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Obviously there is nothing wrong with producing real goods and selling them at a fair price; it is admirable to labor diligently to care for one’s family and neighbors; to build a business that gives honest employment to those who need it is a worthy accomplishment. That, however, hardly consecrates everything that happens on the floor of the stock exchange as something continuous with Christian principles.

After all, when Christ talked about private wealth, he certainly seemed to associate it with spiritual impoverishment. In addition to his advice to the young ruler, there was his clear injunction to store up treasure not on earth but only in heaven, his rather pointed remarks on the impossibility of dual service to both God and Mammon, his parable about the rich man and Lazarus (which was not, I think we can grant, merely a warning against dissipation), and so on. As for imitating the personal industry of the rich, Christ enjoined his followers instead to take no thought for the morrow but to contemplate, emulously, those notoriously indolent lilies of the field. The New Testament as a whole, truth to tell, is fairly clear that the accumulation of great private wealth, even when honestly acquired, is spiritually perilous and, as a rule, morally unjust.

So, make what one will of the Occupy protestors—their stated aims are certainly amorphous enough to allow one to love or despise or ignore them as one chooses, and they are far too various a group to characterize uniformly, in any event—but I cannot really see how their actions constitute an assault on “Christian values.” Setting economic arguments aside for a moment, surely any Christian should acknowledge that at the heart of Christ’s teaching there was a prophetic critique of the pursuit and preservation of material wealth, and that it is hardly fitting then for Christians (even American Christians) to view these protests with simple self-confident disdain.

There is, I should add, no room for sanctimony in such observations. Certainly I cannot claim to have lived the life of the heroic renunciant, and no one can deny the force of the disciples’ question, “Who then can be saved?” But it is wise to recall that the Christ of the gospels has always been—and will always remain—far more disturbing, uncanny, and scandalously contrary a figure than we usually like to admit. Or, as an old monk of Mount Athos once said to me, summing up what he believed he had learned from more than forty years of meditation on the gospels, “He is not what we would make him.”