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The way we pay for things is changing fast. Something we do every day - at a till in a shop or settling a bill for a coffee- is now dramatically different from even a few years ago. More than half of UK adults are now regularly paying for goods and services not just without cash but without cards too. 78% of adults between 16 and 24 and 20% of those over 65 are now comfortable leaving home with no cards or cash – just their phone.

So far, so useful, you might think. This is a practical shift based on our desire for ease, speed and convenience. But more fundamental questions are raised about our use of the money that we have, but no longer see, and some risks are greater too:

In London, a mobile phone is stolen every 6 minutes. And on Monday, a woman was convicted in the largest crypto currency fraud case ever heard in a UK court. She, with just one or two others, defrauded over 128,000 victims and the virtual haul in Bitcoin alone according to the Met Police was £300m.

The Christian tradition has much to say about the ethics of making, keeping, saving and spending money. ‘Whose head is on this coin?’ asked Jesus of his 1st century contemporaries, in a discussion about loyalty, nationality and tax. On UK banknotes, there’s a picture of a person- the monarch- who promises to pay the bearer of the note, not valuable in itself but an IOU. Other banknote faces currently include the novelist Jane Austen and the scientist Alan Turing.
The meaning of money in human interaction, its power and value, can arguably start to feel more remote without the faces and promises that are carried by the physical notes. Digital exclusion becomes an issue too, especially of older or poorer people who may not have bank accounts or smart phones. Moral and spiritual questions of worth, equality and value lie underneath our persistent pursuit of ease.

It’s an often misquoted tenet of Christianity that money is in itself a bad thing. But it’s the love of money that’s at the root of the self-centredness Jesus consistently condemns. And he further cautioned that it is not possible to devote your energy, your love and attention to ‘two masters’ as he put it: you cannot serve both God and money.

No one will argue for a wholesale return to cash. Our digitally literate society has moved past what in the 1960s Harold Wilson called ‘the pound in your pocket’. But recognising the loss as well as the gains in this fundamental shift might help us resist our becoming a society of cynics: famously people who ‘know the price of everything but the value of nothing’.

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