Pay-day loans - the scandal of silence

“Lord, who may live on your holy hill?” asks David in Psalm 15. Answer, the one whose walk is blameless, who does what is righteous and, tucked away at the bottom, “He who lends his money without usury” (v 5, NIV).

That little word ‘neshek’ is one that ought to be written large over our Western culture. Indeed it may turn out to be its economic epitaph.

Simply, it means ‘charging interest’, which is of course at the basis of modern capitalism. In Mere Christianity, C S Lewis pointed out that our economies were therefore based on something which, until the end of the medieval period, all Christian traditions had taken to be a sin. Whilst admitting that he was no economist, he said it would nevertheless be remiss of him not to make this observation.

Personally, I think we now know how right he was. An economy driven by interest charges is fatally flawed. Furthermore, it seems to me Jesus also had this ‘traditional’ take on economics.

In the parable of the talents, the master says to the man who accuses him of reaping where he has not sown, “then you should have put my money on deposit with the trapezites” — according to the Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament a broker or banker who ‘exchanges money for a fee, and pays interest on deposits’. In other words, he should have lent to someone as grasping as he makes his master out to be.

Some still want to argue that the Bible is not opposing ‘sensible’ or ‘business’ loans. Personally I doubt that, but whatever one’s view there is surely something utterly scandalous about the increasing proliferation of so-called ‘pay day loans’. Our television screens are full of their adverts, and that alone surely indicates a booming business. With a typical repayment rate of over 4000% (that’s right, four thousand per cent) they surely qualify by anyone’s standards as ‘excessive’.

Furthermore, it is not just the desperately poor or the economically ignorant who are falling victim to what is basically a scam. In today’s Daily Telegraph, a reporter writes of her experiences with just such a loan, pointing out that with the so-called ‘credit crunch’, banks and other lenders are being urged to be cautious in the loans they offer.

Her conclusions are hard to dispute:

“Legal loan sharks have simply stepped in to the breach, devoid of proper regulation that might provide a cap on lending, and now, worst of all, this Government is actually cosying up to them. As was revealed in The Daily Telegraph a fortnight ago, Wonga executives attended the recent Conservative Party conference and paid £1,250 a head for face-to-face meetings with ministers from the Treasury and the Department for Business.

Instead of financial lessons about loans being learnt, it feels as if the normalisation of debt is close to being complete. You never hear anybody talk about “saving up” any more, unless it’s for a house, and even then that process is only in place so that you can take out a whopping great loan. Entire lives and lifestyles are still built on credit, and it is seen as uncontroversial that one of the Prime Minister’s closest employees goes to work for a company that has been investigated by the OFT.”

This makes me angry. I hope it makes you angry too. Every time I see a ‘Wonga’ advert, I want to throw up. And every day there seem to be more such companies. Yet the Church, along with society as a whole, seems to be strangely muted in response.

This is not a case of wanting the Church to leap on a crusading bandwagon. Nor is it the traditional call for the Church to attack the profit motive. It is about the exploitation of the poor and indeed the spread of poverty. If the directors of these payday loan companies are getting rich, we know exactly at whose expense they are doing so — the poor sap who thought they could pay for that car repair or that little treat for the kids by taking out just a little extra.

In my book, payday loan companies and heroin dealers are not that different. They both relying on getting the needy client hooked and then milking them for all they can.

In God’s book it is already clear where they stand — and it is not on his holy hill.

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"A piece of gold could buy a bag of bread"

Just to take your mind off the things you're probably worrying about at the moment, try reading this:

Return of the Gold Standard as world order unravels.

Quote:

"One of the big US banks texted me today to say that if QE3 actually happens, we could see gold at $5,000 and silver at $1,000. I feel terribly sorry for anybody on fixed incomes tied to a fiat currency because they are not going to be able to buy things with that paper money."

