Christianity, as Gigerenzer reads it, made an unprecedented theological move: it posited a God who is not incarnate. Not embodied, not bound by the laws of necessity, not subject to the conditions of material reality. A God beyond being, beyond becoming, beyond death.
This God is pure abstraction. Pure spirit. Pure transcendence. A God that cannot be encountered materially because it has no material form. A God that must be accessed through faith alone—not through ritual, not through sacrifice, not through the material forms that polytheism required.
Gigerenzer's insight: modernity did not abandon this theological structure. Modernity simply replaced the object of faith. Where Christianity had faith in the non-incarnate God, modernity has faith in money.1
Money has all the properties of Christianity's God:
The theological precedent makes sense of money in a way that economics cannot. Economics treats money as a tool—a medium of exchange, a store of value. But this misses something essential: money functions like a religion. It demands faith. It promises salvation. It offers meaning and order to a chaotic world.
Money's power is not based on anything material. You cannot eat money. You cannot shelter in it. Its value derives entirely from collective agreement to treat it as valuable. This is not utility. This is faith.
Gigerenzer: "Money is the contemporary form of the non-incarnate God. It is pure abstraction that demands faith, offers salvation (financial security, status, meaning), and organizes entire civilizations around devotion to it."1
This explains something that confuses observers of modernity: why do we pursue money beyond any reasonable material need? Why does the billionaire still work to become a multi-billionaire? Why does the achievement of financial security not produce contentment, only the demand for more?
Because money is not actually about material security. Money is about meaning. About participating in something transcendent. About faith in the system that gives life order and purpose.
Here is the deepest insight: money is the perfect embodiment of "the child" consciousness that Christianity preserved and modernity inherited.
The child seeks security, protection, wholeness. The child wants the world organized so that needs are met and danger is prevented. The child seeks the feeling of safety rather than the actual capacity to face danger.
Money promises exactly this: the fantasy that if you have enough of it, you are safe. That the world will provide. That need will be prevented. That you can remain in the protected state the child desires.
But—and this is the psychological tragedy—the more you pursue money, the more this fantasy fails. Because actual security comes from being initiated, from having killed the child, from having faced necessity and integrated it. Money cannot provide this because money exists to prevent exactly that confrontation.
Gigerenzer: "Money is the child's dream of perpetual protection. The more we pursue it, the more we prevent the psychological development that would make us actually secure."1
The modern individual works obsessively for money to achieve security, which prevents the security that comes from psychological maturation. The system works perfectly to keep consciousness arrested at the child stage.
A crucial consequence: faith in the non-incarnate God (whether the Christian God or money) means consciousness becomes divorced from material reality. The sacred, the valuable, the meaningful—all are located in abstraction, not in the actual world.
This explains modernity's peculiar relationship to the material: we treat material reality as disposable, as something to be optimized, as external to what matters. What matters is the number in the account, the concept in the mind, the abstraction that money represents.
Gigerenzer traces this to Christianity's theological inversion: the polytheistic gods were in the world—embodied, material, bound by necessity. The Christian God is beyond the world. Therefore Christianity teaches that the real (the divine, the meaningful, the valuable) is elsewhere. The world is secondary, fallen, base.
Money continues this structure: the real value is the abstraction (the price, the number, the concept of worth). The actual material object is worthless unless money says it is valuable.
The psychological consequence: consciousness becomes ungrounded. We live in a virtual reality of abstraction while the actual world—the material manifestation, the body, the soil, the weather, the genuine encounter with necessity—becomes something to escape from, optimize away, or deny.
Gigerenzer's critique turns here: if the soul manifests itself materially (in ritual, in sacrifice, in the body's genuine encounters), but consciousness has learned to value only abstraction, then the soul's actual manifestations become invisible to consciousness.
The soul is still speaking. The soul is still acting through the body, through material reality, through the actual world. But consciousness, trained in the logic of the non-incarnate (whether God or money), cannot hear it.
Modern psychology has no language for soul-manifestation because psychology itself has inherited the abstraction. We have concepts, theories, interpretations—all abstractions. But we have lost access to soul as it actually manifests in the body, in appetite, in real encounter, in material necessity.
