{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02658855340243353, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0013519603424966202, 'mean_word_length': 4.967741935483871, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
IDOLS OF NATIONS: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism

Roland Boer and Christina Petterson’s Idols of Nations: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism is a theological treatise that critiques the writings of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus on human nature, the garden of Eden, the nature of the fall and sin, and whether God is capable of evil. In every chapter, Boer and Petterson draw lines of comparison between the authors at hand – which they consider capitalist ideologues – and the capitalist mode of production, class difference, and private property. They demonstrate that homo economicus is sometimes read into the Genesis garden narrative, such that the “human nature” assumed by capitalism is depicted as universal to the human race as a whole – a type of reading they consider “economic imperialism.” According to Boer and Petterson, these interpretations of the fall oddly present the fall as a good thing, leading to the “freedoms” of modern society, all the while downplaying the “evils” of exploitation of labor and disparities of wealth that result from the human fall from Eden into sin. They situate their theology in the prophetic tradition of Jeremiah. Jeremiah suggests, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands”; similarly, Boer and Petterson present the four authors they analyze as legitimating the idolization of wealth. By contrast, they prefer a theology that presents the Edenic fall as an evil leading to human sinfulness and selfishness, consequently entailing the exploitations of private property, wage labor, and class inequality. In sum, in place of an anachronistic capitalist myth they would substitute a socialist myth. Boer and Petterson’s chapter on Grotius is probably the best example of what they want to accomplish in the volume (according to the stated aims of their introduction). They write, “we are interested in the way Grotius inaugurates a tradition in which the biblical account of the Fall is reread and rewritten in order to justify the increasingly clear contours of capitalism” (9–10). For Grotius, at bottom the narrative of the fall is less of a disaster for humanity and more of a boon, insofar