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.
First, ownership is authority. It is the legitimate exercise of power over artifacts and created things. This fact is well understood and uncontroversial.
Second, some kinds of ownership are better and more important than others. Owning the means of production matters more than owning consumption goods. It may be the case that, in theory, an owner of $1 million worth of consumption goods can trade those consumption goods for productive assets (for example, a company or real estate) that are likewise worth $1 million. But in practice, the owner of the consumption goods is dependent in a way the producer is not. The heart of the difference is not the distinction between “consumers and producers,” but that between dependent people and independent people.
This is what was meant by economists of decades past when they said that “economic power” rests in ownership of the means of production. A person who owns the means of production is not only independent in a way the equally wealthy consumer is not, but can exert power by withholding or withdrawing his output. These facts were obvious to most economic thinkers until recently.
Third, Christian and non-Christian ownership are different things. This is so because Christian authority is different from non-Christian authority. End, or telos, determines nature, and Christian philosophy recognizes a purpose for ownership that the post-Enlightenment understanding does not. The Christian account of property bounds its use and directs it to ends that foster human flourishing. In the Christian understanding of ownership, property is authority over a created thing, granted by the natural law, as a participation in the authority of God. The non-Christian understanding is very different. It is the liberal account that emerged with social contract theory, and it says that ownership is sovereignty, or complete power of disposition, mediated or mitigated by the social contract (the state). Property is not considered part of the natural law—in other words, ownership is not natural to man. Property is a creature of, and legitimized by, the social contract and nothing more. As such, the legitimacy of ownership is divorced from participation in God’s providential will.
The Christian account says, “I cannot do whatever I want with my property. My agency must conform to, and participate in, the will of God.” The post-Christian account says, “I can do whatever I want with the things I own, so long as I am not hurting anyone else or breaking the law.” The liberal conception of property is, “Do your will, subject to what the law says.” It may not be an exaggeration to say that the liberal conception of property is illegitimate authority masked as legitimate—that is, power masked as authority.
The Christian account has scholastic and Aristotelian roots, but its taproot is Jesus Christ. The Gospels are full of Christ’s teaching on property. Jesus’s teachings consistently emphasize the limits of personal ownership under the sovereignty of God, reminding believers that their possessions are entrusted to them by a higher authority. In the parable of the rich fool, Jesus warns: “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” He likewise insists: “No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” He commends the vigilant steward who uses the goods entrusted to him for the Master’s purposes. 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.
Because Christian ownership is a true account of ownership, and the Christian God is the true God, it follows that Christians should expand their “ownership share” of productive assets—not for the sake of maximizing Christian wealth, but for the sake of turning economic power into legitimate economic authority that advances Christ’s design for history. This is Christian Ownership Maximalism.
Writers such as Renn, Doug Wilson, and Jeff Durbin emphasize the importance of Christians’ actively securing and stewarding productive assets. They view such ownership not as a worldly ambition but as a theological and strategic necessity. They share that conviction that when Christians own and manage the means of production—whether business, land, or other resources—they are better able to shape culture according to godly principles. R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North, with their more systematic advocacy of Christian Reconstruction, contend that biblical governance applies to every aspect of human life, including economic structures. By urging believers to cultivate entrepreneurial ventures, invest in property, and create sustainable business models, these thinkers argue that Christians can fulfill God’s mandate to exercise dominion in ways that transform societies from the ground up.
This movement is continuous with an older Calvinist tradition. Abraham Kuyper famously articulated Christ’s lordship “over every inch” of creation, insisting that no sphere of life, from politics to the arts to economics, lies outside divine sovereignty. In this view, owning and directing the means of production is not about self-aggrandizement or the pursuit of profit. Rather, it is a response to God’s call for stewardship in every realm in which human influence can foster the common good. Calvinist thinkers have historically emphasized the importance of disciplined work, responsible enterprise, and social engagement, positing that economic activity can and should reflect a sacred mission. In this way, the modern evangelical emphasis on building Christian economic influence echoes a centuries-old tradition of Reformed thought linking personal vocation to Kingdom-oriented goals.
Catholics have been late to this party. This is in one sense understandable and in another strange.
It is understandable in light of the Catholic Church’s relatively uneasy relation to capitalism. While recognizing property as fundamental to the natural law and consistently condemning both Marxism and socialism, Catholic philosophy and social teaching also point out that serious dangers can arise in a commercial society. It is entrepreneurs and markets that bring us abortion, addictive devices, and the “recreational” drug industry. These anti-human market outcomes were foreseen, and warned of, by popes and Catholic economic thinkers more than a hundred years ago. In part for this reason, Catholic social teaching is relatively general in its prescriptions, emphasizing principles and urging whatever social structures might ennoble rather than diminish the human person.
