Please note, this article represents Class Eleven of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.”

St. Augustine

A few weeks ago, I received the most remarkable theological blog I’ve read in decades. It was written by a conservative stewardship leader but rather than engage in politics about the sins of others, it was about how so very many Christians have prioritized issues that Christ never seemed concerned about, or even mentioned. Those issues, listed alphabetically, were: abortion, the culture wars, debt, family, homosexuality, patriotism, politics, sex, the sinner’s prayer (as if there could be any other kind!), and worship. Each was worth saving for reflection.

When discussing debt, the blogger confessed: “The Bible offers a lot of information about money. In fact, large books have been written to explain the biblical position on money. However, as near as I can tell, the only thing Jesus ever said about debt was an obscure reference in the parable of the three servants who were entrusted with the master’s money. The worthless slave was condemned for not putting the money in the bank and earning interest.” I appreciated that sentiment. Still, our worldviews are more troubled than even the blogger thinks. As I’ve said here before, and will say again, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus actually told us to lend to those in true need, regardless of their ability to repay. With a bit of thought, you realize that if someone lends, someone else has to borrow. That’s still true today. As The Economist recently said, if you want to save, as opposed to invest, someone has to want to borrow. Yet most Christian financial writers continue to teach an impossible financial dualism by encouraging saving and discouraging borrowing. Anyway, it was actually earning interest that the fathers forbade, as Christianity officially did during the next 1500 years (Ex 22:25). But we rarely, if ever, hear that biblical concept suggested for investors.  Also, some translations suggest Jesus taught us to pray: “forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts of others.” Other translations say “trespasses.”

Yet that wasn’t the financial portion of the blog that most interested me. That was actually the portion about homosexuality. Financial? Yes, as are most issues, if you believe the Bible. There are two movements in America to reintegrate a more Judeo-Christian ethic with the management of money. The first is known as “socially responsible investing,” or SRI. The second is known as “biblically responsible investing,” or BRI. They are very similar; with the major exception being homosexuality. Socially responsible investing has been around several decades. Some suggest it began when Christian investors wanted to avoid alcohol, tobacco and gambling during Prohibition. Others suggest it began during the Vietnam era when Methodists, Quakers, Mennonites and so on wanted to avoid profiting from what they considered to be an unjust war. Regardless, the movement has grown and grown, in both dollars under management and sophistication regarding the concept of responsibility. During that time, it was primarily a “liberal” or “progressive” movement and was ignored, or actually discouraged, by conservative Christian financial planners, as well as Wall Street. But it’s estimated that SRI has now captured 10% of America’s money under management. And each time Wall Street shoots itself in the foot, SRI grows even more quickly.  That means it’s now mainstream business. So Wall Street and conservatives are paying attention.

BRI took root sometime during the mid-nineties when a couple of evangelical money managers decided to join the movement. Yet they almost immediately ran into trouble as they were primarily focused on homosexuality. They didn’t know--ignored or reveled in the fact--that a few of the earliest pioneers in the movement were gay and had won the respect of their associates by sacrificing to grow the movement. So the BRI leaders caused quite a stir at a couple of SRI meetings by describing how their “biblical” screening focused on denying benefits to gays in the marketplace. I wasn’t there but have actually heard how one BRI leader had his bags packed by conference leaders as he spoke and was asked to leave the conference as soon as he had finished irritating, rather than loving, attendees. I was told that story by my Mennonite friends who wanted me to speak the following year to keep all religious participants from being marginalized from the SRI movement. That’s actually quite important for our faith. For BRI is still hardly a blip on the responsible investing scene. 

Peter Drucker once taught theology and knew responsibility has long been a concept closely related to Christianity. (Though Jesus never created a problem, or sin, he accepted responsibility for them all on the Cross.) Peter wrote in Post-Capitalist Society during the mid-nineties that the movement towards responsibility, rather than power, could be the most important non-religious movement since Plato. So it’s important that our faith be seen as an early proponent, rather than a hindrance, detractor or late-comer, to the movement. Yet as with emancipation and civil rights, Christianity is likely to be marginalized if those few conservatives continue to claim the Bible suggests we should single out gays in the workplace but ignore the divorced, for example, that Jesus did mention, as well as drunkards and gluttons like me (the glutton part!) Wouldn’t giving divorced people workplace benefits actually enable/encourage such unbiblical behavior? Does providing me with health insurance encourage me to eat too much, contributing to our national epidemic that’s breaking the bank? And what about the greedy, who Jesus did focus on when talking about the eye of the needle? Shouldn’t that discourage BRI advocates from investing in AIG and Goldman Sachs, as well as promoting the very highest returns, as some do?