QE3 = the third round of 'quantitative easing', ie printing money. A friend of mine tells the story of a member of the aristocracy playing cards with a member of the new middle classes a couple of centuries ago who owned a bank. They had a wager on who could tear up the most money and the bank owner won because, of course, when he tore up a bank note, he just printed another one. As my friend said, the governments of today have the upper hand in the present crisis because there is currently no world shortage of trees.

To put that in plain English, the next big thing will probably be inflation.

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Is there a Christian economic ethic?

Apart from its (almost mandatory) snide headline, and a couple of "nudge, nudge" witticisms in the accompanying text, The Independent has published an article on Christianity and ethical investment which could be a useful discussion-starter.

The second paragraph reads,

Cash has always been a thorny subject for the devout. How can one be rich and pious? There can't be too many Christian bankers who are unaware that, according to Christ, camels have a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than bankers do of getting into heaven. Yet the wealthy may be able to sleep more soundly following the creation this week of Europe's first "Christian equity index". The Stoxx Europe Christian Index is the brainchild of a German investment firm that has spotted a gap in the market to provide a list of companies that the faithful can happily invest in without feeling like they are sinning at the same time.

Of course, Christian interest in ethical economics has been around for a long time. In the 1970s and 80s evangelicals in this country were trying to think through some of the issues involved. Sir Fred Catherwood penned a number of works which I seem to remember were regarded as quite controversial for not saying that Capitalism and wealth-creation were bad (remember, this was in the days when Christians either worried about, or rather approved of, Marxism).

And there have long been Christian groups and companies developing means of 'ethical investment'. The Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, for example, has certain standards it maintains for its 'Amity' funds.

But back in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and others were writing about what we today would call 'economic justice'.

In the last couple of decades, though, it all seems to have gone rather quiet. One of the few solid works I'm aware of on the subject is Andy Hartropp's What is Economic Justice? Biblical and Secular Perspectives Contrasted. This is a very solid work and deserves to be widely read and known. But the commitment in the 'Five Marks of Mission' to "seek to transform unjust structures of society" and to "strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth" don't seem to be translating into very much except (still!) a vague hostility towards and discomfort about Capitalism, which has meanwhile so richly blessed us in the West.

What the article in The Independent might usefully prompt is a discussion on precisely what is a 'Christian' view of economic life. Regulars on this blog, for example, will know that I have a 'thing' about the biblical mandate against usury in any form. (And, contra an opinion in The Independent, I did not take my cue in this from the Muslims, though I do think they usefully show that an ethical principle can actually have an economic application.)

Most of us are also dimly aware of the examples of past Christian entrepreneurs, especially amongst the Quakers.

I cannot help wondering, though, whether from a Christian point of view what matters is not the great scheme of things but the small - the 'insignificant' - details. It is surely as great a challenge to be personally honest in one's business dealings in the office as it is to come up with some 'macro-economic' theory.

Many years ago, I heard someone who was regarded as something of an evangelical leader advocate that Christians in the workplace should go along with the 'dodgy practices' and 'petty' dishonesties so that, when the time came for them to speak up in the Trade Union meetings, they would not have lost the respect and the hearing of their workmates because of their 'stand-offish' attitude. That has got to be mad, hasn't it?

Personally, I think that telling the truth at work because you are a Christian is just as likely to get you 'crucified' as wearing a cross - and I have to admit to being frankly relieved that my own form of employment lets me off most of these ethical challenges.

John Richardson
28 April 2010


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"Britain's real debt disaster"

Whenever people speak, as an example of evangelicals ‘picking and mixing’, of how the Church has given up on its opposition to usury without any real harm being done (so why don’t we ‘get real’ on ‘other’ issues?), I am minded to observe, firstly, that the current economic crisis was caused by money-lending and, secondly, that we are by no means out of the woods yet.

On the contrary, what we need right now is a healthy dose of the kind of reality provided by this article here.

As the headline say, “We are in danger of ignoring Britain’s real debt disaster”, and that debt disaster, as this blog has been saying for a long time, consists not just in national and institutional borrowing, but individuals who have also borrowed well beyond their means to repay.

