We, Nigerians. Well, most Nigerians (I can’t make this statement without a bit of generalisation, so here it is): do Christianity weirdly.
We are home to some of the richest prosperity gospel preachers in the world, but we still manage to think that doing business for profit isn’t very “righteous.” I’m writing this from personal experience, so I have no data to back this one up, but take my word for it (at least for now).
You could find among us a Christian considering raising their prices but equally wondering whether doing so is spiritually appropriate. It is a sense of guilt that the profit margin is too much, and even if that profit is legitimate, something says they’ve sinned for aiming at prosperity.
Some of us are so sure that seeking profit, even through work or petty trading, is sinful that you could find a Christian businessman or woman frequenting a church during business hours, praying for a “helper” or for the same prosperity they could gain if they served their customers unforgettably well.
Here’s why I think some Christians are suspicious of doing business for profit.
According to Plato (and this is a simplistic explanation), the material world is a corrupted shadow of a higher, spiritual reality. The body is a prison for the soul. Physical things like commerce, property, and profit belonged to the lower order of existence. In essence, Plato told us that everything in the world falls into two classes: material and spiritual things.
This view of the world is called dualism, and it eventually influenced early Christian teachers, many of them who taught that anything material is bad while spiritual things are good. Today, several known “pastors” teach variations of this understanding as if it’s a new revelation.
One of the biblical references often made to support this assertion is the statement of Apostle Paul to Timothy that ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’ (1 Timothy 6:10). But, it ought to be obvious that the Pauline emphasis was on love of money and not money itself, so it cannot be profit itself, nor commerce itself.
But the prevalence of monasteries in the medieval period portrayed the highest form of Christian life as one of poverty, prayer, and separation from the world. Monks and nuns who renounced property and commercial life were considered more spiritually advanced than the merchants who travelled the world negotiating transactions and gathering profits to finance them or the workers who toiled for months to build them.
The Catholic church had largely institutionalised a two-tier form of Christianity: the sacred clergy above and secular laity below. In fact, Thomas Aquinas argued that charging interest on a loan was inherently sinful because it meant profiting from time which belonged to God. Never mind that several Christians could have started new ventures with great success had they secured loans from other affluent Christians at the time.
Over two thousand years of church history, the practical theology of many church traditions made a blanket suspicion of financial success that Paul himself would not have recognised (he was a tentmaker, you know).
Nancy Pearcey, in her landmark work Total Truth, says that the sacred-secular divide is not truly Biblical. Still, it would be difficult to dislodge because it is embedded in the institutional structures, the devotional literature, and the unexamined assumptions of the church long before anyone thought to question it systematically.
The marketplace Christian, you and I, must shatter the tiny little variations of this bias towards financial prosperity because it pretends that one’s blessings could not possibly be a gift from God. I’ve been poor and rich, and I know by experience that there’s nothing righteous about depriving yourself of profit.
Martin Luther believed that the cobbler who crafts shoes with skill and honesty is serving God just as faithfully as the monk who prays in his cell. This is the doctrine of vocation, the idea that every legitimate occupation, done faithfully for the common good, is an avenue through which God meets the needs of the world, and you can be certain that those who engage in God’s work shall be richly blessed.
Christians who exercise their faith at work or in business, offering value to their clients as if working for God, are agents of God’s providence. Such people are blessed, and in their profit and prosperity, there is no shame.
In the beginning, there was no hierarchy of sacred and secular work. There was only faithful work and unfaithful work, work done for God’s glory and work done for self-advancement.
John Calvin taught that prosperity and productivity were not signs of spiritual compromise but of God’s blessing on faithful stewardship. It was Calvin’s theology that Max Weber famously analysed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, identifying the religious roots of the work ethic and the legitimisation of profit that helped build the modern economy. And we should be grateful for that!
Despite this, I have heard some honest preachers narrow the church’s mission to strictly “saving souls.” Whatever this means, I sincerely hope they can extend this saving interest in the soul to the body first. A family man must demonstrate his salvation by providing food, clothing and shelter for his family because his family’s life will be better if he is profitable at work or in business, so the church must teach him to sustain such legitimate profitability.
It is C. S. Lewis who said in Mere Christianity that the devil is perfectly happy to have us think of God as a spiritual being who is uninterested in the physical world, so long as this keeps us from bringing our whole lives, including our commercial lives, under his lordship.
Anything short of a profitable approach to work or business (including non-profits) means that we don’t consider this area of our lives to be under God’s domain.
David Kinnaman describes a ‘Sunday-Monday gap’ as a profound disconnect between spiritual identity and working life, leaving millions of marketplace Christians navigating their professional decisions without a coherent theological framework.
Into this vacuum, two distorting messages have repeatedly rushed in. The first is the prosperity gospel, which overcorrects dramatically by treating financial success as the primary evidence of divine favour, reducing faith to a technique for wealth accumulation and God to a vending machine.
The second distortion is more common in serious Christian communities: the belief that the really devoted Christians are those who enter vocational ministry or missionary work, while those in business are doing something secondary that requires spiritual justification to be acceptable to God.
I am for neither of these extremes. I am convinced that God has called you and I to do valuable work and be prudent in business. If we do so, we will be richly blessed, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in God-given, honest profit.