I want to start by being clear about what this is not. This is not an attack on faith. This is not a dismissal of scripture or of the spiritual traditions that have carried entire peoples through impossible circumstances. I believe in something greater than myself deeply, personally, and irreducibly. What I am questioning is not the divine. What I am questioning is the interpretation. Specifically, the interpretation of money in a religious context that somehow always seemed to land on the same conclusion: having wealth is suspect, wanting wealth is sinful, and the good and holy life is a poor one.
The Verses We Took Literally
The love of money is the root of all evil. Most of us heard some version of this before we were old enough to earn a dollar. And the message we received, the simplified, unexamined version, was: do not love money. Money is evil. Good people do not chase it.
But the law of the universe, and I have studied this extensively, teaches something directly contrary to that interpretation. You have to love something to attract it. Energy follows frequency. What you repel with your beliefs, your emotions, your subconscious associations, will not come to you regardless of how hard you work for it. So we were handed a spiritual instruction that, taken literally, guaranteed that many of us would stay in a state of emotional and energetic rejection of the very thing we needed to build free and dignified lives.
Then there is I am not worthy. A statement of humility that became, for many people, a statement of identity. If I am not worthy, how do I receive abundance? How do I ask for the raise? How do I invest? How do I build? Unworthiness is not a virtue. It is a ceiling. And a ceiling installed in childhood at the level of spiritual teaching is one of the hardest ceilings to identify and remove.
And then, the one that may have done the most damage: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Read literally, this verse tells us that wealth and righteousness are incompatible. That the path to God runs through poverty. That accumulating resources in this life puts your eternal life at risk. If you believe this, and many people do, at some level beneath conscious awareness, then every step you take toward financial abundance comes with a spiritual tax of guilt and doubt.
What Was Actually Happening
Here is the historical context that does not get taught alongside those verses.
The Bible was weaponized during slavery. This is documented history, not conspiracy. Enslaved people were given scripture strategically. They were taught obedience, humility, patience, and the rewards of the afterlife. They were not taught stewardship, ownership, investment, or the building of generational wealth. Those books were kept elsewhere. Those conversations happened in different rooms.
The church accumulated land while teaching congregations to sell theirs. The church accumulated wealth while teaching congregants that wealth was spiritually dangerous. The instruction was not neutral. It served a purpose. And the residue of that purpose is still present in how many of our communities relate to money today. The poverty mindset that was installed as spiritual virtue has outlived the conditions that created it and is still running in the background of millions of lives.
I am not saying the scripture itself is the problem. I am saying that what was done with it in certain hands, at certain historical moments, for certain reasons, was not done in your interest. And recognizing that is not a loss of faith. It is a gain in understanding.
The Reinterpretation
Money is a tool. A tool has no moral character. A hammer is not good or evil. What matters is what you build with it or what you destroy with it. Money works the same way. The love of money, meaning the worship of it, the placing of it above all other values including people, integrity, and purpose, that is what corrupts. Not the having of it. Not the building of it. Not the passing of it to your children.
The universal principles I have studied teach that abundance is the natural state of the universe. She, the creative force behind all of this, did not design a world of scarcity for most and excess for a few as a divine plan. That distribution is a human construction, maintained by human systems. Your alignment with abundance, your belief in your own worthiness to receive it, your willingness to build and invest and grow, is not a departure from the spiritual. It is an expression of it.
A Proverb 13:22 that many of us know says a good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children. Inheritance. Built. Passed down. That is generational wealth language inside the very text that gets used to discourage the building of wealth. The instruction was always there. The interpretation just depended on who was doing the teaching and why.
What I Am Building and Why
I am building because I believe in abundance. Because I believe my children and their children deserve a starting point, not a starting-over point. Because I understand now that the money I build is not a departure from my values. It is an expression of them.
I am building because I want Avi, Amelia, and Jahiem to inherit not just love and memories but options. Real, material, financial options that give them the freedom to choose their lives rather than survive them.
And I am building with clean hands and a clear conscience because I have done the work of separating the tool from the corruption of it. Money in the hands of an intentional, values-driven person is not the root of evil. It is the root of possibility.
Reinterpret the verses. Not to excuse greed. But to free yourself from a poverty mindset that was never yours to begin with.
"Wealth is not about having a lot of money. It is about having a lot of options."
Chris Rock