The Dominant Faith in the World Today: Materialism

Origami made from dollar bills on display at the Origami Convention at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York on June 22, 2013. Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Most people in the world today claim they have a faith. The large majority of Americans, 77 percent of the adult population, identify with a Christian religion. Another 18 percent of Americans do not have an explicit religious identity, and 5 percent identify with a non-Christian religion.

Europe is much less religious, though Poland and Russia are exceptions. More than 80 percent of the people in India claim they believe in Hinduism. Some 70–80 percent of the Japanese regularly tell pollsters they do not consider themselves believers in any religion. Most Chinese, are also not religious according to Western standards.

But are these statistics about people’s faith truly accurate? Not really.

The way to judge whether people are truly religious, by the standards of their religion, is to look at their behavior when facing a real test.

Consider the “million-dollar test.” Suppose a man finds a bag containing 1 million dollars cash near a highway rest area with no one in sight. If he decides to hand over the million dollars to the local police, that means he is true to his original faith to be a good person. If he decides to keep it for himself, then his real belief actually is Materialism, a rapidly developing religion for the past 20 years.

This relatively new religion, Materialism, is becoming the fastest-growing faith in many parts of the world.

Many so-called Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists are actually true followers of Materialism when given the million-dollar test. It is your answer to the test that decides your true faith.

The new religion Materialism has at least 1 billion followers around the world, thus making it the most important and dominant faith today.

This new belief has its own god, whose name is Money Power Wealth. Its birthplace was Manhattan, birthdate some time around the 1980s, parents unknown.

This branch of faith (among more than 4,000 beliefs around the world) believes that its god Money can bring happiness to life, and that Wealth determines social status as manifested in the rankings of richest people in the world appearing in the media year after year. Power (middle name) can be achieved through money well spent.

This popular religion that disregards moral standards affects people’s daily lives everywhere. Consider the high leveraging to pursue short-term profit that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns; the false Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program reporting that partly contributed to the decline of The New York Times, the deaths of many soldiers, and trillions of dollars wasted; the business interests considerations that led to the disregard of grave human rights violation in China and the resulting creation instead of a dangerous adversary; the widespread fraud cases in the American welfare system; the bogus disability claims by more than 100 New York police officers and firefighters, who used the 9/11 tragedy for personal financial gain.

In a society dominated by Materialism, money is the only thing citizens care about. Since money does not have any feeling, it can only bring happiness for a very short period of time and then the trader mentality will set in. When a whole society behaves like traders for short-term profit like those on Wall Street, the bonds of family and friendship will be downgraded to junk bond status, and there will be fewer and fewer people you can trust in your life.

Warren Song is a New York-based financial consultant