Moreover, as the article goes on to observe, they are being encouraged to do so even further by economic pressures and government policies:

Alistair Darling duly obliged this week by removing stamp duty completely from all houses costing less than £250,000. It was almost certainly an astute political move. But then you notice that first-time buyers are currently borrowing an average of between four and five times their annual household income when, to be safe, that multiple should stay below three. You can see the strain. And when you recognise that the rise in interest rates which must, eventually, come would expose all those interest-only borrowers to sharp "rent" increases on undiminished debt, you can see the danger. Such borrowers are a different version of the "sub-prime" which devastated America. It would be much kinder to help them pay down debt quicker than to devise new, clever ways of inciting them, or new entrants, to borrow more.

What is needed is a new attitude — both to debt and to wealth. And this is a matter of morality and (that old favourite of Church campaigning) of justice:

It is wrong to go on presenting the bottom rung of the housing ladder as an essential mark of modern adulthood, like losing your virginity or passing your driving test. It is foolish for the Government to offer equity share to first-time buyers when the housing market is, in real terms, going down. As with endowment mortgages and private pensions in the past, this looks like mis-selling. Indeed, in relation to money, you could say that all our politics in the 21st century has been a form of mis-selling.

And, moreover, it requires a new attitude to life itself:

For half a century, we experienced the "revolution of rising expectations". That revolution went on for so long that the expectations outreached reality. The revolution of lowering expectations is only just beginning.

The problem is, our Western culture does not want to hear this. We regard increasing wealth, and widespread prosperity, as ‘normal’. Indeed, we think that these things can be achieved and maintained without too much effort on our part. But as the article observes,

... the history of the world is one in which most human beings have had a very hard time. A social order which produces steadily, genuinely growing prosperity for most citizens is therefore a great and rare achievement.

The Bible was right to frown on money lending for profit, and the Church was wrong to abandon its objection. (Investment was never the issue — the question was whether money itself could and should be treated as a commodity. So long as it is, there will be people greedy enough to lend to those who cannot afford to borrow, and those stupid, or desperate, enough to borrow what they cannot afford to repay.)

A friend of mine whose business it is to know about these things predicts that we are halfway through the economic crisis, and that the present sense of disaster averted is actually the calm before the second storm. If he is right, and if, as this article suggests, that storm brings rising interest rates (as must surely eventually happen), then we are in for not just difficult, but dangerous times:

Ministers, bankers, Parliament have all failed, while looking after themselves comfortably in the process. So the conditions are ripe for a new politics of grievance and anger. Which is where revolutions begin.

Watch this space.

John P Richardson
27 March 2010

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Another Nightmare: The Intellectual Eclipse of the West

Last night I was literally lying awake around 3.30am thinking over the implications of the global economic crisis for what has hitherto been the economic hegemony of Western civilizations. The result was my earlier post about the possibility of a hyper-inflation being just around the corner. This, however, is not my only, or chief, worry.

I remember reading as a child a book which must have been written in the early twentieth century. I can recall neither the title nor the plot, but what has stayed with me was a remark made by an adult character in the book to the child-protagonists, to the effect that, unimaginable as it might seem, the British Empire would one day be a thing of the past.

Given that we were then living through the ongoing moves towards colonial independence, two things struck me forcibly. The first was that this ‘unimaginable’ event was coming true, and the second was that therefore other such changes as would seem unimaginable in the present might be just as possible in the future.

And it is that sense of ‘unimaginable possibilities’ that I feel when looking at where we are now. Everyone on this planet has grown up with the ‘normality’ of Western dominance. This has been most obvious economically, but it has also been true industrially, and, even more importantly, intellectually, culturally and scientifically.

I say more importantly, however, because economic downturns can come and go. The crisis of the ‘Great Depression’ gave way to a period of sustained economic boom and prosperity which might itself have seemed ‘unimaginable’ at the time. And the same could perhaps be true in the present economic climate. Western nations have maintained high levels of domestic product and living standards despite competition with one another and with the economies which emerged in the Far East during the post-war years.

