The maxim “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” underscores that Christian ownership confers not unbridled license, but an opportunity to participate in the providential will of God.
Christendom is gone. So, too, is much of the Western civilization that was built atop it. Christians find themselves strangers and sojourners in an unfamiliar land. Aaron Renn calls this landscape the “Negative World.” In the Negative World, it is socially and politically harmful—and economically dangerous—to be publicly Christian. What should Christians do in this Negative World? How should we live in the face of the disintegration of Christendom and the civilization Christendom built?
One answer, put forward by James Shea, is to reorient Christian structures away from maintenance and toward mission. Every domain of Catholic life—schools, seminaries, lay movements, parishes, churches—should be oriented to evangelical, or missionary, activity. Shea is undoubtedly right about this. In an apostolic age, our job is to be apostles. The mission is mission.
Shea’s reframing of the Great Commission has been taken up by many Catholics in the United States. But Shea’s purpose was to offer a framework for thinking about our historical moment. His framework is not a playbook, any more than is Renn’s Negative World.
A playbook has been offered by Protestant pastors and theologians, who have long espoused the idea that Christians should expand their ownership and control of physical space, real estate, and businesses in order to build foundations upon which Christian communities can persist. This is a version of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, but one that does not withdraw from the world. It emphasizes the importance of asset ownership for survival in a hostile landscape. I call this approach “Christian Ownership Maximalism.”
Christian Ownership Maximalism urges us to increase our ownership of the economy’s productive assets for the explicit purpose of advancing the Kingdom of God. Christian Ownership Maximalism is, in my view, implied by the Christian understanding of ownership, or property. The relation can be explained in the following way.
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