The Gospel of Silver: How Paul Branded Empire and Called It Faith

Paul, Empire, and the Long Con of Christian Power 

I. The Root 

The root of all evil is not money. It is the love of money—love to the point you spoil your soul. Those weren’t the words of a Marxist or a monk. They came from one of history’s most sanctimonious grifters: the Apostle Paul. A man who sold spiritual authority with the cadence of empire, who wrote letters like a CEO drafting doctrine, who warned of false teachers while laying the foundation for the world’s most enduring franchise. He preached against the sickness even as he institutionalized it. 

The word he used—philargyria—meant more than greed. It meant affection for silver. Not wealth, but obsession. Not survival, but seduction. A hunger so refined it masquerades as righteousness. That line, perhaps his truest, became the exception that proved the rule of his long game: control disguised as conviction. A moment of unguarded truth from a man who otherwise turned mystery into management, spirit into structure, revelation into rules. 

II. The Market 

The letter of 1 Timothy is addressed to a young leader in the early Christian movement, tasked with guiding and correcting believers in Ephesus—a prosperous, cosmopolitan city in the Roman Empire. Paul's warnings about the “love of money” were aimed at the wealthy within the church and those aspiring to wealth through religious influence: rich patrons who thought they could buy spiritual authority, charismatic teachers who used faith to fleece communities, everyday believers seduced by status and economic mobility. 

Paul wasn’t just writing letters. He was scaling a network. A traveling speaker with a brand, pitching transformation, franchising belief, and urging local leaders to duplicate the model. House to house. City to city. A decentralized movement that ran on charisma, social capital, and donor support. He took a radical street preacher who flipped tables in temples and whispered freedom to the oppressed, and turned Him into a cosmic CEO—complete with entry requirements, behavioral clauses, and a lifetime membership plan. 

Just like the Liver King sold “ancestral living” while juiced on $12K-a-month steroids—a parody of authenticity—Paul sold liberation while quietly centralizing control. He claimed to be just a servant but spoke with the authority of a founder. Claimed he met Jesus in a vision but wrote like a man drafting bylaws and mission statements. The structure he built wasn’t accidental. It was scalable precisely because it mimicked empire. An administrative skeleton was already forming—one strong enough to hold up a future throne. 

III. The Hierarchy 

When Paul condemned embellishments, restricted women from speaking, and upheld rigid hierarchies, he wasn't just laying out theological opinions. He was building a system that reinforced male control and preserved existing power structures. That structure, predictably, translated into material control, social dominance, and generational wealth for men. 

Paul’s restrictions on women weren’t just cultural—they were strategic. They aligned the church with the patriarchal norms of the Roman Empire, which meant the faith could spread without threatening male authority or economic order. By outlawing female leadership and condemning ornamentation, Paul wasn’t defending humility—he was gatekeeping visibility. And in any power structure, visibility is currency. Visibility means voice. Voice means influence. And influence is a threat—not just to male control, but to the right to define what counts as godly, what counts as order, and what counts as profitable. 

When Paul wrote that women should be silent, that they should not teach or hold authority over men (1 Timothy 2), he wasn’t just reinforcing cultural tradition—he was branding a theology of submission that scaled efficiently in a patriarchal empire. It gave wealthy male patrons built-in spiritual superiority and made the faith a low-risk investment for Roman assimilation. And let’s not forget: many early churches met in the homes of women. Paul’s directives weren’t merely theological—they were targeted responses to female power already in play. 

In a movement that relied on donations, hospitality, and persuasive leadership to survive, excluding women from authority wasn’t merely misogynistic it was economically shrewd. It created a system in which men preached spiritual equality while quietly consolidating material and narrative control. 

The Dobbs decision, like so many others cloaked in the language of morality, is part of that same lineage where male-led theology becomes state policy, and control over women is recast as spiritual order. It was crafted not to erase women from the economy, but to strip them of rights while keeping their labor in circulation. Control over female voice then. Control over female body now. In both, the story was framed as godly order. The result? Cheap, compliant labor spiritual or domestic held in place by divine fiat. The gospel of endless alpha male podcasts. A modern update of an old model economic utility maintained, autonomy denied, and power preserved behind the curtain of sanctified control. 

