Christian churches are the silent killers of the spirit in America, and they could give a big whoop that they are. They rarely if ever speak up to upbraid banks, consumer loan companies, and credit card companies for extremely high interest rates charged on the working poor and the middle class. The Bible itself is full of condemnations of high-interest rate usury, but do you think the Bible has any hold on “good” Christians today? It does not.
Knocking down interest rates has been the civic calling card of the Judeo-Christian tradition for the past 3,000 years and the legal mainstay of the laws of Europe and America throughout their history.
That is, until America the beautiful buried that tradition six feet under starting in the 1980s by allowing interest rates to skyrocket without regulation.
Churches justify the pillaging of the orphans and widows of divorce in America under the legitimizing banner of the Christian “prosperity gospel.” Good Christians are supposed to get rich quick, even if it is off the backs of the unfortunate in their own communities.
High interest rates provide prosperity for the new Christian aristocracy alone and leave everybody else in the living-from-paycheck-to-paycheck plan, or the welfare system, or the homeless class of America.
Ignoring the Christian doctrine of spending only what you earn, charging low or no interest rates on one’s neighbors, and forgiving debtors places our supposedly respectable churches under condemnation of the very spirit they claim to love and makes them God-awful hypocrites.
Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross
