...Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.
From Ezra Pound's Canto XLV (1937)
Wrestling with the matter of usury and in light of recent discussions, I have been forced to address the question differently and through the lens of different contexts. This is not a question of situation ethics but rather applying wisdom and some Biblically-driven discernment to a question that is both simple and straightforward but also inescapably complex - and perhaps without solution.
The question of usury has vexed the Church for centuries, though you wouldn't know it today. Living in the context of the techno-industrial revolution and capitalism has made these questions even more complex and difficult and the sheer overwhelming momentum of modern life has led most to simply dispense with the question as resistance to the cultural deluge seems all but impossible. They have a point but for Christians taking the Bible seriously, it's not that simple.
We can speak of usury in the context of Christendom and this discussion is immediately thrown out of focus by the assumption (made by most) that Christendom is a legitimate framework to begin with. Such an argument cannot be sustained by the New Testament. That said, the Ancient Church and the later Roman and Byzantine Churches (for all their egregious faults) were pretty clear and unified on this point. Usury (or charging interest) is sin. Usury was not 'excessive' or 'exploitative' interest as it is defined today (or even by Pound) in the context of Capitalism, which cannot function apart from it. The ancients and historical Church viewed any interest as exploitative and ethically dubious - in terms of how profit should be generated and earned. Contrary to contemporary apologists for the practice, the ancients did not misread the text - their exegesis is sustained and further they took it seriously.
Increased late medieval and Renaissance trade and the rise of modern banking and insurance resisted this arrangement. Large-scale endeavours, delayed profit schemes, and long distance business arrangements gave rise to a need for finance and the underwriting of investments. Fees and currency exchange rates had long allowed business a means of usury 'loopholes' - ways of circumventing the usury prohibition. But by the 15th century, usury was becoming a mainstay in European business - at least in Italy and yet this would soon spread across the continent and beyond.
Reformers such as Calvin granted the practice a degree of validity and yet the debate (even among Protestants) continued in earnest until (more or less) the 18th century and the rise of capitalism and industry. At that point, the debate ended and the practice was embraced. By the 20th century, the American Church would come to not only embrace the practice that was denounced for centuries - it would celebrate and even champion the system, its principles, and its ethics, arguing that it's a direct application of New Testament ethics. Even though there's no evidence for this apart from the twisting of a couple of passages, this teaching has come to dominate and is an article of indisputable orthodoxy within the framework of American Christianity. Undoubtedly the fear of communism added a little fuel to the fire and the need to posit a viable (and perceived moral) alternative.
For those of us who still take Scriptural teaching and the testimony of the Early Church seriously, we reject usury in all its forms. We don't live in the context of Christendom any longer and the residual elements and debates surrounding this paradigm simply add to the confusion over this issue and others. We'll return momentarily to the problem of the Usury-endorsing Church.
Our Last Days situation can best be described as analogous to the Babylonian Occupation and Exile or as Christians living under the aegis of pagan Rome. By Last Days I refer to the Parousia epoch - the period between Christ's first and second advent.
And so to not pay or to refuse usury in a capitalist context is to live on the absolute fringes of society, in a permanent underclass. Most likely you will not be able to own a home and if able to purchase an automobile it will be something cheap and unreliable. You will not be able to build a business of any real size or substance. Higher education is mostly out. We will return to these themes more than once.
If living in the city, we will be forced to live in marginal neighbourhoods that may not always be secure. The country would in some respects be more attractive but in our modern society, rural living requires driving lots of miles for work and other necessities and this is challenging to say the least when one is trying to drive low-end cash purchased vehicles. I know this from long experience.
I'm am more than willing to embrace such lifestyles and I will say this - it would be an easy burden to bear if Christians or even more Christians agreed. If we were on the same page and lived the same way, and helped one another, such struggles would certainly be lessened.
To reject usury is to oppose the very economic (and ethical) core of this society. Credit (as understood today) is dependent upon usury. It is the foundation of industrial society and its eventual outgrowth - the military industrial complex.
Some might at this point agree and admit usury and the system it has spawned is evil. But then how to live in this New Rome Bestial system?
In this arrangement we have little choice but to pay the various fees (many of which are legal bribes) associated with bureaucracy of business and institutions. We pay them every day often having no idea what they're actually for. Many of them are arbitrary and if a local businessman attached such fees to his services, he would be called a thief and a swindler. But institutions can engage in such practice with impunity - akin to the way a government functions. They are authorities in this society. We pay taxes (as commanded) and thus we also at some point find ourselves caught in the net of usury.