Gigerenzer: "Modernity worships abstraction and therefore cannot access the soul, which will only speak in concrete, material, embodied forms."1
This is why contemporary psychology is so hollow, despite its proliferation of concepts. The soul is not interested in your interpretation. The soul wants manifestation. The soul wants to kill, to feast, to encounter genuine otherness, to stand in the presence of material necessity and respond to it.
The therapy that offers only interpretation, only meaning-making, only cognitive reframing—this is precisely the abstraction the soul is trying to escape from.
Gigerenzer vs. Marxist Critique of Capitalism — God vs. Capital: Both Gigerenzer and Marx recognize that money/capital functions as a sacred principle organizing civilization. Marx treats capital as an economic structure that exploits labor; Gigerenzer treats money as a theological principle that represses the soul. Marx wants to abolish capital through revolution. Gigerenzer is more pessimistic: even abolishing capital will not solve the problem because the problem is theological (the worship of abstraction, the non-incarnate). You could have a communist society that still worships money-logic or its equivalent abstraction. The convergence: both recognize that modern civilization is organized around an invisible transcendent principle. The divergence: Marx thinks this is contingent and can be changed through material revolution; Gigerenzer thinks it is a consequence of Christian theology and requires consciousness-transformation, not economic restructuring.
Gigerenzer vs. Weber's Protestant Ethic — Causation and Symptom: Weber traces the rise of capitalism to Protestant theology (the ethic of worldly asceticism, predestination creating the need for success as sign of salvation). Money/capital becomes the driving force of modernity. Gigerenzer takes Weber further: Weber shows how theology generates capitalism; Gigerenzer shows that capitalism is Christianity continued—the worship of the non-incarnate principle, now called "money" instead of "God." Both trace modernity back to theological roots. But Weber treats Protestantism as the cause and capitalism as the effect. Gigerenzer suggests they are the same thing operating at different registers.
Gigerenzer vs. Psychoanalytic Critique (Lacan, Zizek) — Lack and Symbolic Order: Lacanian psychoanalysis describes how the symbolic order (language, culture, the Law) creates perpetual lack—the subject forever chasing the object that will complete them. Gigerenzer's analysis parallels this: money operates as the endless object of desire that never delivers security. Both systems recognize that modernity is organized around perpetual lack. But Lacan treats this as intrinsic to language/symbolization; Gigerenzer treats it as specific to the Christian repression of the soul. For Lacan, the only way out is to traverse the fantasy and accept lack. For Gigerenzer, the way out is to kill the child—to face necessity rather than seek protection from it.
Money's function as modern god cannot be understood through economics alone. Economics treats money as neutral tool and therefore cannot explain its religious power or its psychological grip.
Psychology alone cannot explain why a concept (money) becomes the organizing principle of civilization. The individual's pursuit of money can be pathologized, but this misses the civilizational structure that makes money sacred.
The handshake: Money is a theological structure—a form of the non-incarnate God that Christianity introduced. Understanding modernity's relationship to money requires recognizing the theological heritage: the devaluation of material reality, the faith in abstraction, the evacuation of the sacred from the actual world. Economics has no language for this. Only theology and psychology together can make sense of why we have collectively chosen to organize civilization around faith in an abstraction.
If money is modernity's god, then modern civilization is a religious civilization, not a secular one. We have not escaped theology. We have only changed gods. And in doing so, we have intensified the evacuation of consciousness from material reality.
This means the critique of religion often leveled at modernity misses the point. Modernity is not less religious than the past. It is differently religious—worshiping abstraction with even greater single-mindedness.
If money is the modern god, what would it mean to consciously recognize this and ask: what am I actually worshiping? What would change if consciousness saw through the abstraction to the faith required to maintain it?
Gigerenzer claims that actual security comes from facing necessity, not from accumulating abstraction. What would it look like to pursue genuine security—the kind that comes from psychological maturation—rather than the fantasy that money provides?
If the soul manifests materially but modernity can only perceive abstraction, what would happen if consciousness began to listen to material reality as the soul's actual language? What is the soul saying through the body, the instincts, the earth?