It might reasonably be doubted whether all can have such generous slices of cake in a world of limited physical resources. This is why there can be no certainty that the living standards to which we have become accustomed can be made universal. But it is not necessarily the case that a global economy must always have great disparities of prosperity, and therefore the economic rise of the East need not entail the economic decline of the West.

What is in prospect however, is not merely a shift in the economic balance of power but in the vitality of civilizations.

At its most basic, this may simply mean that the West as a whole, including the United States of America, may be about to go through on an even larger scale what Great Britain went through in the 1950s and 60s, namely  an abrupt transition from being the key world power to an international bit-player. That, it must be said, is a process from which the British are still recovering, and which has yet to be fully played out. Our privileged position in the UN Security Council, for example, is beginning to look as anomalous as the position of Anglican bishops in our own House of Lords. The time cannot be far off when embarrassing questions begin to be put.

What is harder to imagine, however, yet is surely possible, is that the entire Western world faces the same situation —where, for example, a heavily indebted US, whose dollar no longer commands respect and which can no longer afford to maintain its armed forces (remember the rusting Russian submarines of the 1990s), is simply forced to take a back-seat in the decision-making councils of the world.

Yet even this is not my ‘worst case’ scenario, for it is possible to cope with a variety of outside threats, so long as one is inwardly strong. My real worry is that the Western world will be surpassed by the East not only economically but culturally. And the danger here, I believe, would come from an intellectual decline of the West, manifesting itself through a decline in cultural vitality and scientific endeavour.

The signs of cultural decay have been there for decades. All over the world, ‘Western’ artistic culture is admired and imitated, and we could take some pride in this —but it is not the artistic culture of the contemporary West which is admired. There is something slightly unnerving, for example, about Eastern prodigies in Western musical forms. On the one hand, it is slightly bizarre seeing someone excelling in a form of cultural expression quite different from their own. There is also something threatening about the sense that they are ‘better at it than us’ (not unlike the feeling we Englsih get when playing the rest of the world at football or cricket).

Worse than that, though, we are surely no longer producing art which will be much admired in two or three centuries time —as evidence of which we need only look at the succession of artistic ‘movements’ which come, and more importantly go, through the intellectual ‘upper echelons’ of our own society. If we have so little confidence in the durability of our best cultural efforts, can we assume that others will think differently?

Yet my concern is that this is still not the greatest threat, for an even more serious danger is that we will fall behind in the area of scientific endeavour and discovery. And if we feel that this is not merely ‘unimaginable’ but impossible, we might do well to remind ourselves how the Muslim world might have felt in the early middle-ages, when Western Europe might have seemed decidedly backward in this regard and where continued Islamic progress would have been taken for granted.

Specifically, I believe there are two possible contributors to such a decline which are already evident. The first is the transformation of our educational system from an intellectual enterprise to a business. Recently I was briefly involved in consultations regarding the future of the chaplaincy at the University of East London —a post I held for seventeen years. At one stage, in this I asked a member of staff what was the prevailing ethos of the institution —what was the core reason for its existence? The answer was to the effect that, “We are a business, whose product is academic degrees.”

I have to say, that fitted entirely with my perceptions of the same institution coming towards the end of my tenure some fifteen years ago. When I started at what was then the North East London Polytechnic it was chaotic and wasteful, but it was fun, and it had about it still some sense of intellectual adventure (though not as much as one might have hoped). By the time I left, it was clean, tidy, reasonably financially efficient and intellectually as dull as ditch-water. What mattered most, it seemed, to both management and students was getting the qualifications for a well-paid job. The staff, caught in the middle, simply had to deliver in order to survive.