But Catholic hesitation concerning expansive Christian economic authority is also surprising, for several reasons. To begin with, the Western understanding of property, and of the rights and obligations attached to it, is partially rooted in Catholic philosophy. In contrast to post-Enlightenment views of property as a “zone of sovereignty” mediated and bounded by the “social contract,” the Catholic understanding has always emphasized that property is natural—in fact, innate—to man. Thus, the idea that ownership offers a central foundation for human flourishing, though emphasized by Protestant theology, has also been a tenet of Catholic political thought from the beginning.
Furthermore, Western civilization, which sprang from European Catholicism, was in a material sense founded on, and required, a form of Christian Ownership Maximalism. It was founded on feudalism, which imparted a social and theological dimension to ownership of the means of production. Marx recognized this. He viewed the Catholic religion as a “superstructure” whose economic foundation, or base, was feudalism. The feudal lords who owned the means of production, and therefore wielded power, did so within parameters imposed by the Christian Church, including obligations to support the works of the Church.
Finally, Catholics should recognize Christian Ownership Maximalism as a variant of what is perhaps the only version of political economy that is decidedly Catholic: the so-called distributist school. The main distributists were G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who argued that a wide distribution of the means of production promotes both freedom and virtue. It promotes freedom because property is power, and it promotes virtue because property is natural to man and demands something of him.
Renn, Wilson, and Durbin are right to say that expansion of Christian ownership is a strategic and theological necessity. It is also urgent. Christian Ownership Maximalism is imperative for the simple reason that Christians are surrounded, and what economic influence they still have must be preserved and expanded. Protestant evangelization during Renn’s “Neutral World” of 1994 to 2014 entailed an attempt by Christians to be “winsome” or “attractive.” Their efforts resembled the implementation of Vatican II by Catholics.
Notwithstanding some notable exceptions, this project was largely unsuccessful. We have lost almost all the ground we once controlled, literally as well as figuratively. In just a few decades, Christians ceded control of institutions they founded and ran for centuries: hospital systems, universities, publishing houses, and culture-related industries. Being surrounded has taught us that economic power matters. “Peak woke” and the pandemic lockdowns showed us that economic authority can be deployed effectively in the service of harmful ideas.
It is foolish to imagine that these episodes will not be repeated. Much like the Israelites venturing into a land dominated by demonic pagan deities, Christians in the Negative World find themselves in situations where faith is marginalized and rival ideologies and religions compete for supremacy. Today, the biblical narrative of entering Canaan has relevance: The people of God are not told to coexist with hostile forces; rather, our mission is to establish a foothold for righteous flourishing and the advance of a new Christendom.
To borrow R. R. Reno’s terms: We see the resurgence of the “strong gods” not only in the cultural gods of political ideology, unrestrained technological impulse, and market-driven consumerism, but also in the dark gods of the occult. The task God assigned to ancient Israel is ours also. We are called to build, safeguard, and sustain faithful institutions that testify to God’s authority and promote authentic human flourishing. This mandate can be fulfilled only if Christians preserve and expand their economic authority.
I recognize that some Christians, particularly older Christians accustomed to a world in which being Christian was at worst neutral, will consider the analogy to ancient Israel a strained one. This is unfortunate, because it is primarily older Christians who own and control productive assets. For them, perhaps a straightforward economic analogy may be more convincing.
For decades, the United States funded its trade deficits with China by selling its assets to foreigners—mostly to China but also to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others. The cumulative effect is measured by something called the “net international investment position,” which is the net dollar value of U.S. assets owned by foreigners—that is, the dollar value of domestic assets owned by foreigners and foreign corporations, minus the dollar value of foreign assets owned by U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations. That figure currently stands at negative $16 trillion, which means that on net, foreigners own $16 trillion of U.S. businesses, real estate, and other productive assets. In order to fund our consumption, we have sold more than half of American economic power to foreigners ($47 trillion out of $94 trillion). We hold only about 10 percent of theirs ($31 trillion out of $320 trillion).
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has noted that this state of affairs represents a clear and present danger to the United States. At his confirmation hearing, he warned, “If we stay on the road we’re on right now, in less than ten years virtually everything that matters to us in life will depend on whether China will allow us to have it or not—everything from the blood pressure medicine we take to what movies we get to watch.” By selling our assets to China, and by allowing an atheistic communist country to become the world’s largest owner of productive manufacturing assets, we have enfeebled ourselves almost to the point of servitude.
Now ask yourself, “What is the net international investment position of Christians relative to non-Christians?” I don’t have the exact answer, since the relevant data do not exist, but I am certain that it is deeply negative. Christians have been selling their businesses to decidedly non-Christian, and often hostile, private equity firms for nearly two decades. Main Street has been equitized, and Christian economic power was always on Main Street rather than Wall Street. Once Wall Street has completed its purchase of Main Street, Christian economic power will have been fully sold off. The same problem exists for formerly Christian-owned commercial real estate and farmland.