In short, I think we can all be glad that no one’s ever wanted to deny our families health care and so on because of our sins. They’re now culturally acceptable, even if still biblical sins, as is homosexuality. But of course, it’s never that painful for conservative male religious leaders whose temptations are usually heterosexual to focus on homosexuals. And as noted sociologist Gertrude Himmelfarb has written: “When we now speak of virtue, we no longer think of the classic virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage, or the Christian ones of faith, hope and charity, or even the Victorian ones of work, thrift, cleanliness and self-reliance. Virtue is now understood in its sexual connotations of chastity and marital fidelity.” And as the blogger wrote: “[Homosexuality] is today’s hot topic in the Christian world and the Bible does have direct and indirect guidance on the topic. However, unless I’ve missed something, Jesus said nothing about the subject. It is possible to draw inference and conclusions from statements He made about creation but He did not approach the actual subject of homosexuality. Once again, I am not suggesting that the church ignore the issue. My only point is that we must be careful not to overlook some of the positive approaches of Jesus toward an issue [as when writing in the dirt about casting the first stone] in favor of pounding on everyone with the issue of the day.”

While I loved the blog, I had to reply to my friend that sweating these small things was more evangelical than Christian. He responded that no denomination had been more troubled by the homosexual issue than the Episcopal Church. I replied that was true but the official position of the Church when I was a member years ago was the Jesus position: that there are more important things to worry about than the sexual preferences of 1% of the population, a few of whom want to be ordained. When asked about the issue, I’ve always replied that children are starving in Africa. (As Henri Nouwen reminded us, Jesus seldom answered the legalistic questions posed to him but pointed people toward higher matters of the Kingdom.) It was the cultural Episcopalians--whose worldviews were usually shaped by Jim Dobson, Pat Robertson and so on--who elevated this non-Christ(ian) issue to the point of dividing the mind and body of Christ. It’s the same today in my Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is also threatened by schism over homosexuality. Yet I’m not aware of any of my leaders saying or doing anything about the greed that’s led to massive unemployment, shattered retirement plans, concentration of wealth that we haven’t seen since 1929, suicides over the Gulf oil spill, and so on. Apparently, all that is acceptable to the modern and cultural church; even if such issues were the primary concerns of biblical prophets, Jesus and Luther.

As someone confessed in Christianity Today this month, evangelicals often have such a limited sense of church history they often think the church fathers are those men serving on the current board of deacons. But the true fathers of our faith, historic denominations and so on were always focused on the economic root of all evil rather than the sexual sins of a few. For example, Luther wrote: “Among themselves the merchants have a common rule which is their chief maxim…I care nothing about my neighbor; so long as I have my profit and satisfy my greed, of what concern is it to me if it injures my neighbor in ten ways at once? There you see how shamelessly this maxim flies squarely in the face not only of Christian love but also natural law.” And the debt crisis might have been avoided had we understood the spirit behind these words of Luther: “If, after diligent work, his efforts fail, he who has borrowed money should and may say to him from whom he has borrowed it: This year I owe you nothing…If you want to have a share in winning, you must also have a share in losing. The money lenders who do not want to put up with these terms are as pious as robbers and murderers.”

No, investors will never hear any of that financial inconvenience from Joel Osteen, or a BRI advocate for that matter. So taking liberties with biblical financial concepts, rather than adherence to what we’ve been told is Christian sexual morality, is the true reason I believe America’s new cultural religion is so very popular with the masses even as it undermines our faith and nation. But those teachings remain biblical, as attested by Dt 15:1, and supposedly eternal. Yet ironically, you’ll likely find those true biblical teachings espoused more often in the somewhat secular SRI community than in the exclusively religious BRI community. So until more Christians actually read the Bible, we can only pray that Jesus will be less harsh as we too tithe the mint, dill and cumin while ignoring the major tenants of the Law. And that means praying for the amazing grace that Luther focused on, rather than the relatively small stuff so many religious celebrities do. 
***
Gary Moore grew up a biblical fundamentalist in the Southern Baptist Church, joined his wife in the Episcopal Church where he considered attending seminary, and is now an Evangelical Lutheran, which is sort of a down-home Baptist who appreciates liturgy and sacrament. He is the founder of The Financial Seminary. http://www.financialseminary.org

Please note, this article represents Class Ten of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“Although responsibility for the accident plainly lies with BP, a slick of recrimination now laps around the White House too…Such is the fate of those who occupy the Oval Office. As Gene Healy, author of a recent book called “The Cult of the Presidency” notes: ‘Over and over again we begin by looking to the president as the solution to all our problems, and we end up believing he’s the source of all our problems.’”
The Economist, June 5, 2010

My son and I recently celebrated his graduation from college by putting the top down on my beloved sports car and taking a road trip. It was truly special as he studied international finance and is joining the family investment business/ministry. Suffice it to say he made far better grades than his old man so I’m rather proud of him and look forward to working with him.

We meandered up I-75 from Florida to Kentucky to see my mother. That meant we spent some time in Georgia. I’ve long loved the natural beauty of Georgia. Atlanta is so nice Sherry and I spent our wedding night there. Yet the state has long seemed quasi-religious and home to billboard theology that I’d find amusing if it wasn’t so confusing. So I’ve often wondered if America will ever be “of one mind” until Georgia, and the Bible-belt in general, is.