Usury is not just about squeezing something out of nothing, extracting value from the work of others, a kind of alchemical process that creates money out of thin air. All too often it is exploitative, it is profiting off the hardship, difficulty, and suffering of others. They come to the usurer because they need a roof over their head, a way of getting to work, or to pay for medicine or treatment. It is certainly granted that people indulge themselves and borrow out of desire and impulse rather than need or want. They are sinners and to be pitied - all the more as they are conditioned and manipulated. Should Christians be part of this? Should they profit off the lostness of the lost? Is caveat emptor an ethic found in the New Testament?
Again, usury is sin and it's at the heart of finance, investment, and thus the banking and insurance industries. Our society itself is sin. It is established on wicked foundations. Given the Evangelical penchant for mythology regarding the founding of a Christian America this truth is one not easily embraced or even grasped. The nation was born in sin - rebellion and bloodshed, and became an empire of mammon. The False Church calls this blessing and celebrates this worldliness and Babel impulse.
We must live in this usurious Babylon and yet not sin - a tall order apart from living as hermits in the woods, and even this is not really possible any more. We are tracked by a capitalist infrastructure, cameras are everywhere, and there are laws about occupancy, building standards, and child welfare. In addition it is a culture that despises poverty and views it as a primary evil, a sure sign of bad character, immorality, deviance, and stupidity. There's nothing worse and as such American Christians literally gloss over the abundant Biblical evidence that says otherwise - not to mention the long list of passages in the prophets and apostles that condemn wealth and the rich.
Under a capitalist model, corporations and the finance sector function as branches of government. They are institutions serving as foundation stones to the society itself and many are strategic - existential blocks upon which even the government must rely. The necessity of doing business with them and paying them is both inescapable and (it can be argued) tantamount to a form of taxation. I immediately think of the role played by utility companies and once again the nature of housing and how both function within a financial framework wed to credit and credit scores. Even if we argue that Christians should simply rent and not own property that cannot be purchased with cash - you still have to deal with utilities and most will want (or be required) to carry some kind of insurance. Obviously if anything you have is financed, you're forced to participate in the usury system. Companies on the public exchange dealing in securities and the like are all part of the usury-system and when I pay my electric bill - part of that payment is transformed into dividends for investors - who profit off me. That exploitation is also a form of usury - profiting at the expense of others.
More than once I have commented that as I drive toward the Manhattan skyline I wonder - is this the real seat of American power? Is this the capital as opposed to Washington DC? The answer is they both are - and their relationship is symbiotic. Washington is the seat of government but New York is no less the center of power.
In other words, we need to understand Western capitalist society is literally a racket. The American system (and Western Capitalism in general) is an expansive criminal enterprise - even if large portions of its activity are reckoned legal. Legal has nothing to do with being in line with Biblical ethics.
In this system we Christians tread water at best. We get by but we don't flourish. Those that do have compromised and bought into the system. There's no indication in the New Testament that we're to join the Babylon system and flourish within it, gain status or respect, nor are we to seek to sanctify it. It can't be done. Those who flourish in a wicked society are part of that wickedness. There are exceptions but they are few and far between. While I can eschew the taking of usury easy enough by the way I choose to live, it all but seems impossible to live in this society without paying the usurers. This is my dilemma and my attempt to find a solution - if an unhappy one.
What about the argument that if usury is a sin, by taking out a mortgage or car loan I am (in effect) supporting or encouraging people in their sin?
Tax revenues support sin but they also support the system which (though evil) promotes a stability which is good - not a sacral good but a Providential good. We pay taxes and the money is used for all manner of evil - but we're still told to pay it. Paul exhorted the Roman Church to pay their taxes knowing full well the money would support legions, bloody conquests, wicked games, and the building of idolatrous temples. Often it was used to pay for deranged fancies of emperors. One thinks of Marcus Aurelius erecting monuments to his dead catamite Antinous. Paying those taxes to Rome (it could be argued) 'encouraged' them in their sin, and supported it.
And that's true enough on one level but neither Paul nor Christ framed the question in that manner. This is to misunderstand the nature of the Last Days state and to extract demands from it that it cannot give. The 'good' it promotes is not covenantal but common and temporary and thus profane - as opposed to sacral. This is why confusing the Kingdom with the state is so perilous to the Church.