This, in my view, is the deep reason why Christians were forced out of their churches during the Covid pandemic and out of their jobs at woke corporations. Christians matter less and less to policy and culture because their economic power is shrinking. The reduced net investment position of Christians stands behind these episodes, and our net position is worsening.
I have five recommendations for Christian business owners.
Do not sell your business to a private equity firm that intends to “flip” it after a holding period. The traditional private equity model is to purchase a firm, grow it for three to five years, and then resell it to a larger private equity firm or a “strategic” acquirer in the same industry. This model has two effects that represent a problem for the Church. The imperative to grow as fast as possible, often for the purpose of servicing debt, almost always means that businesses with a Christian corporate culture are commanded to minimize their Christian character. Because we live in the Negative World, overt Christianity is seen as detrimental to revenue growth. (In many cases, this perception is reinforced by a woke orientation within the private equity firm.) Moreover, the private equity model transfers ownership upward into ever larger ownership structures in which Christians exert no influence. As private equity firms chase ever smaller companies, they destine many formerly Christian firms to non-Christian ownership. Birthrights are sold for bowls of pottage.
Sell your business instead to other Christians or to a Christian investment firm that intends to maintain your culture and own your business for a long time. Most business owners have the bulk of their net worth tied up in their businesses. For the Christian business owner, this fact presents a dilemma. If a Christian business owner sells his business to traditional private equity in order to monetize its value, the business will lose its Christian character. But if he does not sell to private equity, he may never access the wealth he has created. In recent years, solutions to this dilemma have emerged. We now have Christian CEO and executive organizations: C12, Legatus, SENT, and Convene are good examples. These organizations are networks of Christian business owners, some of whom have holding companies and are seeking to acquire successful companies. Similarly, evergreen funds have emerged to acquire high-quality businesses that have been owned and operated in a Christian manner.
Be intentional with your real estate. Real estate presents an opportunity to “take up space” for the Kingdom, because it is space. Real estate owners can do simple things such as placing crosses in publicly observed areas. They can make real estate available to churches and Christian groups. They can allow priests or Christian counselors to set up “Ask Me Anything” booths. Subject to legal constraints, they can deter activities that are evil and harmful to human flourishing, as by refusing to lease space to marijuana shops and topless bars.
Operate your business in an intentionally Christian manner. Business owners should consider practices and employee benefits that promote a Christian ethos and worldview. Examples include a paid chaplaincy or an organizational structure that includes a “Chief Prayer Officer” who prays daily for the company and each of its employees. The company may provide Christian mental health counseling and a benefits program that includes support for marriage, marital counseling, financial literacy, and even debt reduction. It may give employees paid time off to volunteer in the community. Finally, consider consecrating your business to God and opening meetings with a prayer.
In a similar spirt, I have four recommendations for Christian asset allocators and wealth advisers.
Implement values-based screening and exclusion lists, and refrain from investing in companies and funds that violate Christian ethics. Obviously, this includes firms involved in pornography, abortion services, anti-family policies, or other objectionable activities.
Conduct due diligence on asset managers and custodians. Evaluate the policies and practices of financial institutions to determine whether they promote or fund initiatives that conflict with a Christian worldview. Even if a portfolio excludes certain woke corporations, an asset manager’s personal political or social activism may be at odds with Christian beliefs. Request transparency concerning the institution’s proxy voting guidelines, charitable giving, and lobbying activities. Consider smaller or specialized Christian broker-dealers or custodians who affirm biblical principles.
Espouse active ownership and take proxy voting seriously. Do not delegate proxy voting to fund managers, who may vote shares in favor of proposals that are antithetical to Christian social ethics. Vote against resolutions or board candidates that support policies that run counter to Christian values.
Diversify through Christian and faith-aligned platforms. Consider partnering with or allocating funds to dedicated Christian financial platforms—for example, specialized Christian long-term private equity, venture capital, or debt funds that prioritize Christian values in their investment decisions and governance.
All Christians should recognize that Christian ownership is fundamentally different from secular ownership. It is both an honor and an obligation. God saw fit to let man participate in his work of creation. We need to take our jobs seriously.
We must remember that Christian ownership and renunciation go hand in hand. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, “This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.” Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.
Reading this, one expects Christ to conclude with something like, “And therefore when you set out to follow me, you should be prepared. You should plan for hardship.” Instead, he says something totally different: “In the same way, if you want to follow me you must renounce your worldly goods.”
In the same way. Christ makes renunciation analogous to planning and consideration. He instructs us that renunciation is the foundation of the authentic Christian life, which includes ownership. Yes, we should be enterprising and ambitious on behalf of our business ventures. But we must always remember that what we own is not “ours.” We are stewards, and in our economic activity we must make the words of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane our own: “Not my will, but thine be done.”