For years, there was a billboard considerably south of Atlanta that apologized for the state’s peanut farmers’ sending Jimmy Carter to the White House. I never knew why they were so angry. But that obviously didn’t matter to them. They just wanted the world to know they were angry at the president. About the time that disappeared, there was a board erected just south of Atlanta that claimed “Jesus was a vegetarian.” That not only suggested those Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A cows are wrong suggesting we should eat more chicken but the scriptures are wrong in stating Jesus asked for some fish to eat after his resurrection, thereby establishing the physical nature of the event. But why let biblical Truth get in the way of our cause? 

And of course, signifying the even more highly politicized times in which we live, a new one just one just below Atlanta now claims “God is not a socialist.” A line below said it was purchased by some group, ostensibly Christian, angry about President Obama’s economic policies. In a way, it is correct of course. No political label created by mankind can express the nature of God’s economic plan, which even suggests we may one day “buy without money.” But non-believers might finally grasp that reality about our faith had the billboard added the words, “Nor a capitalist,” as C.S. Lewis so pointedly reminded us in Mere Christianity.

And the south being the south, another board north of Atlanta asks Americans to “wake up” as 911 could have been prevented by profiling, or having our homeland security and police take extra precautions when people who do not look of Anglo-Saxon descent board our transportation facilities, drive through white neighborhoods and so on. To me, that would be an American nightmare rather than the American dream. 

These billboards suggest Georgians are typically American in wanting government out of our lives…as long as it also fulfills our every wish and protects us from every misfortune, however remote. Most media is the same. Only that morning, we awoke to some fellow on CNN railing about President Obama deserving to be impeached as he hadn’t done anything about the BP oil spill. Acknowledging the president often seemed as confused as Tony Hayward, it didn’t seem to matter that the best minds in the oil industry didn’t know what to do or that they didn’t have to also worry about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, budget deficits and so on. Our leaders are now damned if they do; damned if they don’t, even if the electorate has no idea what it wants. 

That dualistic American mind really hit home when I got to Kentucky. Mom’s Sunday morning paper was full of conversation about Senate-candidate Rand Paul. Seems Rand attended Baylor University, a supposedly Baptist school, and attends a Christian church but has gotten himself in some hot water by espousing the political and economic views of Ayn Rand, a woman who wanted to be remembered as the “greatest enemy of religion” ever. In one of his first press conferences, he suggested the Civil Rights movement was misguided as government cannot interfere with private businesses even when they are discriminating, a distinctly Randian philosophy, and that President Obama had been “un-American” for utilizing the famous bully pulpit and even criticizing BP’s creation and response to the disaster. 

Yes, the president may have been “Un-American.” Ayn Rand was quite correct that America has long been torn between its Judeo-Christian morality and its desire to serve Mammon, hence its double-minded world-view. Even southern religious leaders who have long criticized governmental interference in the economy have also suggested we invest exclusively in government bonds as they’re the most dependable protection of our wealth. But having government interfere in “private” business is not “unChristian,” a nuance the candidate and Christian voters of Kentucky should work out between now and Election Day.

Frankly, I’m not optimistic either will. I’ve discussed Ayn Rand at length with one of my oldest and dearest Christian friends who has been heavily involved in Kentucky politics. But he told me he could never vote for a Democrat under any circumstance. I even asked if he’d vote for Billy Graham, who’s long been a Democrat, if he ran. My friend apparently wouldn’t. Clearly, our faith has taken a back seat to partisan politics for many. Anger, which by definition is lack of reason, keeps us from understanding the serious nature of that.

So it seems timely for this life-long Republican to brush up on some biblical concepts of political-economy. They will undoubtedly challenge those who still believe GOP stands for God’s Own Party. Of course, I could list an equal number of challenges for “progressives” who actually believe God is a socialist of the Marxist variety. But criticizing others is politics; taking the log out of our own eye is morality. So rather than cite carefully selected passages, like 1 Samuel 8:18, that concretize what we conservatives and libertarians already believe and convince us God is on our side, let’s look at a few that might help us better understand the perspectives of our fellow Americans and perhaps discern whether we’re still on God’s side. 

As you read these concepts, you might remember that Moses was not only a prophet but an original law-giver. His concepts were not quaint suggestions but laws subject to up to capital punishment. The West’s separation of church and state often encourages us to see him as one or the other but he was both. David and Solomon also knew a thing or two about law. Then remember that Jesus said not one of Moses’ laws would be changed for all eternity and anyone who even attempted to change them would be in a heap of trouble with Him. That is why Ayn Rand had to get rid of Judeo-Christianity before she could get rid of government. Yes, spiritually, it’s true we Christians no longer live under the Law but under love, which fulfills all the laws. All government really does is control behavior and redistribute wealth so if we behave ourselves and live in charity with our neighbors we might save a lot of overhead. But that ideal has hardly been achieved in America. We may go to church but we live in a functionally post-Christian nation, where anger toward neighbor rather than love seems our organizing principle. Edmund Burke said a sick society must think about politics as a sick man must think about his stomach; but our double-mindedness suggests our illness is mental. So laws are about all we have. Here are a few that I believe might civilize our political-economy if more of us conservative, and particularly libertarian, Christians simply knew about them and understood them: 

First and foremost, there is no such thing as an absolute guarantee of “private” property in the Bible. All wealth belongs to its Creator and that Owner was quite free to interfere in its management, regardless of what Ayn Rand and her disciples think. And that Owner made it eternal law that the truly needy have a limited access to that wealth so they can live day by day (Dt 23:24, Lv 19:9). After that, the commandment about stealing was applicable. But Jesus and his disciples, who were not property owners, were not stealing while availing themselves of that graceful law when challenged about working on the Sabbath. This concept was beautifully captured in Les Miserables.