But the trouble is, you cannot build an adventurous intellectual class (from which will come great endeavours and great discoveries) on the basis of boosting your figures for ‘first destination returns’ —the number of students who, upon leaving higher education, go straight into what they themselves describe as ‘employment’, preferably relevant to their degree subject. A degree ought not to be evaluated first and foremost on the basis of its usefulness in obtaining gainful employment, and those who think it should have already abandoned the cultural foundations of Western culture, which brings me to the second contributing factor.

What gave our culture its past position of precedence was its relative ability to produce people who could think, and who could therefore produces scientific discoveries and advances —whether theoretical or applied —ahead of other nations and cultures. And a case could, I suspect, be made for the suggestion that this required a certain amount of what might be called ‘intellectual leisure’, the space for original thinking free from economic, or even academic, pressure.

Albert Einstein in his patents office, Gregor Mendel in his monastery or William Herschel in his back garden are all examples of what I mean —people who were not working to an agenda determined by assumptions about what they should be studying or how useful their discoveries should be. By contrast, what I fear is happening specifically in the sciences in the West is the limiting of investigation and discovery by both economic and intellectual constraints.

As an example of this I would point to our society’s current hagiolatry of Charles Darwin. The mention of Darwin’s name draws from many an inward response comparable to the Muslim’s “sall Allahu alayhi wa sallam” (May Allah bless him and grant him peace). Any criticism, expressed or implied, is taken as a sure sign of being an ‘unbeliever’ worthy, if not of death, at least of contempt. Darwinism (or, for the sophisticated, neo-Darwinism), and therefore Darwin himself, provides the ‘Great Explanation’ which saves us from intellectual darkness. Criticism, therefore, is not merely futile but dangerous.

Now in what follows I must stress I am entirely unconcerned with the question of speciation by natural selection. Whether that is true or false is irrelevant to the point I am making, as are questions about Creationism or Intelligent Design (so please do not post comments on these subjects).

However, through some reading around the subject of genetics and behaviour, I have become aware of just how strongly even neo-Darwinism has been challenged within the scientific community by other ‘evolutionists’, particular those working in the field of genes and behaviour. These are not covert Creationists or supporters of Intelligent Design, but ordinary scientists, yet they voice opinions which, one suspects will scarcely be allowed to see the light of day in the media or in our educational institutions.

Two writers, for example, expresses the following view:

... recognizing that there are epigenetic inheritance systems through which non-DNA variations can be transmitted in cell and organismal lineages broadens the concept of heredity and challenges the widely accepted gene-centered neo-Darwinian version of Darwinism.

Of course, their work must itself be open to scientific challenge. But the point is that, outside the scientific community you are unlikely to hear anyone who wants to be taken seriously repeating the phrase “challenges ... Darwinism”.

And in case it might be thought that only some kind of stubborn ‘anti-Darwinist’ can think like this, I found this from a critical review of work challenging neo-Darwinism. The author of the review was unpersuaded, but nevertheless wrote,

... the process structuralist critique does reveal some deep-seated problems with orthodox evolutionary theory and some of its suggestions may be employed to good effect.

Once again, the point is not that this ‘disproves Darwinism’, much less that it proves Creationism, but simply that the idea that there are ‘deep-seated problems with orthodox evolutionary theory’ is something you are unlikely to hear admitted in public debate.

A rather more trenchant critic, but still one who is apparently concerned only with evolutionary theory, wrote this:

Ignoring disagreeable literature became a frequent strategy of hardened neo-Darwinians [...]. ‘This intellectual degeneracy is the outward expression of the fact’ [concludes Milton 1997, p. 240] ‘that neo-Darwinism has ceased to be a scientific theory and has been transformed into an ideology . . .’ [...]. (Eugene K Balon, Epigenetic processes, when natura non facit saltum [nature does not make sudden jumps] becomes a myth, and alternative ontogenies a mechanism of evolution. This essay was also apparently reproduced as ‘Alternative Ontogenies and Evolution’ in Environment, development and evolution: toward a synthesis, edited by Brian Keith Hall, Roy Douglas Pearson, Gerd B. Müller, 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

And same author provides perhaps my favourite quote, albeit from another writer:

... the belief that unreconstructed neo-Darwinism is the all-sufficient explanation of evolution illustrates a survival of the polemically fittest.

