How We Saved The World

My Entry into Suzanne Taylor's Essay Competition Feb/Mar 2024

Suzanne put up $12,000 of her own money to fund a essay competition. The brief was to imagine you were writing in 2050. The world had transformed into a cooperative utopia. Explain what you did to make that happen. I misunderstood part of the brief because I thought ‘How We Saved The World’ was the title we were supposed to use. I might have chose differently if I’d realised. But apart from being a tad self-aggrandising it sort of works for my piece. Which would be the same regardless.

Twenty essays were shortlisted. Mine wasn’t one of them. But I’ve exchanged a few emails with Suzanne. And it might not be the end of the line for my story. I’m always keen to get fresh eyes on the ideas and on Church of Burn. So we’ll see. I hope you enjoy it. There’s no holding back with this one!

P.S. If you’re new to Church of Burn. Everything up Feb 2024 in this story is true.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Audio version is available on the other side of the paywall if you prefer to have me read it to you.

January 1st 2050

I’ll be 85 this year. It’s unlikely I’ll see 2060 arrive. 

That’s a shame. Because, aside from the obvious not-wanting-to-be-dead thing, I love these turn-of-the-decade moments. They’re temporal high points. You get a better view of the past and future from up here. 

And looking to the past now, it seems so obvious that it was money holding us back. Technology was advancing fast. But our dreams of universal peace, freedom and prosperity were fading even faster. To make meaningful progress as a society our relationship to money had to change.

Money has been present for only 1% of our species' total time on Earth. 100 generations have used it. But 10,000 did not. In the blink of an epochal eye money had infused itself into our very being. We were fish and money was our water. 

We'd allowed its logics to become a stronger determinant of behavior than our genes. To be any other way, than how we were with money, seemed inconceivable. Unimaginable. 

There’s an old adage: “It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting”. We all know the truth of that. Habits make us. And they can break us, too. But humankind just couldn’t seem to join up the dots around money. 

People call me the ‘Founder'. But Church of Burn is something we’ve created together. A Church is its congregation. Without me our Church will carry on. Without all of you it will cease to exist. 

Now though, as I await my passing, perhaps it's time I tell you my story of how Church of Burn helped to save the world.

I’ll start 30 years ago today, on 1st January 2020, the day I published ‘Looking Back - A Prophecy’. In it, I imagine myself on the brink of 2030 from where I ‘look back’ to ‘remember’ the events of the 2020’s.

I was brimful of joy and hope when I wrote it. 

Twenty three days before, we’d held the most important Church of Burn to date. We’d sold out a London Theatre. David Graeber had been a Bishop in our Synod. The Service was intense. Our congregation had responded by burning just shy of £1000 in Ritual Sacrifice. 

So much money-ash floating in the air. You could taste it. The revolutionary potential of Church of Burn rushed through me.

Writing my Prophecy was a way to hang on to that. And it was the starting point of a decade-long ritual; the invocation of a new future. I was under no illusion about the difficulties I faced. Nor about how crucial it was that I try. For our children’s future and their children’s too.

My resolve was soon tested. 

I’d made immediate plans to build on the momentum. But the Covid virus had other ideas. It felt like we’d got a fire lit right before the rain came. 

The burden of my self-penned destiny weighed heavy. I worked my day job delivering groceries during the pandemic and I dreamed. Then I cashed in my pension and maxed out my cards. I gambled everything on Church of Burn 2021. A landmark event on the very first weekend free of covid restrictions.

It was magnificent. A vision realized. But lingering Covid fears meant small congregations. I lost all my money. Still, I didn't doubt that I’d done the right thing. It was the sacrifice the future demanded of me. 

Within a month, by a lucky twist of fate, we lined up our next event at a big festival - The Secret Garden Party - in July 2022. 

We blew their minds. The Afterburn party was wild. We made some people angry, too. “Give it to Charity!” they’d demanded. 

Anger like this had accompanied us since the first mass burn in 2015. It wasn’t always easy facing down the firing line of condemnation. Weaponized shaming can cause collateral damage. But over time we’d come to understand that anger was going to be a symptom of success. 

The next 18 months were a test of attrition. 

I knuckled down to the mundane grind of six-days-a-week work. I carried my beloved Church and its financial baggage into an uncertain future. Then came the gift of redundancy. A payout allowed me to devote a few months of full-time work to Church of Burn. But by February 2024 the money was running out and my reserves of optimism were close to exhausted. 

That’s when I stumbled across Suzanne Taylor’s essay competition on Substack. 

I’d started my own Substack - CoB’s Creation Diary - a couple of months earlier. I hoped it might extend my period of devotional work. The competition brief was to write as if looking back from 2050. And recount your role in the transformation that had taken place. 