Second, even the recently published and conservative New Stewardship Bible from Zondervan observes: “God told Moses that the promised land was to be distributed according to the relative size and needs of the various tribes: ‘To a larger group give a larger inheritance, and to a smaller group a smaller one’ (Nu 26:54). In this way, socioeconomic equity was ingrained in the very DNA of Israel’s agrarian economy.” Today, America’s wealth is even more concentrated than its income, which is at 1929 levels itself.

Third, while the New Stewardship Bible softens this teaching as we conservatives often do, that Owner made it a capital offense for stewards to habitually refuse to steward wealth in a socially responsible fashion (Ex 21:28, Dt 22:8). Small wonder those who want government off our backs, out of our wallets and out of our bedrooms, such as pro-abortionists, casino operators, cigarette manufacturers, pornographers, polluters and discriminators of many types are often strong supporters of think tanks and politicians who preach Ayn Rand’s notion about the management of wealth being an absolutely private matter. It was precisely that notion that encouraged Rand’s disciple Alan Greenspan to deregulate the sub-prime lending industry.

Third, the Owner was far more environmentally extreme than even Al Gore. God actually told Moses to shut down private enterprise each seventh year. That not only restored the air, water and land but assured abundance for the poor and wildlife (Ex 23:10-11). Fourth, the Creator was so politically tone-deaf the citizenry of Israel was commanded to treat foreigners living in the land with respect and grace as the Israelites had once been foreigners in Egypt (Ex 23:9). That concept could be quite civilizing, assuming we remember there are few Native Americans among the electorate today. Fifth, as the BP disaster indicates, all the governmental action, and even charitable giving, in the world can’t undo the damage we do when we ignore these laws of stewarding the Owner’s wealth, as Jesus tried to tell us (Mt 23:23-24).

Finally, God once asked Jonah, “What right do you have to be angry?” simply because things aren’t going the way you’d like (Jon 4:4). The cultures of Washington and Hollywood reward the Ann Coulter’s and Michael Moore’s of our world. They entertain us by imitating children moving to the extremes of the see-saw in order to create as wild and bumpy ride as possible. But the Gospel famously says “blessed are the peacemakers.” The “moderation in all things” should turn us into those kids who used to stand in the middle of the see-saw barely moving. That’s my way of saying I know this class may be difficult for some to swallow but I still hope you love rather than shoot this messenger. The political-economy our grandchildren will inherit desperately needs for us to lovingly talk Truth to one another rather than angrily yell politics past one another. 

Please note, this article represents Class Nine of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“If there is one element in the market economy that has caused more confusion in the minds of Christians than anything else, it is the issue of credit…While it can be grossly misused, credit at its best is entirely compatible with traditional Christianity.”
Bruce Howard, Ph.D.
Chair, Dept of Economics
Wheaton College

Sometime during the mid-nineties, I received a call from the Fellowship of Companies for Christ International (FCCI). The caller asked me to speak to its annual conference. He’d heard I had a different, and considerably more hopeful, perspective of the federal debt and economy than most evangelical businesspeople had heard from the evangelical media. I replied that I would be honored to speak but he should know I was rather controversial in evangelical financial circles and I didn’t want to harm his meeting. I suggested he check and see if people really wanted to hear a differing opinion. When he called back, he said they’d find another speaker and hoped I understood. 

I understood perfectly. Evangelicalism has long been known as the “Holy Huddle,” even among evangelical academics. Professor John Stackhouse once wrote in Christianity Today: “One of the attitudes that is tearing us evangelical Christians apart is the insistence that everyone else better just agree with me when I give my opinion--and if some refuse to do so, then I’ll write them off and associate exclusively with those who will. We badly need an attitude of Christian humility that affirms we don’t know it all and that we’d like to know more. We badly need an attitude of Christian appreciation, one that recognizes that other people can give us what we do not have ourselves.” In reality, I find most Christian sects are much the same. We rarely learn from each other, too often causing Christ’s church to exemplify the old saying that insanity is simply doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Brandt Gustavson, a friend who headed the National Religious Broadcasters, even asked me to write a cover story for its magazine after I told him the evangelical media was again building a molehill into a mountain during Y2K, just as it had the federal debt only a few years earlier. Like myself, he was concerned such politics was dividing even the conservative churches. I was once called a “tool of Satan” by a person from a financial ministry simply for asking a group of Christians to count the economic blessings of living in the richest nation the world has ever known. Today, the dollar is soaring as the world seeks the stability of our economy. But tea partiers are setting the political mood…and it isn’t one of joy and gratitude.

