Praise the Lord and pass the balance sheet

But the peculiar billion-legged beast known as 21st century capitalism appears to be at a crisis point, spirituality-wise. Not everyone goes for the jugular. A coequal trend in business books is the spiritual business book, embodied by titles like "The Corporate Shaman," by Richard C. Whiteley. These books may or may not be Christian-themed, although many are.

So on one hand you have "Machiavelli's Lessons for Managers," and on the other you have Laurie Beth Jones' "Jesus, Inc." I haven't read all of "Jesus, Inc.," but I've gotten far enough into it to know that the author is not advising us to do what Jesus would probably do, which is to liquidate the company holdings and give them all to the poor in Calcutta or some such place. Lord help us, at least the book doesn't provide a rationale for some Bible-thumping executive to gleefully announce to his shareholders, "God himself told me to lay off 10,000 people and move the whole operation down to Haiti!" What it does do is try to give business principles the same kind of mystical sheen that the Ten Commandments possess, to exploit whatever synergy might exist between finance and God.

Bruce Wilkinson's "The Prayer of Jabez" is the most egregious example of the unholy alliance between business and spirituality. Though not a business book, "Jabez" does offer untold "blessings" unto all those who accept its special message of magic disguised as prayer. In a stunningly blatant display of apophasis, Wilkinson tells the reader he's not going to help you pray for material wealth from God and then spends the next 70 pages telling you exactly how to claim your God-given right to riches. Jabez has sold more than 9 million copies to date, with 13 million in print.

Two very separate and distinct ideologies are converging here in an unseemly partnership; traditionally, authentic spirituality has had very little to do with matters of wealth and business. I seem to remember a particular biblical analogy about rich men and heaven having something to do with camels and the eye of a needle. Is this the dawning of a new era of friendship between these two spheres?

Perhaps certain strains of religious zeal are completely compatible with business, after all. In the eerily prescient "Jihad vs. McWorld," published well before Sept. 11, author Benjamin Barber asserts that the great conflict of the 21st century will be the clash between the forces of tribal fundamentalism and secular capitalism. But isn't secular capitalism itself a sort of misguided religious fundamentalism? Is not the fervent faith in markets and their capacity to self-regulate a theological and not a rational belief? Is the Invisible Hand the Hand of God? Look at Enron, look at Long-Term Capital Management. Genius fails. Gods fall.

It's not bad that some businessmen are spiritual. Nor is it a bad analogy to say that business is war. It's just that one would like the money masters of Wall Street to be peaceful, moral men and not feuding religious warlords. What else are downsized employees but casualties of war? What else could stagnant wages, weakened unions, and communities blighted by job migration be but collateral damage? Modern business is war indeed -- a holy war waged by fundamentalist zealots whose misguided belief in the supremacy of the market has led to job uncertainty, threatened our national sovereignty through entangling international trade agreements, and produced the greatest income gap between the rich and the poor in this country since the 1920s.

It is not a new thing to say that our culture uses war as a metaphor for any conflict we have -- the war on drugs, the war on cancer, etc. -- and even the most ardent cheerleaders of Wall Street acknowledge the role of the military in American business. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said three years ago, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist; McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Our new war is not the first to fold God, militarism and capitalism into one tidy package. But if we're going to go whole-hog on this holy war/holy business thing, then maybe it's time to borrow a page from that noble manager's handbook, "The Art of War," and use the enemy's force against him. Perhaps, if the entrepreneurial spirit moves me, I'll print up some Make Love, Not Business T-shirts when I get home from work tonight.

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