The Christian understanding of what constitutes "usury" has changed. What began as an absolute prohibition against lending at interest has evolved into a vague condemnation of lending at "excessive" interest.
I've argued below that this change is defensible and rational — that economic ethics from the ancient world needed to be reinterpreted for our modern context, for a world and a marketplace that our forebears could never have imagined.
The refusal or inability to adapt to a changing world can be a dangerous thing. Consider, for example, the so-called "Reconstructionists." This weird, southern-Gothic strand of America's religious right claims to want to establish the civic laws of the Pentateuch. Homosexuals and adulterers, they say, should be stoned. (Religioustolerance.org has a helpful overview of their perspective here.)
The Reconstructionists are an extreme example of the primitivist impulse in American Christianity, which manifests itself in the idea that tradition is suspect and history is irrelevant. This impulse often expresses itself as the noble-sounding goal of "getting back to the New Testament church." My friend Bill jokes that the people who try to reclaim the New Testament church always seem to end up in Corinth. (The context there is that the Corinthians were a bunch of raucous perverts who serve as a good reminder that "early Christianity" could be just as mucked up as the postmodern variety.)
So, on the one hand, the idea it is simple or wise to reclaim the rules and standards of the "early church" can be dangerous.
But on the other hand, the recognition that we're now casually accepting something that was previously regarded as unacceptable should at least give us pause.
One worrisome aspect of the modern understanding of usury, for example, is that the standard for what constitutes "excessive" interest is rather vague. I argued previously that the real standard for usury, the real principle at stake, is whether our lending/investment is a matter of empowerment or exploitation. In making such an argument, I'm essentially attempting to distill the principle at work at the heart of the earlier law, written for a different world, and to apply that principle to the world in which we find ourselves today.
It's interesting that such an attempt encounters little disagreement when the subject is economics and when ancient proscriptions are reinterpreted in a way that permits our 401(k)s and home mortgages. Yet taking the same approach to sexual ethics provokes howls of protest.
This series of posts on the meaning of usury has been a kind of extended holiday into the abstract. I needed such a vacation, as the actual and particular this week — the vile bankruptcy bill sailing through the Senate — was too depressing.
But, alas, let's get back to those depressing particulars. The bankruptcy bill is an endorsement of exploitative lending. The immoral is made moral with the full pedagogical and punitive force of law. Usury is endorsed, and will be enforced. The right of usurers to practice their vice is made sacrosanct and the courts and police will be enlisted as agents of their usury.
It is a wholly and enthusiastically corrupt piece of legislation. The task now, for those who care about such things, is to make sure that those senators who supported this insupportable bill face real consequences for doing so. If their reputations, moral standing and electoral prospects are not diminished as a result of this vote then God only knows what they'll be emboldened to do next.
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