Let me repeat, these are not quotations from anti-evolutionists. As far as I am aware, they are ‘natural selectionists’ to the core. The point is that the criticisms they voice of (neo)-Darwinism are unlikely to be met with a dispassionate, we might say scientific, response within contemporary debate. (Indeed, I await the comments on this blog which immediately leap to the defence of Darwinism and pour scorn on all critics.)

But that is my point entirely —we have reached a stage in our intellectual climate where a scientific theory has, as the writer above says, become effectively an ideology. And as history shows, such a transformation is inimical to true scientific enquiry.

And the worry is not so much that we are doing it —cultural history is full of such examples —but that we are so blind to the fact that we are doing it and that it goes against the hard-won Western tradition. We believe ourselves to be entering the highlands of free thought after the valleys of ignorance. In fact, we may be simply be descending from the peaks, unaware that we are moving in an intellectual fog. In short collective cultural fear and rejection of ‘unscientific’ religious views (and such undoubtedly exist), but more generally of religion, may actually be crippling our practice of science.

And what if, on the other side of the world, there is a scientific community unshackled by such fears and inhibitions? What if truly free thought actually is possible within their universities and academic communities? By definition, we cannot know what is yet to be discovered. What if their discoveries allow them to develop some hitherto unimagined source of, or store for, energy? What if they are able to produce weapons we cannot match or which neutralize our own? What if their discoveries make them ‘top dog’, yet leave their own cultural assumptions about the way the world should be unchallenged?

The crisis I imagine may not materialize, but if it does not, it will be our good luck, not our own achievement. Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence left off in the 1990s, and the title tells you what he thought of Western culture by that stage. If he is right, and if we have truly become decadent, we cannot assume that we will nevertheless continue the human voyage of enterprise and discovery uninterrupted. It may take a long time for us to realize we are culturally stagnating, but there is the very real possibility that we are.

Revd John P Richardson
6 October 2009

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Children died, the days grew cold ...

Afficionados of Larry Norman will know that the line from I wish we’d all been ready continues, “A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold.” The reference is to the days after the supposed ‘Rapture’: “The Son has come, and you’ve been left behind,” is the ‘punch-line’ to the song. The idea is that in the days before the Tribulation (with a capital ‘T’) the condition of the world would become worse and worse, until the Christians were finally removed, leaving the planet to its own, or rather Satan’s, devices.

This is a concept with which I have very little theological sympathy. I think that the notion of the Rapture is based on a misreading of a Scriptural image (specifically, 1 Thess 3:17). In that sense, I am a classic amillennialist. But, perhaps controversially, I am not one of those who believes that Christ could return ‘at any moment’. It seems to me that the argument of 2 Thess 2:1-11 (“that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed”, v3) depends on their being certain discernible events taking place before the Second Coming of our Lord.

Less controversially (maybe), it also seems clear to me in the Scripture that Christians will not be preserved from the world’s sufferings before the End. The bad news, from that point of view, is that we will have to stick around.

Back in the realms of controversy, however, I am entirely unconvinced by the Post-millennial scenario expressed in one of my favourite Christmas songs, “It can upon a midnight clear,” with its reference to the “age of gold” which will come round “with the ever circling years.” It is a wonderful idea with a long pedigree, that the Church will prove triumphant and, through the gospel, bring an age of peace and prosperity, but again I do not believe it fits the Scriptural evidence. Rather, the evidence points (I am persuaded) to increasing difficulties and a final outbreak of rebellious evil.

At the same time, I am aware that previous generations which thought they were living in the end ‘end times’ have all been wrong, whether they were the pessimists of medieval millenarianism or the optimists of the nineteenth century Student Volunteer Movement with its slogan of “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” History teaches us caution. Yet I cannot help feeling a certain resonance between Norman’s angst and what appears to be coming towards us just over the horizon.

