Thoughts on the Financial Crisis

The Credit Crisis and the Church

When something goes wrong, there is a deep instinct to find someone to blame. It might be a train crash, a political mistake, or simply losing your keys – it must be someone’s fault, usually someone else’s fault. And so it is with the financial crisis. Someone is guilty. The blame game has been played with great gusto over the past month or so – was it the banks who borrowed far too much, assuming growth was going on forever? The mortgage lenders who gave crazy loans to people who were always going to struggle to repay if things got tight? The hedge fund traders keen to make a quick buck? The banks? The short-sellers? The regulators? The government? Just take your pick.

So what is a Christian response to all this? Christians may get dragged into the same game, pointing the finger at whoever seems most culpable. This is understandable, but maybe flawed. Scapegoating is rarely a good Christian strategy, particularly in the highly complex area of financial management. All kinds of people have a hand in what has happened. All of the above share a little of the blame in a hugely complicated and inter-related area. There has been selfish short-term greed in all quarters. Yet a wiser Christian approach might be is St Paul’s ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ – perhaps blame is a much more intricate thing than it first appears, and my first step should be to recognise my own assumption that economic growth will be endless, my own tendency to trust in my income and savings to keep me safe. Despite the pain and distress it causes, it is not hard to see the hand of God in the breakdown of confidence in the market.

The church often feels itself stuck between two extremes – the conservative tendency to think that the gospel is about ‘spiritual’ matters like the salvation of the soul, and therefore things like economics, politics and social cohesion are at best secondary, at worst a distraction. The other is the liberal tendency to try to tell the world how to run itself, thinking that the gospel is purely about trying to make the world a better place. So what is the church to do? What role does the church have to play in a crisis like this?

There are differences between doctrine, ethics and policy. Doctrine is the agreed teaching of the church. Ethics governs the practical outworking of that doctrine in society. Policy concerns how all this is fleshed out in the precise detail of legislation or practice. Doctrine tells us God is good to the poor. Ethics tells us that taxation should be fair, policy decides on the particular tax-banding or rate of taxation that is appropriate at a particular time and place. We might have cause to be wary when church leaders try to be too specific about exact policies. Trying to prescribe exactly how our government should order taxation, run the Health Service or regulate the financial markets inevitably brings trouble. Whenever you start to take up a particular position on such issues another equally devout and conscientious Christian is bound to come up with reasons why they take another view. Is short-selling evil? Or is it a valuable balancing corrective to mis-valuing of assets in the market? Christians differ on all kinds of policy matters – economic, political and social. It is notoriously difficult to identify a definitively Christian position on almost any issue of detailed economic or social policy. There are laissez-faire Christian capitalists and planned-economy Christian socialists, and it will always be that way.

So then is the church resigned to silence and irrelevance when it comes to such a complex issue as the causes of the credit crunch? Well maybe yes when it comes to detailed policy of close analysis of causes, but that does not mean church does not have a vital role to play. Stanley Hauerwas argues that "the most important social task of Christians is to be nothing less than a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God's truth in the world" In other words, the church’s primary task is not to tell the world how to run itself, nor to prescribe particular policies or strategies, but to be a community capable of developing people of virtue and goodness, who are more likely to make good, considerate, wise choices, than bad, harmful or selfish ones. The church is there not to apportion blame to bankers, hedge fund managers or private equity firms – there are those who are guilty, but it’s not the church’s first task to work out who they are - but to invite them to become part of a community in which they can learn patience, kindness, gentleness, selflessness, grace and self-control: the kind of qualities that will enable them to make good choices and wise decisions. Individual Christian financiers, teachers, bus drivers, diplomats or nurses do not need lectures from clergy telling them how to do their jobs. They do need to find communities where they can learn patience, goodness, wisdom, gentleness, self-control and love.

Holy Trinity Brompton, my church in London has what in my experience are rather unusual regular prayer meetings. The unique thing is that the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers do not gather to pray for the work of the church, but the church meets to pray for the work of the solicitors, the teachers and the healthcare workers. Here the church as a whole is not trying to tell them how to do their jobs – they know that better than everyone else. It simply meets to encourage them, pray for them that they may have the perspective of the kingdom of God on their work, to pray for wisdom, courage and grace in the work they are called to, and to enable them to talk to each other. It is a vision of a church trying to be what Hauerwas suggests - a church seeking not to prescribe policy, but to form them in practical Christ-like goodness and wisdom, so that they become the bedrock of a functioning society, and trustworthy signposts to the Kingdom of God.