Did any heretical Christian sect believe money is evil?

Did any heretical sect believe money is evil?

Before going on with my post, let us recall what Jesus said in the Gospels: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). I trust everyone is now warned not to abuse it or fall in love with it!

I believe Catharism fits the bill here, but you may be thinking of another Christian sect!

Catharism was a Christian dualist or Gnostic movement between the 12th and 14th centuries which thrived in Southern Europe, particularly in northern Italy and southern France. Followers were described as Cathars and referred to themselves as Good Christians; in modern times, they are mainly remembered for a prolonged period of religious persecution by the Catholic Church, which did not recognize their unorthodox Christianity.

The Cathars were a heretical Christian sect that were dualists. These Cathari professed a neo-Manichaean dualism believed that there are two principles, one good and the other evil, and that the material world is evil. If the material is evil, by consequence they considered all material goods evil, which would include money, silver and gold.

The Cathari displayed a serious contempt for everything material, a position with enormous ramifications, based on their Dualism.

Cathari (from Greek katharos, “pure”), also spelled Cathars, heretical Christian sect that flourished in western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathari professed a neo-Manichaean dualism—that there are two principles, one good and the other evil, and that the material world is evil. Similar views were held in the Balkans and the Middle East by the medieval religious sects of the Paulicians and the Bogomils; the Cathari were closely connected with these sects.

Although the various groups emphasized different doctrines, they all agreed that matter was evil. Man was an alien and a sojourner in an evil world; his aim must be to free his spirit, which was in its nature good, and restore it to communion with God. There were strict rules for fasting, including the total prohibition of meat. Sexual intercourse was forbidden; complete ascetic renunciation of the world was called for.

Raymond Khoury states the following in his blog about the Cathars: ”Following this belief, the Cathars considered all material goods evil, which led them to reject the trappings of wealth and of power that had undeniably corrupted the medieval Roman Catholic Church.” See: Templars, Cathars and The Jefferson Bible: Behind the book

Although St. Paul warns us about the love of money as being the roots of all evils. Money in itself is not evil.

10 For the desire of money is the root of all evils; which some coveting have erred from the faith, and have entangled themselves in many sorrows. -1Timothy 6:10

For the Cathars, the material world of wealth, money jewels, gold, silver, etc. were indeed evil in and of themselves! It a world so messed up in their way of thinking.

Implications of Cathar Beliefs

The idea that human beings were sparks of light trapped in tunics of material flesh had a number of logical consequences:

1. Procreative sex was bad, since conception would result in another soul being trapped. For this reason, normal sex between man and wife was as bad as any other procreative sex. Marriage was worthless, while contraception was regarded with approval. Also, there was no reason to condemn any form of non-procreative sex.

2. The less one had to do with evil (ie material) things, the better. Eating animals, or animal products, was particularly abhorred, though fish were allowed (as they were thought to reproduce asexually and were not therefore able to imprison a soul).

3. The sooner we can shed this tunic of flesh, the sooner our souls could be free to fly like a spark of light back to heaven, the realm of the good God. There was therefore no reason to discourage suicide.

4. There was not any reason to regard men as better than women. The important part, the soul, was the same. Only the vile material body was different.

5. Since material objects were creations of the Bad God, it was absurd to imagine that they could be of any virtue. So, for example, jewels, money, relics, the Eucharist, reproductions of the cross, and church buildings were of no value whatsoever. Similarly the Catholic teaching about resurrection of the body was absurd. The very idea of a physical body in heaven was ridiculous. Further, it was not plausible that the Good God would send anyone from his realm into the evil material world of the Bad God. Jesus must therefore have been a sort of phantom, looking like a man but in fact immaterial.

6. Anyone who attached great value to material things was at best mistaken and at worst a disciple of the Bad God.

There certainly have been religious groups from the start of Christianity who were heretical. Marcionites adopted a form of dualistic theory. Their leader, Marcion, taught that the material world was created by 'a lower being, the god of the Jews', he rejected the O.T. and produced his own writing, 'Antitheses' to 'replace' the book of Acts. Manicheism was another such group, as were Novatians. But although dualism despised all things material (including the human body) and would treat money and gold with contempt, it was never disregard and disrespect for money that got them labelled as heretics!

After all, many Christians of good repute have lived lives of poverty, renouncing all worldly goods and working the land to be self-sufficient. There's nothing heretical about that. Jesus himself is our example in living one day at a time, in faith and obedience to God's will. He never begged, of course, and he never did farming, but he was exemplary in not being materialistic or money-minded. Indeed, he clearly warned against setting any kind of store by money.

Now, what about religious leaders who are in control of vast hordes of gold, money and real estate? If such religious leaders became responsible for any attempted genocide of professed Christians who lived lives of material poverty (deliberately), surely we would have to consider motives? If a group labelled 'Cathars' in 12th century France, for instance, were almost wiped out due to the charge of the heresy of dualism, and they were heretical in that respect, why would anybody even have to mention their contempt for money? After all, no person called a Cathar was ever burned by fire or slain with the sword because they had renounced all things material as 'evil'. It was for religious beliefs about a 'demiurge' god, and that God's good creation was so corrupt as to be evil, that they were hounded to death.

The immense power and wealth of the 12th & 13th century Catholic church was launched against hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in France. It was actually the desire of the Catholic church to suppress the Cathars in the 13th century that gave rise to the Inquisition then. Well, if heresy was being preached in the name of Christ, that would be one thing. But on July 22nd, 1209, around 15,000 men, women and children in the town of Beziers were killed because some leading Cathars were in that town. Arnaud-Amaury, papal legate and Abbot of Citeaux, is said to have written to Pope Innocent III that "Neither age, nor sex, nor status, has been spared." Well, that's another thing. And it has nothing to do with 15,000 non-Catholics having a contemptuous attitude towards money, even if they actually preached that money is evil.

It is also worth considering that Christianity clearly teaches the evil of sin, and that Christians must 'crucify' the flesh (but not literally - that's symbolic biblical language). Yet we see Catholic asceticism being applauded, such as during the Black Death in Europe, when Flagellants would go from town to town, trying to 'deal with' the plague that way. They literally treated their bodies as vile, causing blood to pour from self-inflicted wounds, but nobody accused them of having dualistic beliefs. The sin that contaminates the whole of God's good creation is what needs to be 'done to death', not people. And only what Jesus did to deal with sin is the remedy for all heresy, and all love of money, and love of power. Now, who has evidence that those hundreds of thousands of Cathari in France openly denied those biblical doctrines? Or was it only a few of their leaders? Or was all the written information about them destroyed by their persecutors?

There's no defense of heresy here, nor any defense of dualism. Such things are heretical, in Christian religion. But to move from clear heresy in the ancient past, with Marcionites, and Manicheism, and Novatianism, to tarring hundreds of thousands of French people in the 12th and 13th centuries with that brush so as to get them wiped out is, by no stretch of any Christian mind, the right thing to do. Where is the proof that they taught money was evil, to such a degree as to threaten Christian religion back then, warranting genocide? Answer that question, and the OPs question is answered, which is what this answer attempts to begin to do.