IV. The Disruption 

Jesus challenged temple authority and economic exploitation. He taught in parables, not policy. He elevated women as witnesses, patrons, and participants—Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, Mary of Bethany—not as footnotes, but as central figures. He flipped power hierarchies with teachings like “the last shall be first,” refusing political titles, wealth, and institutional alignment. 

He preached directly to and with the poor, the sick, and the outsider—not from above, but alongside. There were no applications, no memberships, no branding. Only tables. Only stories. Only people. What he led was not a bureaucracy or a theology class. It was a disruptive, non-hierarchical movement grounded in proximity, care, and dangerous truth-telling. 

V. The Takeover 

What Paul offered was, first, a central lie—that he was an eyewitness. He was not. He never walked with Jesus, never heard him teach, never stood among the crowds or at the foot of the cross. What he claimed instead was a vision—an unverifiable, private revelation that he used to override those who knew Jesus in life. From that moment forward, he positioned himself not just as a follower, but as an authority. His voice would carry more weight in the shaping of Christian doctrine than those who had lived, eaten, and suffered alongside Jesus. 

That lie—that proximity could be replaced by revelation, that firsthand witness could be substituted by spiritual branding—became the foundation for everything else he built. Paul turned the Jesus movement into the classiest tax code in history: a system of spiritual accounting dressed up as divine revelation. He didn’t abolish class; he spiritualized it. The rich could keep their status if they gave. The poor were told obedience was godliness. Women were told to be quiet and wear less. 

He transformed hierarchy into holiness, submission into sanctification, and giving into proof of righteousness. It was, structurally, a theological pyramid scheme: support the mission, follow the rules, respect the chain of command, and your reward would come in the next life—where none of it could be audited. 

Jesus fed people. Paul sent thank-you letters to donors. Jesus preached disruption. Paul offered policy and payment plans. Jesus preached to the hungry. Paul drafted letters to the loyal. What began as a radical message of freedom was converted into a system that loved money and needed it to survive. It didn’t challenge empire. It mirrored it. Then it baptized it, granting it tax-free status. 

VI. The Merger 

When Constantine came, the structure was already in place. He didn’t need to invent anything. Paul had already done the groundwork: a faith with centralized authority, clear doctrine, obedience baked in, and a donor class that doubled as the leadership class. Constantine saw the value immediately. Here was a belief system that demanded loyalty, organized people into a moral order, and could be administered like a state—without a standing army. 

He legalized Christianity not because he was converted, but because it was ready-made governance. A religion that taught submission, deferred justice to the afterlife, and sanctified hierarchy was a perfect partner for empire. 

And so, the merger happened. The church, once a decentralized network of the oppressed, was absorbed into the machinery of Rome. The cross was lifted not by the poor, but by the military. Bishops became administrators. Councils replaced communities. Heretics were now criminals, and theology became law. 

By the Council of Nicaea, faith had become regulation. Creed replaced conscience. Rome didn’t need swords—it had bishops. 

Constantine didn’t seize Christianity. He simply recognized its utility and gave it a throne. And with that throne came a new gospel—not the one spoken in parables and shared at open tables, but one issued from chambers, codified by councils, and enforced by decree. The teachings of Jesus were no longer invitations to live differently; they became tools of compliance. 

The Sermon on the Mount was sidelined in favor of creeds that could be recited, policed, and weaponized. Faith was no longer a path—it was a platform. One that could crown emperors, justify conquests, and demand loyalty not to the poor carpenter from Galilee, but to the institutional machine built in his name. What had once been a movement of risk became a monument to order. And in that monument, empire found its most loyal chaplain. 

VII. The Fruit 

We have built entire systems—political, religious, economic—around grifters to protect ourselves from the radical implications of love. Because real love dismantles hierarchies. It centers the voices we've silenced. It feeds without asking for paperwork. It forgives without extracting obedience. 

Real love is dangerous to institutions because it can’t be monetized, managed, or militarized. So instead, we chose order. We chose doctrine. We chose control dressed up as truth. And we called it gospel. 

We built a theology that lets us admire Jesus while avoiding everything he lived and died for. We’ve learned to worship the man and ignore his mission. To sing the songs and skip the sentences. To kneel before the symbol while crucifying the call. 

Because if we took him seriously, we’d have to stop what we’re doing. And we’re not ready to do that—because we love philargyria. We love silver. We love the system it buys, the power it protects, the story it tells. We love it so much that we have become a nation of cults, most with a spoiled soul.