Q&A with Justin Pack, author of Grace or Money: Rediscovering the Gift of Grace in an Age of Greed January 13 2026

Greg Kofford Books reached out to Justin Pack, author of Grace or Money: Rediscovering the Gift of Grace in an Age of Greed, to ask some questions about his new book.

Q. What is the central argument you are making in your book, and what two opposing forces are you contrasting? 

A. The central argument I make in this book is that we have become caught up in the world of money and it is deeply damaging us. The foil to this world of money is a world of grace, which I claim is nothing short of the order of heaven: a world of gifts, non-calculation, and mutual care. Many dismiss this sort of thing as unpractical hippy nonsense. In fact, most of us can’t even understand how a world like that would work. This is a terrible shame, because it has been accomplished in the past, both in prehistory and in the historical record, and in scriptural accounts, and it could be accomplished again.  

Q. You argue that the modern notion of scarcity is not "natural." Where do you trace the historical origins of human scarcity and poverty? 

A. As recent anthropology is teaching us, for most of prehistory humans experienced themselves as living in abundance, although there was always the threat of wannabe alphas hoarding the abundance for themselves. The neolithic or agricultural revolution made it easier for these wannabe alphas to do so, and, as we see in the Hebrew Bible, they did. This is one of the reasons the Hebrew Bible is always warning Israel to stop taking advantage of each other and instead take care of each other—as humans did for most of our existence. Prehistory and scripture teach us that if we share, there is more than enough to go around. 

Q. You define "grace" not just as salvation, but as an "entire order." How does the logic of the "order of grace" differ from that of money? 

A. We are familiar with the world of money. Work hard, grind, get ahead, invest wisely: money is not just a neutral tool, not just an object that we use, but a way of thinking and a way of relating to others. In the world of money, everyone is potentially a competitor and potentially a customer. Money turns us into strangers and encourages us to always seek to get ahead. Furthermore, in a meritocracy, we tend to mistakenly believe that accumulating money is an indication of moral goodness. Wealth is fallaciously taken as a sign of hard work and moral goodness. Poverty is cruelly taken as a sign of not working enough and moral failure. 
 
Interestingly, we also recognize that we should treat our close friends and family differently. We don’t make our children pay rent or charge our friends interest. We understand that love is different from business, and we act grace-fully with those we care about: giving them gifts, caring for them, being with them—all without seeking payment for doing so.  

Oddly, even though we regularly seek to live gracefully with friends and family, we are so spiritually and socially shaped by the world of money, that it doesn’t occur to most of us that we can and should seek to make the world as a whole a more graceful place. But this was how most humans lived for most of human existence. We can and should live in a world of caring friends. 

Q. You dedicate two chapters to the concept of "bullshit." What is your Arendtian theory of "bullshit," and how does it relate to integrity? 

A. Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish philosopher who had to flee Nazi Germany. Because of German racism against Jews, she and other Jews had to constantly decide whether to hide their Jewishness and seek to “be normal” or whether to embrace it and be an outsider. She argued that all of us have to make decisions about whether we are going to conform to whatever social or moral expectations we are surrounded with and that this can often involve “selling ourselves out”—betraying our own sense of self or our own standards to conform. Arendt did not describe this as “bullshitting,” but “walking around with masks.” Now students and workers often describe this “walking around with masks” as having to “BS” and have to put up with “BS” in their education and their work. 

Philosophers like Harry Frankfurt have analyzed “bullshit” and made the important argument that lots of BSing leads to a world full of “bullshit.” For Frankfurt this undermines truth. I argue it leads many to compromise their integrity and become accustomed to constantly selling themselves out. I argue a world of money will lead to a world of “bullshit.” This is a direct threat to our spiritual wellbeing. 

Q. How does your analysis of the hunter-gatherer existence, or the "Original Affluent Society," challenge the typical modern "narrative of progress"? 

A. For a long time in “modern” times, we have defined ourselves (“we moderns”) over and against those that came before. We are advanced, they are primitive, backwards, and premodern. Supposedly the further back we go in human history, the more primitive humans were. This kind of “narrative of progress” makes us feel good about ourselves and provides a justification for us to colonize and “civilize” primitive peoples.  
 
Marshall Sahlin’s famous essay on the “Original Affluent Society” argued that the earliest, most “primitive” kinds of humans actually lived a life of abundance, worked less than us, and actively worked to prevent inequality. He pointed out that is it in OUR times we find rampant poverty, inequality, overwork, and social resentment. If we actually pay attention to hunter-gatherer life, we find that it raises questions about our supposed superiority.

Q. What is the core moral danger of money, as noted by ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plato? 

A. For Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Biblical prophets, and basically all of the ancient world, money and merchants were viewed with deep suspicion. They thought money is deeply addicting and those that seek it can never get enough. Instead of focusing on things like truth, wisdom, their souls (Socrates), the wellbeing of the community, and friendship (Aristotle), they would get caught up in the trap of always accumulating money.  
 