I share those stories as the federal debt is again becoming so politicized by the media it again threatens to do real harm to the economy as we hoard rather than invest and give. The feature story of the February 8, 2010 issue of Forbes was about “The Global Debt Bomb.” Yet had you risked the bomb on the cover and gone beyond the rhetoric, you would have seen a chart entitled “It’s the Total Debt, Stupid.” It showed America has the second lowest federal and bank debt, which is the debt that causes “systemic risk” to the financial system as it’s guaranteed by the government, in the industrialized world, bested only by Slovakia. No, I don’t believe we live in heaven, or even utopia. But neither have I seen economic paranoia enrich anyone. That’s why I referee this political boxing match despite hating boxing.

During the early nineties, round one of this political battle--which was actually round eight or nine as we’ve argued over the federal debt since the days Alexander Hamilton said a federal debt could be a “blessing”--was a highly partisan issue that my fellow Republicans exploited. Vice President Cheney rang the bell to end that round by famously reversing the conservative fighting stance by saying “deficits don’t matter.” President “W” changed positions too and deficits exploded when we went to war and funded homeland security. It’s inconvenient to remember but when President “W” came into office, most everyone was predicting federal surpluses as far as the eye could see. Wall Street actually worried about running out of Treasury securities. Even in 2005, the conservative Heritage Foundation provided political cover for the war efforts by issuing a major paper entitled “Why America’s Debt Burden is Declining.” It too ignored the explosion of debt in the financial sector. But the same year, my mentor the legendary mutual fund manager Sir John Templeton who was a Rhodes Scholar in economics and famously lived a debt-free lifestyle, wrote a white paper entitled “Financial Chaos.” He predicted the government would soon have to get heavily involved in Wall Street. I’ve never understood why we conservatives ignored that root of all evil on Wall Street while focusing on the cost of making the world a freer and safer place for our grandchildren by running up the federal debt by winning the Cold War. 

We rarely admit it but economists estimate spending on wars has probably been responsible for half or more of the accumulated federal debt. I showed that reality in a chart in my mid-nineties book but no one seems to have paid any attention to it, despite being most critical of the book. Worse, we quote this verse about as often as we quote Moses shutting down economic activity every seventh year for environmental reasons (Ex 23:10) but Moses clearly told us, “The king is not to have a large number of horses for his army (Dt 17:16). Still, The Economist says we spend more on defense than all the other NATO countries combined. I’m an old Army officer so that’s not political posturing, simply another inconvenient theological reminder. Similarly, while Jesus taught we should be wary of all forms of greed, we were myopically focused on the federal debt as Wall Street firms were leveraging over thirty to one. Ironically, when they imploded, President Bush’s administration had to ignite the federal deficit to stabilize the financial system and prevent a likely depression. That was wise in my opinion. It’s smart to avoid dousing your home with water; but when it’s on fire you don’t want to be too dogmatic.

Our recent fire proved John Templeton wise once again. He’s died but I’d guess most of the huddle never considered his late-nineties prediction that the Dow would stagnate the past decade but then rise to the one million level this century as they didn’t agree with his theology, which admittedly I never quite understood. (As I’m not supposed to fully understand God, I never saw John’s theology to be a reason to let that keep me from listening to his economic views.) Yet the debt has recently ballooned so much economic pessimists in the huddle now rightly blame both parties, even if they don’t really understand why. And “going rogue” suggests yet another third party could be in the making, as evidenced by my Republican governor of Florida going independent after being abandoned by the tea parties. Ironically, that again demonstrates the law of unintended consequences. It now threatens to again divide the Republican Party and solidify the Democrat’s, read “big spending liberal’s,” hold on Washington. It might be timely to re-read the updated version of Larry Burkett’s best-selling 1992 book on the federal debt. The very first paragraph says: “I completed work on The Coming Economic Earthquake in March of 1991. It was the first of many books on the critical state of the U.S economy that have hit the book stores around the country since that time. These books, along with Ross Perot, helped to focus the election of 1992 around the economy, and because of it, President Bush lost his job.” I doubt Larry ever realized he took credit for electing President Clinton, who he then spent eight years criticizing.

In reality, the earthquake book was a baptized version of Ravi Batra’s Great Depression of 1990 that reset the doomsday clock. Harry Figgie’s Great Depression of 1995 did later. Years later, Larry wrote, “I don’t believe an economic earthquake will occur in 1995 as Harry Figgie projects in his book. I believe it will be more in the era of 1998-99. But I do believe that at this point the die is cast and cannot be altered.” Yet I recently read an article that suggested Larry was right after all as 2008 was the predicted earthquake, even though most economists believe the recession of the early eighties was much worse due to rampant inflation. Wall Street calls that human tendency to always be right “hindsight bias.” Just try to find an investor who bought internet stocks in early 2000! The problem of not recognizing the biblical reality that “no man knows the future” is we’re doomed to repeat history. Substitute the name Sarah Palin, or an actor to be named later, for Ross Perot and the words “tea party” for Perot’s populist movement and you can see history may be about to repeat itself. Consider the tea parties have been almost exclusively about economics rather than America’s ethical and social pathologies and you might see it would be insanity for right-wing evangelicals who truly want to “seek first” to again “yoke” with secular partiers. 