The idea chimed. How Do We Save the World was the question I'd posed back at the Synod in 2019. And my Prophecy piece was a similar attempt at future-making. So I entered.

It’d be nice to re-read that essay right now. I’d like to compare my imaginings with how the actual events of the past 26 years have played out. But I can’t seem to access it from where I am.  

Anyway, back in February 2024 writing it gave me the optimism boost I needed. I’d already prophesied that we’d do more events and festivals in the second half of the 2020’s. And by magic, faith and a lot of hard work we did. 

The total amount of burned money grew and grew. And the headlines about us became ever more lurid and sensational. They were all variations on the theme that we could’ve - should’ve - given it to charity, instead. But for every twenty people tutting and puffing in exasperation, there was one person who got it. 

We grew a congregation of curious minds and open hearts. 

By 2028 we had enough support to put into action our plan to register as a Religious Charity. The legal privileging of money destruction as a religious rite would have far reaching implications. The Charity Commission refused at first, of course. But we appealed. 

By the time it was heard we’d recorded over 250 thousand individual acts of sacrifice in the Record of Burn. Testimony poured in about the transcendent power of our sacrament. We won our charitable status. 

This meant the sacrifice of money now held precedence in law. Credit card companies, banks and other ‘for profit’ lenders had to get in line. Their claim upon a person's income was secondary to freedom of religious expression. Any individual could set aside up to £50 a month to make sacrament. This was a small but decisive victory against Capital.

Being a religion in English Law does not require the worship of a Deity. And a Church does not need brick walls or a pointy roof. We were official. And also, because of our Charitable status, we were a highly tax-efficient investment opportunity!

The right-wing Press were apoplectic. But their outrage just fuelled our growth. 

Meanwhile, the climate crisis tightened its grip. Extreme weather was causing ever more death and destruction around the world. The pressure from mass migration intensified. Wars raged. In the darkest moments it looked like the politics of the coming 2030’s might mirror those of the 1930s.   

The soil was rich with radical and revolutionary ideas for both good and evil.

As the 2030’s dawned, I closed the ritual I’d begun in my Prophecy. And I opened another. This time my divination wrapped around the sacrifice of a hundred dollar bill. It would happen twenty years hence - in other words, it would happen today the 1st January 2050. 

Of all symbols in the history of humankind none is more powerful than $. Some believe that $ is a monogram of ‘In Hoc Signo’ - by the sign of Christ. But $ far exceeds the crucifix in its omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. 

As traditional religion had declined so money filled the spiritual void. And the dollar became our living God. Our King of our kings. 

From the start Church of Burn's mission was ‘to change money by changing our relationship to money’. If we were ever to fulfill it we'd have to go to America. And we’d have to start burning dollars. 

Our experience in the UK meant we had a rough idea of how things might play out. Except in the US, we'd have extra worries about the power of the Evangelicals and the prevalence of guns.

We started off in the obvious places. Burning Man 2032 followed by some venues on the coasts. But as we moved further inland we experienced more hostility. I don’t believe this had to do with people being any less personable or warm-hearted. 

Church of Burn had finally come under the eye of the incumbent financial elites. They realized what our success would mean for them. Our mission would change their relationship to money, too. And they didn’t like that. So they began whipping up a hate storm. 

We’d long ago passed the million burn mark. We were close to a hundred million dollars’ worth of sacrifice across all currencies. Our events now drew huge congregations. We'd perfected our Service to offer an unmatched intensity. And the Ritual was more spine-tinglingly and breathlessly transformative than ever. 

The still-stupid drug laws meant we had to distance our Church from it in public. But among our congregation the responsible use of psychoactive substances was becoming commonplace. Many claimed the combination of drug, scene and setting marked a spiritual renaissance. A religious experience fit for the C21st century. All I can tell you is that my own experiences were fucking awesome!

All told, we were becoming a problem for the politicians and their rich and powerful friends. 

The political narrative that our society ‘doesn’t have the money’ would no longer wash. There was a realization that a cure to basic social injustice was already within our reach. Homelessness and hunger were no longer seen as unfortunate outcomes. But as cruel choices made by governments. 

Our strategy of positively disrupting both money and religion was working. It was undermining the moral basis of their political authority.

Soft-money reformers began - at long last - to see the gift our Church was giving them. Each and every sacrifice contributed to a change in the public consciousness of money. Modern Monetary and Degrowth theories could finally cross the Rubicon into reality. And Economic Policy could reflect the truth. The monetary currencies we create are constrained only by the strength and quality of our social relations. 

One commentator wrote; “[Church of Burn] have taken the essence of what Frank Baum tried to do with the Wizard of Oz. And then embedded it into our lived experience of money. They’ve torn down the Wizard’s Curtain. And there ain't no putting it back up.”