How the Drive for Profit Destroys Faith, Hope, and Love

St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:13, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." These aren't just nice sentiments for greeting cards. In Catholic theology, faith, hope, and love (charity) are the theological virtues—the supernatural gifts that orient us toward God and make us fully human.

But we've built an economic system that systematically dismantles all three. When profit becomes our organizing principle—not just an economic mechanism, but the lens through which we see all of reality—it doesn't just redistribute wealth. It fundamentally reshapes what we believe is real, what we dare to hope for, and how we relate to one another.

The Profit Motive Kills Faith

Faith, in the Christian sense, isn't blind belief against evidence. It's trust in a reality beyond what we can measure, commodify, and control. It's the conviction that there's more to life than the material, more to a person than their economic utility, more to creation than resources to be extracted.

The profit-driven worldview reduces everything to calculable value. If it can't be monetized, it doesn't count. If it can't be measured on a quarterly earnings report, it doesn't exist. This is the practical atheism of our age—not the denial of God's existence, but the organization of society as if God doesn't matter.

Pope Leo XIII warned in Rerum Novarum (1891) that labor is not a commodity—workers are human persons with dignity, not just factors of production. But we went ahead anyway. We built an economy that requires us to treat people as resources, to see creation as inventory, to view every relationship through the calculus of advantage.

Faith says: there are goods that cannot be bought or sold, realities that transcend the market, truths that exist whether they're profitable or not. The profit motive says: everything has a price, and if something doesn't generate return on investment, it's worthless.

You can't serve both God and Mammon. Not because God is jealous, but because Mammon demands the totality of our vision. The drive for profit doesn't just compete with faith—it crowds out the possibility of faith entirely.

The Profit Motive Kills Hope

Hope, in Christian theology, isn't optimism or wishful thinking. It's the confident expectation that God's promises will be fulfilled, that redemption is possible, that the arc of the universe bends toward justice because God is guiding it there.

But profit-driven economics runs on manufactured despair. It needs us anxious, insecure, and endlessly striving. The logic is elegant in its cruelty: if you're not secure, you'll work harder. If you're afraid of falling behind, you'll accept worse conditions. If you believe scarcity is natural and inevitable, you won't demand better.

Christian hope says: another world is possible. The Kingdom of God is at hand. We can build a civilization of love. But this hope is dangerous to a system that requires our resignation.

The profit motive doesn't just create material poverty—it creates poverty of imagination. It tells us that endless growth on a finite planet is possible (absurd). That wealth trickles down (false). That we can't afford to care for the vulnerable (a lie). That this is simply "how things work," as if the economy were a law of nature rather than a human construction.

Pope Francis writes in Laudato Si': "We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."

But the profit-driven economy can't hear those cries. It's structurally deaf to them. Because acting on them would mean sacrificing short-term profit for long-term flourishing. And in a system that discounts the future at the rate of investment returns, long-term flourishing is always deferred, always sacrificed, always impossible.

So we lose hope. Not all at once, but gradually. We accept that this is just how things are. We stop believing change is possible. We settle for managing decline rather than building renewal. And without hope, we're just going through the motions, waiting for the end.

The Profit Motive Kills Love

And here's where it gets to the heart of it: love, caritas, is the greatest of the theological virtues. It's self-gift, sacrificial care for the other, the willingness to lay down your life for your friend. It's what makes us human, what makes us the image of God, what will remain when even faith and hope are fulfilled in the beatific vision.

The profit motive is love's photographic negative. It's the cultivation of calculated self-interest. Not just selfishness (which is at least honest), but the systemic elevation of personal gain as the highest good and the mechanism by which society should organize itself.

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." - Matthew 6:21

When profit is the treasure, the heart follows. Relationships become networking. Friendship becomes social capital. Marriage becomes an economic partnership. Children become investments (or liabilities). Community becomes a market. The stranger isn't the Christ in disguise—they're a potential threat to property values.

The Catechism teaches that the economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around (CCC §2426). But we've inverted it. We shape our lives, our families, our communities, our very selves to serve the demands of economic growth.

Love requires seeing the other as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. The profit motive requires seeing everything—including ourselves—as means to the end of accumulation. These aren't compatible worldviews. They're not even in the same moral universe.

You can try to "balance" them, but in practice, profit wins. Not because people are greedy (though some are), but because the system structurally rewards those who subordinate love to profit and punishes those who don't. The company that treats workers as beloved image-bearers of God gets outcompeted by the company that treats them as cost centers to be minimized. The economy that prioritizes human dignity grows slower than the economy that prioritizes extraction.

And so love dies. Not dramatically, but quietly. Death by a thousand quarterly earnings reports.

Catholic Social Teaching Points Another Way

This isn't anti-business or anti-prosperity. Catholic social teaching isn't Marxism in a cassock. It's something far older and, frankly, far more radical.

It says:

• Human dignity is non-negotiable. Every person is made in the image of God and possesses inalienable worth—not because of their productivity, but because of whose they are.
• The goods of creation are meant for everyone. Private property exists, but it's not absolute. It's subordinate to the universal destination of goods (CCC §2402-2406).
• Workers have rights. To organize, to fair wages, to rest, to dignity in their labor (CCC §2427-2436).
• The poor have a preferential claim. Not because they're more virtuous, but because they're more vulnerable. Justice demands we prioritize their needs.
• Solidarity is a virtue. We're not isolated individuals in competition—we're members of one body, responsible for and to one another.

These aren't policy prescriptions. They're moral principles that should shape our economic life. And they're fundamentally incompatible with an economy organized primarily around profit maximization.

What Would an Economy Oriented Toward Faith, Hope, and Love Look Like?

I don't have a ten-point plan. I'm suspicious of anyone who does. But I know it would have to:

Restore faith by recognizing that not everything can or should be commodified. That there are sacred things, relationships that transcend transaction, goods that exist for their own sake. That human persons are subjects, not objects. That creation is a gift to be stewarded, not a resource to be extracted.

Restore hope by demonstrating that alternatives are possible. That we can organize economic life around human flourishing rather than endless growth. That caring for the vulnerable isn't a drag on prosperity—it is prosperity, rightly understood. That we can build systems that serve life rather than serving systems that devour it.

Restore love by putting human relationship at the center. By ensuring that work allows time for family, rest, prayer, and community. That economic structures support rather than undermine the bonds between us. That we see one another as we truly are: beloved children of God, siblings in Christ, fellow pilgrims headed home.

Keep Catholicism Weird on Economics Too

Capitalism and socialism are both modern ideologies. Catholicism is older than both, and will outlast both. We don't have to choose between them—we judge both by the standards of the Gospel and the consistent teaching of the Church.

That makes us weird. Pro-business conservatives think we're socialists. Progressives think we're too focused on personal virtue and not enough on systems. Good. We're not supposed to fit neatly into political categories invented in the Enlightenment.

We're supposed to be weird. Countercultural. Signs of contradiction.

Because faith, hope, and love aren't just nice ideas. They're the very life of God shared with us, the supernatural realities that make us fully alive. And any economic system that systematically destroys them isn't just inefficient or unjust.

It's demonic.

Not metaphorically. Not hyperbolically. Actually demonic—a power and principality that devours human souls in service of a dead abstraction called "growth."

So maybe it's time to stop baptizing it. Time to stop pretending that with a few tweaks and some charitable giving, we can make it compatible with the Gospel. Time to name it for what it is and start imagining what comes after.

Because faith tells us God is real and His kingdom is at hand. Hope tells us another world is possible. And love tells us it's worth fighting for.