I offer that caution as Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, has wisely said we evangelicals went “from unthinking non-involvement to unthinking involvement” in politics during recent decades. And a friend recently forwarded an email from FCCI entitled “DEBT: Ballooning National Debt Violates God’s Precepts.” While the author predicted an economic hurricane rather than an earthquake, it basically echoed what Larry, Pat Robertson and so on, were preaching about the debt and economy twenty years ago. What so very few of us understood is that even they didn’t agree on this political challenge. For example, Larry didn’t think it was useful to compare our federal debt to America’s GDP. Pat advocated we do so. But both agreed very bad times were imminent. Yet even fewer of us understood economically trained Christian conservatives seriously disagreed. For example, due to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, John Templeton was predicting a soaring stock market and unequaled global prosperity. Both he and Larry had endorsed my first book. But while Larry was a friend at the time and a sincere Christian, he was still an engineer who had made some less than accurate prophecies in the past. Meanwhile, John was a Rhodes Scholar in economics turned legendary mutual fund manager who had made a series of prescient calls on the global economy over decades. Prudence dictated I over-weight John’s perspective. 

Bruce Howard, the chairman of the economics department at Wheaton College, read Larry’s book and responded with Safe and Sound: The Strength and Stability of the U.S. Economy. It essentially refuted most of Larry’s politicized perspective. And Bruce paralleled what some of us were writing about our involvement in politics when he said: “Christians should spend less time worrying about the remote chance of needing to survive economic calamity and get back to thinking about more important issues of the kingdom.” Few in the huddle seemed to know any of that as they usually only read what the evangelical media suggests they read, which means economics through the media lens of “if it bleeds, it leads.” Still, Bruce’s arguments rang true as they echoed Christ saying not to worry about what we will eat and drink as the pagans do and to seek first the kingdom. And my experience was the ethics of Wall Street were far greater threats to our well-being than was the federal debt, as my ignored books suggested.

Robert Bartley, the legendary and very conservative editor of The Wall Street Journal, had a book entitled Seven Fat Years published the same year Larry’s Coming Economic Earthquake was published. But Bartley wrote: “The deficit is not a meaningless figure, only a grossly over-rated one. Our politicians have conjured the deficit into a bogeyman with which to scare themselves. In symbolizing the bankruptcy of our political process, the deficit has become a great national myth with enormous power. But behind this political symbol, we need to understand the economic reality, or lack of it.”

Casper Weinberger, President Reagan’s ultra-conservative Secretary of Defense, wrote a full page editorial in the July 20, 1992 Forbes entitled “The Federal Deficit: Is It All That Bad?” He wrote: “One myth is that we are surviving only because so many foreign countries buy our bonds. Actually, comparatively little interest goes abroad.” President Reagan wanted to change that to finance the Cold War so he made it easier for us to borrow foreign money. He repealed the law requiring Washington to report interest earnings to the governments of foreign lenders. Essentially, he turned the U.S. into the world’s largest off-shore tax haven. (See Forbes, September 21, 2009, “Need a Tax Haven? Try America” or Section 3 of IRS Publication 519.) I thought the Cold War was a moral use of capital, like buying war bonds during WWII, so I helped by sending special prospectuses around Latin and South America to get my clients to buy treasury bonds. Yet I also believe politicians of both parties have failed us by not reinstituting the so-called “reporting requirement” once the Cold War was won, often while pressuring small island nations that are tax-havens. There’s little moral superiority there.

Today, there’s reason for true concern, though paranoia and panic will still not produce prosperity. The nominal debt is higher; increasing even relative to GDP. While I believe the political system will likely work and/or the wars will end, the trends are unlikely to turn favorable with the boomers retiring. Those who want war and those who want butter are as politically divided as we were twenty years ago. And both liberals and conservatives believe God is on their side--liberals by assuring wealth is distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion, as Moses did in Dt 19:14, and conservatives by their concern future generations will not be burdened by debt, usually quoting Dt 28:43 as the FCCI article did. Yet the primary truth of the Bible, if not of political parties, is that we have all fallen short. As for this life-long Republican, I’m more interested in theologically taking the log out of our conservative eyes than politically taking the spec out of the eyes of our liberal friends. Such humble introspection was crucial in keeping our two-party system civil until politicized pride and finger-pointing began to rule post-Christian America. So allow me to respectfully disagree with a few opinions shared as facts, even theology, in the FCCI article, and particularly with its hopeless tone. Hope eternally remains a primary virtue of true Christianity, even if cultural Christianity forgets that in the heat of political battle. 

Opinion: “In the Bible, borrowing is always described negatively…When the Lord wanted something done, He always made some provision other than a loan.” Facts: That “biblical truth” always seems to clothe the kings of evangelical finance. But they are naked theologically. The sentiment may be simply pragmatically helpful to those struggling with credit cards; but it is quite harmful to micro-lending ministries, evangelical credit unions making construction loans to churches and so on. During Holy Week alone, Jesus borrowed a donkey, tomb and upper room. Moses clearly knew that lending was a primary way the rich could help the poor. That’s why he laid down the Law in Dt 15:7 that loans must be made anytime someone is in true need or God will “deem it evil.” Jesus thought that teaching was so important he spent precious time in the Sermon on the Mount reinforcing it (Lk 6:34-36.) Both passages refer to lending but a little thought indicates that if everyone is freely lending, lots of us are borrowing. 