What about usury? If usury is a way this finance-dominated society extracts a kind of tax revenue (to other power-related institutions), then it follows we can legitimately pay it.
Isn't it voluntary?
It is to some extent, just as sales and property taxes are. Some out of conviction embrace poverty in order to (among other reasons) limit their tax contribution to the state, given its immoral uses. If you make little, buy little, and don't own property, then you can keep your tax footprint to a minimum. Others twist this and on the basis of Libertarian argument hide their money, operating in a sub rosa world of cash transactions. Contrary to Scripture, they teach 'taxation is theft' and other distortions - refusing to accept and submit to the order God has established in this present evil age. Ironically such 'under the table' ethics are close cousin to that of bribery. The Christians who engage in this behaviour are simply breaking the law for individual gain or at best a sense of misguided justice or even bitterness toward the state - motivated by divided loyalties and twisted ideology. It's not the same as those who pay their taxes but deliberately keep their obligations to a bare minimum out of conviction. The Libertarians who behave in this hyper-individualistic (even sociopathic) way want to flourish in this society, but don't want to play by the rules and thus behave as the very criminals who sit atop it.
If one applies this minimalist principle more broadly, it could mean that we don't build a big business, generating not only tax revenues but requiring finance and inevitably lawyers. Wealth not only changes ethics - it corrupts them.
And yet as I've previously discussed - when it comes to being working class in a rural area, and following the advice of Christian financial advisors who discouraged debt, I spent years trying to drive low-end cars. It killed us. I would scrape together the cash and buy the car. I would have no payment but the car broke down regularly and so between the out-of-pocket costs for repairs and the lost hours of work - I might as well have carried a payment for a newer and more reliable vehicle. In many cases the payment was actually a savings as opposed to driving the low-end car and trying to keep up with the expense associated with it.
But to do so I would have to take out a loan and thus pay usury to a bank or finance company.
In the American system, finance created a situation in which industrial and retail consolidation occurred and small town economies were destroyed - largely turning them into bedroom communities for commuters. The automobile allowed people to drive not only to work but to buy food and other necessities in larger stores located in larger towns. Consequently the small town economy was all but destroyed. Like it or not the system itself created the conditions in which I cannot make a living in a local economy engaged in either farming or a cottage industry. I have to work on the industrial economy - driving in my car to distant and larger towns to work and shop. Consequently these towns are also more expensive to live in and like many I am in something of a trap. Even if I want to move up (as they say), it's not easy. It's certainly not a sideways move.
I don't like any of it it but I see no alternative to finance apart from living 'mountain man' style in the woods which in many places is illegal and you'll likely have your children taken away. And frankly I wrestle with that being a viable option for Christians who would be part of a church and maintain a witness in the world.
So, since I live in the American Babylon, I pay the many thieves who fleece me at every turn and work in this cash economy to pay dues to those atop the system. Out of both conviction and even umbrage, I try to keep this to a minimum. The system is a racket. It relies on credit and the extension of credit leads to inflation. And it's not just the depreciation that hits us in the sense of the money in our pockets or savings in a bank (I don't have interest earning accounts). It allows the forces of supply and demand greater flexibility. Prices can continue to go up as long as someone is willing to take a little more risk, take on even more debt - perhaps at higher rates or longer terms. Now we could get into discussions of equity and re-finance. This process is further amplified by the efforts of Madison Avenue and the consequence is prices that have risen into the stratosphere over the past 150 years. We're all trapped. We're all slaves to the banks, debt, and their tool of manipulation and profit - usury.
This in turn has led to not only a host of 'smoke and mirrors' mechanisms but even greater evils as Wall Street and the state have attempted to keep things going by extending more credit, and forcing open new markets to access ever cheaper labour and goods often on other continents which in turn leads to social upheaval, corruption, and sometimes war. It's an absolutely evil process - but one that is to be expected. This practice is also now well established and there are many notable instances during the period of nineteenth century colonialism - the heyday of laissez faire capitalism. From Matthew Perry's Gunboat Diplomacy in 1850's Japan, to the British invading Tibet in 1904, to African Neo-Colonialism in the post-war twentieth century, industrial capitalism has repeatedly demonstrated its ties to imperialism.