The immediate cause of these musings is an article I came across by a gold analyst (here as a pdf), warning of the potential danger of hyperinflation. I am not an economist, and am therefore not in a position to judge his prescience, but I know a Christian who is, and he is making exactly the same prediction for similar reasons, namely that far from being almost out of the recession caused by the credit crunch we are about to have our ‘swine ’flu’ moment as a second wave of problems hits us in the form of runaway inflation.

The heart of it is that the First and Second worlds have accumulated debts which make Third world debt a thing of, if not indifference, certainly insignificance in terms of the global economy. The Christian’s view is that the measures taken by Western governments have done the trick and saved the economy from simply going ‘pop’. However, they have done it because governments have an advantage with regard to debt which is not possessed by the ordinary citizen and it is called ‘the printing press’. That is to say, governments can create money. The posh name for this, as most people know, is quantitative easing. The Analyst and the Christian both agree that the way governments have been buying their own bonds has averted the immediate disaster. But they both also agree that this still has to be ‘paid’ for.

Who, then, will pay? The answer (because there is no-one else) is that we will. In the immediate short-term it may be by the traditional method of taxation, for the other thing governments can do which ordinary citizens cannot is to raise revenue from ordinary citizens. In the long term, however, we will pay by massive (perhaps hyper) inflation. If multiple trillions of dollars (that is $N,000,000,000,000) are ‘owed’ —and they are —then somehow the debt has to be reduced. The good news is that you can do this by printing money. The bad news is that printing money is inflationary. The very bad news is that an awful lot of money is going to have to be printed. The good news —maybe, if I’ve understood this correctly —is that when the £20 note in your pocket is actually a £20,000 note, that debt mountain has just had a useful number of zeros knocked off its effective ‘value’.

All this, however, brings me to two questions —or rather one question with two aspects, and it is this: are we, the Christian church, ready? Readers will not be surprised to hear that I think we are not. On the one hand, we seem to be saying nothing, and to have nothing to say, about the current economic situation, beyond an easy criticism of ‘the greed of the bankers’. Yet we could just as easily criticize ‘the greed of the man in the street’, for all that debt, whether amassed by governments or corporations, is allowing us all to live beyond our means, right down to the level of ‘schools and hospitals’ so beloved by our political leaders.

As the Analyst points out, we have already had one scary foretaste of what the future will hold with the spike in basic food prices, especially rice, that occurred in 2008. The difference next time is that whereas previously the impact of such ‘spikes’ was absorbed by people in the Far East doing without, next time they will have the economic clout to compete, and the pinch will be felt here. The indebtedness of our societies puts us in an increasingly poor position (in every sense) as global economic competitors, and the balance of economic power is undoubtedly shifting to China and India.

The Western church, at least, seems to have nothing to say, just when a ‘prophetic’ voice might actually come in handy. We could, for example, be denouncing First and Second world debt, or warning about the credit-card culture, but we are not. Instead, we are paralysed by the headlights.

But the Church also seems unready for the spiritual challenges this implies and entails, for (as history again shows) economic hard times bring with them spiritual risk. This may not be the time before the End Times, but it certainly provides the opportunity for spiritual forces which have been at work throughout history to manifest themselves in ways which will be simultaneously both deeply attractive to the mass of humanity and deeply inimical to God’s people.

I am constantly reminded of the verses from Revelation 13 which express, I believe, not so much a prediction as a recurring theme of history: “He [that is the second beast who is the ‘false prophet’, 19:20] also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.”

Who, in 2009, could imagine the free countries of the West succumbing to a system of economic dictatorship? Yet who in 1950s England could imagine a London bus ticket costing over a pound? And who, in early Weimar Germany, would have imagined Christians would be unsure how to respond to a man who offered them economic security and a glorious future at the price of complete obedience?

Revd John P Richardson
6 October 2009

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