Opinion: “Clearly, the scope of the debt is on a scale we have never experienced as a nation…In business terms, we are bankrupt…The utter magnitude of the debt problem is beyond our human ability to fix.” Facts: We can still do all things through Christ who strengthens us, as we did after WWII. In thirty years, even American consumers have not depleted the rich blessings our Judeo-Christian heritage produced over centuries. The Economist magazine recently said: “Publicly held debt [which is also the figure preferred by The Wall Street Journal ], just 37% of GDP two years ago, has already jumped to 56%.” But it was 120% in America and 240% in Great Britain at the end of WWII. Furthermore, when you apply for a mortgage, lenders also consider your debt to asset ratio. That’s even more hopeful as few nations are blessed with the natural and fiscal wealth America is. I’ve never seen it discussed publicly but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the White House has long estimated America’s assets at well over $100 trillion. It then compares our debt to those assets, just as any CEO of a company or non-profit would to determine solvency. (See http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/spec.pdf).

That may be the most important chart I know of for two reasons. First, most discussions break down the reality of America’s finances into federal debt, consumer debt and so on, typically ignoring our assets. This chart helps us see the big picture by counting our blessings. Second, it’s what the administration relies on when preparing the budget for the approval of Congress. The line about the federal debt/asset ratio is the last entry on the chart on page 199 entitled “National Wealth.” It shows our debt to asset ratio has actually been in steady decline since 1960, from 10.3% to 6.5% of GDP at the end of 2008. That’s because until the recession, our assets had been growing at a much faster rate than was our debt. The past couple years, the growth of assets has slowed, causing the ratio to level out. 

Opinion: “Deuteronomy 28:45-51 calls borrowing a curse for disobedience. ‘The foreigner living among you will become stronger and stronger, while you become weaker and weaker. They will lend money to you and you will not lend to them. They will be the head and you will be the tail.’” Fact: The Treasury Department has reported that as of August 2009, foreigners owned about $3.5 trillion, or about a fourth, of our treasury securities.  There’s another line in the OMB chart that says the “Net Claims of Foreigners” on all forms of debt is now $7.2 trillion, meaning we owe them that much more than they owe us. However, private economists have estimated we own a dollar’s worth of equity assets, or foreign stocks, for every net dollar of debt we owe foreigners. In essence, unsophisticated Chinese savers buy U.S. Treasury bonds paying less than 2% while American investors buy Chinese stocks returning a great deal more. Economists call China’s cheap labor and our financial expertise “comparative advantages.” If the Chinese should sell our government bonds, we might simply sell our Chinese stocks and buy back our bonds, which might be wise due to the economic disruptions that sort of fear and non-cooperation always produces. After all, fulfilling Moses, didn’t Jesus, Paul and the Good Samaritan destroy nationalistic thinking when it comes to helping each other? 

Opinion: “Like a drawer full of credit cards, federal budget deficit projections, much of which will simply cover interest payments, are driving the national debt up at a rate of over one trillion dollars per year.” Fact: The federal debt, or our treasury securities outstanding, average less than five years in maturity. As all investors know, that indicates America is paying less than 2% interest on the debt each year. Few credit card borrowers enjoy such favorable terms. Contrary to popular wisdom, the Financial Times recently said the interest expense on the federal debt amounts to 1.8% of our national income, or GDP . The Economist has reported the more bearish Congressional Budget Office has estimated it may rise to 3.8% by 2019.  From a biblical perspective, that should be our true concern. While the Bible commanded we lend freely, it forbade us to charge interest on those loans (Ex 22:25). We rarely quote that concept as our capitalist culture blinds us to these words from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity: “There is one bit of advice to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews of the Old Testament and by the great teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending at interest--what we call investment--is the basis of our whole system…It does not necessarily follow that we are wrong. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.”

Notice Lewis didn’t say the ancient Roman philosophers, who are so influential in conservative economic thought, had forbade charging interest. The law of the Roman Empire generally allowed up to 12% annual interest to be charged. In other words, while most conservatives equate Christianity with capitalism, capitalism has largely turned key principles of the Bible upside-down. While the Bible teaches we should lend freely, even “Bible-believing Christians” teach debt is unbiblical. While the Bible teaches we should not charge interest, a principle taught by the Catholic Church until the Reformation when Luther and Calvin liberalized the teachings, we usually try to earn as much interest as we can on investments and by financing purchases by consumers. While the Bible says to forgive loans each seventh year so they won’t become onerous (Dt 15:1), we insist there is a moral obligation to repay no matter what. The article from FCCI repeated those misperceptions but sort of got it right by saying loans are to be forgiven when property is returned to its original owner each Jubilee Year, which occurred every fifty years (Lv 25:13). In essence, if biblical economic principles are still true, debt will remain burdensome and need to be liquidated by default or inflated away until we investors are willing to forgive our loans to the government and each other on a regular basis shorter than every half-century. So my guess is that capitalism will reach its point of truth when borrowers can no longer service their interest payments. 

