On Ptoxocracy

“Blessed are the ptoxoi, for theirs is the dominion of God”

Luke 6:20

“…[the situation] struck me as deeply plutocratic in nature. I chuckled to myself as I parsed a word that conveyed the opposite to plutocracy, reaching into my divinity school biblical-greek memory bank to do so: ptoxocracy. I had never heard that word before.”

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ptoxocracy:

[p · toeks · AW · kruh · see]   noun

governance by the ptoxoi; a hybrid form of representative democracy whereby only persons of the lowest economic status are eligible for elected public office

Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity

Chapters

  • “Christianity does not have to be a religion of patriarchy, political domination, sexism, gender conformity, rigidity, or violence…”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 3.

  • “The [COVID-19] pandemic helps to see clearly what is usually obscured in day-to-day life, that when faced with a true existential threat, rich leaders did what was most logical as stakeholders: they looked to the well-being of their interests. They had no reason not to act this way, and even less of a reason to attend to the needs of the poor, because they had no stake in the lives of the poor beyond a vague and often contradictory set of moral imperatives.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 20.

  • “The power of the mythology of divinely authorized rich rulers is relatively simple. By telling a story in which power and wealth are inevitable co-partners in ordained authority, be it through democratic, totalitarian, or monarchical mechanisms, this mythology blocks any possibility by which wealth and power are not inevitable outcomes of one another.“

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 43.

  • “If it is true that the rich have no meaningful stake in the lives of the poor, then our work is to create one.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 59.

  • “The aim of such an interrogation is to free ptoxocracy from the unfortunate tendency whereby today’s well-meaning ideas become tomorrow’s oppressive ideologies.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 75.

  • “Jesus was a ptoxocrat.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 98.

  • “If God holds a stake in the lives of the ptoxoi, then the ptoxoi are the true stakeholders of the church.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 128.

  • “When the best we can imagine for the poor comes down to an economic [form of] tokenism, one must conclude that we do not care much to be a church that includes the poor. So long as the church expects the poor to conform to the social expectations of the rich, the poor will not be a part of the church.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 154.

  • “To speak the word [ptoxocracy] is to perform its meaning… to let a touch of spittle emerge from the mouth… one must perform the very action of spitting to speak the word, a one-two step implicating the lips and the tongue in their willful collusion. The performance of ptoxoi reenacts a common encounter, the true encounter of distain known by the ptoxoi themselves.”

    Lohrmann, MC. Ptoxocracy: An End to Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2025), 157.

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"Convicting, insightful, and compelling. Lohrmann calls us to radically re-center the poor in politics and ministry, with a concrete and constructive proposal for our systems of governance."

— ELSA MARTY, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Religion, Hofstra University, New York

“It may be possible to avert exile in the unknown lands of denominational decline, but the pathway of life for the church will be through the poor, not around them.”

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