-based slavery to enrich our nation is sinful and wrong,” that slavery within the British empire began to die. This is the situation we find ourselves in today. Until Christians recognize and refuse to continue to indulge and participate in an economic system that allows evil men to assume God-like power and speak new money into existence in order to fund their every whim both at the expense of normal people today and generations of their future kids and grandchildren, nothing is going to change. We are at a point of definitional crisis, and need the authoritative definition that only belongs to Christ.
Our goal is to help Christians think clearly, consistently, Biblically, generationally, and eternally about God’s design for people, government, money, and economics.
So we’re putting on a Christian economics conference at Rocketown in Nashville on July 24+25. On day one, we’ll cast a Biblically robust vision in defining what people, government, economics, and money are and to what end they exist. Then we’ll unpack exactly how God designed the world to work, where and why things have gone astray (especially in the last 100 years), and its consequences on life and discipleship both in the US and abroad.
Then we’ll dive into what to do about it, and explain why we believe Bitcoin to be a timely, limited-yet-important part of that path forward. We’re not in Bitcoin for Lambos or because we want to get rich quick. We see it as a timely counter-insurgent tool to help the Church continue to carry out her mission. We want to look at Bitcoin through God’s eyes, regardless of how highly or lowly the rest of the culture might think about it. They don’t matter, but He does. And we think that like us, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised to find that the same God who has used foolish things to shame the wise for thousands of years is at it again, this time in the form of magic internet money.
Who’s “we?”
Economists, pastors, theologians, technologists, programmers, farmers, venture capitalists, missionaries, classical Christian college presidents, engineers, Hollywood producers, and more.
It will almost assuredly be the most diverse and unlikely group of speakers at any conference you’ll see this year. Not everyone above is a fan of Bitcoin. The goal isn’t to circle the wagons and throw a party for the Bitcoin-crazed. It’s to create an environment where Christians can gather and talk openly about real challenges and questions about money, investing, economics, and the clown world we find ourselves in to find timeless wisdom and an eternal hope with which to faithfully navigate them all, for the glory and the good of people everywhere.
Join us for TGFB24 in Nashville. It’s a full two day event (8:30am-5:00pm each day) and if you purchase tickets now you can receive 20% off by using the promo code BITCOIN.
