You're a Slave to Money, Then You Die | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame
This essay traces neoliberalism from its origins in 1920s anti-democratic theory through its ascendance under Thatcher and Reagan to its current dominance as a comprehensive worldview—arguing that it functions not merely as economic policy but as a quasi-religious metaphysics in which the Market replaces God as the organizing principle of reality. Drawing on thinkers like Hayek and Mises, the author demonstrates how neoliberals deliberately obscured the market's artificial construction behind mystifications of "spontaneous order," used state power to suppress democratic constraints on capital, and cultivated technologies of the self (social media, personal debt, the "entrepreneurial self") that internalize market logic into every aspect of human identity and relationships. The essay concludes by suggesting that imagining genuine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism requires recovering a theological vision of human dignity—that we are creatures of infinite, not market-determined, worth.