Money was also seen as a force that threatened the stability of the world and human identity. The example of this was the merchant—the individual who changes shape with every different encounter to try and buy or sell, much like our current characterization of the used car salesman. The merchant doesn’t actually care about you but wants to make a sale. Similarly, those that love money will constantly put on masks and become protean, slippery, untrustworthy beings. It creates a world of fakery, BS and BSers. 

Q. What is the fundamental problem with the ideology of "meritocracy" in contemporary society, according to your argument? 

A. Meritocracy (rule by those who have shown themselves to be the best) sounds good at first, but as Michael Sandel has pointed out, it actually makes a world of deep injustices and inequalities appear to be just and moral. In Meritocracy Mingled with Scripture, I argued that meritocracy is particularly insidious because it shapes our identity. Those who succeed financially come to feel like they earned and deserve what they have and that those who haven’t succeeded financially have not earned it and do not deserve it. The rich merit their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty. Despite the scriptural admonition to care for the poor, meritocracy says that the poor have done this to themselves and need to help themselves.  

Meritocracy thus flips basic gospel principles on their head and leads to a widespread aporophobia (hated of the poor). It is genuinely shocking situation, and it makes modern “Christianity” into something unrecognizable in many cases. 

Q. You argue that "all wealth is the result of disproportionality." What do you mean by this? 

A. This is a claim that is particularly hard for those that are thoroughly shaped by meritocratic ideals to understand or accept. 

It is common to hear blue collar workers saying, “my job isn’t easy, but it is honest work.” Often the kinds of work they do involves physical labor. The work is visible and comprehensible. I build a house or a road and I get paid for it. The pay is proportional to the amount of work that went into it. 
 
If there is honest work, there is also “dishonest” work. This could be jobs that are shady or even criminal. But this could also be jobs where the amount that one gets paid seems completely disconnected from the kind of work one does—getting paid six figures to sit at a desk while pushing buttons on a computer that move the money of wealthy people around in ways that allow for it to increase. This is work, but it is nothing like “honest” work. It involves taking advantage of certain abstract systems (say investing on Wall Street) that are often incomprehensible and weird from a traditional perspective. The value of this kind of labor is not measured by how much actual work one does, but by how profitable what one does is. Thus, a lawyer who makes his company billions of dollars may be paid immense amounts, even though the work they do may be much less arduous and take much less time than construction work. The connection between work and payment is broken and replaced instead by simply by how much profit is generated. 

But what is profitable can be absolute nonsense. Just think of all the weird toy trends that get immensely popular and then die off: Labubus, fidget spinners, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc. Some companies make a fortune off this stuff even though it is just wild, silly trends.  

Less silly, an acquaintance bragged on his social media that his real estate portfolio is taking off. What he means by this is that he has bought a bunch of houses and they are going way up in value. Is this increase in value a result of hard work on his part? No, it is just a matter of market fluctuations. He claims he has “earned” this, but from the perspective of honest work he isn’t even doing any work.   

The vast majority of wealth is not a result of hard work, but of disproportional profits from trends, abstract systems, or the weird fluctuations of markets. Try telling this to wealthy people—those that are committed to meritocratic ideals HATE it. They want to believe they have worked for what they have and that therefore they don’t have to share it. Meanwhile the world economy is held up by people who are paid very little and work very hard.  

Getting wealthy is not about working hard, that is for suckers. Getting wealthy is about finding ways to break the proportionality of honest work and raking in money disproportionate to the labor involved. Cynically, this is often called “working smart, not hard.” 

Q. How is the moral standing of the poor connected to the logic of money and meritocracy in modern society? 

A. If we believe that hard work leads to success, then it seems to follow that poor people just need to work harder. They must not be working hard enough.

This is nonsense. I’ve seen far too many people work hard and not be able to make it (Speaking for myself, I can’t afford a house, for example). Instead of blaming the poor, we should realize that something is broken with the system.  

Q. What is one practical step you suggest readers take toward living in the order of grace and away from the order of money? 

A. This is actually a loaded question, because grace is so radically different from money that most baby steps towards grace end up being sucked back into the logic of money.

I mean, Jesus says to sell your possessions and give to the poor. Sadly and tellingly, that is probably too big an ask more most of us.  
 
If there are baby steps, I suspect they would be something like practice not calculating, not being in a hurry, listening to the birds, not investing, giving gifts, letting go, loving trees, rejecting luxury goods. [Hugh] Nibley tells a story about a person who finds out they are going to die in a week. But instead of rushing to work on their bucket list, they start reading about the next life. They stop caring about things they did previously and instead start caring about a whole different set of things.