In summary, our federal debt should never be compared, morally or economically, to our personal or corporate finances, anymore than we should run our churches as businesses. They are quite different. The simple fact the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is a huge advantage economically, similar to families having a legal printing press, even if that remains a moral question. But if we’re going to be simplistic, we should at least confess most family leaders, like myself, have probably over-promised what their families might enjoy during retirement. My wife, for one, will not get that penthouse on the beach. In fact, we might be better off spiritually if we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we are bankrupt, anymore than America is bankrupt due to over-promised entitlements. As the old economic saying goes, if something can’t happen, it won’t. And most American families would love to have debt that is only 6% of their assets’ value; only spend 2% of their incomes servicing their debts; and only have a fourth of that interest expense go outside their families.

The simple truth is that our real problem has been that while our federal debt has been stable verses our incomes and in decline verses our assets the past fifty years, personal and corporate debt has been soaring against our incomes the past decade while also increasing verses our assets since the recession began. The January 30, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal contained a chart that detailed “federal government purchases of good and services” increased by $330 billion the past decade but “consumer spending” increased by $1,909 billion. Shouldn’t we have worried more about consumerism and less about politics before we ran into God’s economic laws and the resulting recession?

Still, there is an old saying that we don’t see reality as it is but as we are. Reality is that over one-half of Americans carry no credit card debt. True economists say the rest of us carry about $2200 on average. In other words, cash strapped businessmen and ministries dealing with the heavily indebted may simply be projecting our own economic sins onto our government. For example, as do most evangelical financial ministries, the FCCI article quoted Romans 13:8, which says we should owe no man anything other than love, as being opposed to financial debt. However, that passage is clearly about politics. The habitual use of it is simply a proof-text that distracts us from its true meaning, which might discourage political entanglements rather than credit card debt. That does little or worse to help us know God. That’s the major reason Christianity Today has published an article calling the Bible “The Greatest Book Never Read” by evangelicals and Jim Baker admitted after prison that he had simply quoted verses out of books by other evangelical authors rather than studying the Bible. Had we truly understood what Paul was telling those living under the barbarous Nero, as well as us, we might not have played such a large role in electing those presidents who were so responsible for running up the federal debt, even if they were supposedly fiscal conservatives. By their fruit, rather than their campaign rhetoric, will we know true conservatives; by our fruit, rather than good intentions, will the world know us as true Christians. 
***
Gary Moore lives a debt free lifestyle. He has thirty years of Wall Street experience, a degree in political science and has served as an advisor to Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett’s Empower America. He once thought of attending seminary to study the moral and spiritual foundations of political-economy but discovered they don’t teach it anymore, which is likely the true root of our economic and political problems. He has authored five books on moral finance, the last being Faithful Finances 101 from the John Templeton Foundation Press. He is affiliated with National Planning Corp, member FINRA/SIPC, but these ideas are his alone. See financialseminary.org.

Please note, this article represents Class Eight of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“This newspaper supported the final version of Obamacare, but only because we have long maintained that a country as rich as America should provide decent health coverage to all its citizens. But this bill does almost nothing to control costs,..If the tea-party crowd examined the free-market paradise they think existed before Mr. Obama signed the bill, they would find that their government already spent more per citizen on health than most OECD countries do. ”
The Economist
March 27, 2010

Against the odds, Obama has won badly needed health reform: Barack Obama and his allies in Congress have succeeded where previous Democratic administrations have failed. They have passed a healthcare reform that guarantees health insurance for almost all Americans and ensures that bankruptcy will no long be a consequence of serious illness. It has taken the US much too long to do what other rich countries did decades ago. Better late than never.”
The Financial Times
March 23, 2010

I might be in Florida while Dick Towner is in Chicago but I can still hear him wondering if I’m crazy to enter this divisive political debate. Well I’m not, entering the health care debate that is. Crazy, maybe. I still can’t understand my family’s health insurance. Wall Street has never been able to teach me to sell any form of insurance. I suppose I’m an investment counselor as I believe in managing life’s risks rather than paying someone to make them go away. But I do have a degree in political science. So I will make a couple of general political and economic comments while thinking out loud about the spiritual dimensions of this debate. I find them far more important with Americans being “rich” but “miserable” to use The Economist’s words. 

First, it is the job of the minority party to question the goals of the majority party. But the Times said: “Mr. Obama can fairly criticize the Republicans, who were never open to co-operation. Their unanimous opposition to the reform is wholly indefensible.” And it’s the job of the majority party to pursue policies favored by their constituencies. But again, the Times said the Democrats “mismanaged the process. To their credit, they have ended up with a centrist, moderate reform--similar to the plan introduced in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, a Republican governor. But they got there reluctantly, approving the measure after months of roiling argument and bitter opposition from their own progressive wing.”

The extreme opinions on both sides suggest this political battle is far from over. So it’s crucial to understand its moral roots, as I see them. As the light of faith has dimmed in America, the “moderation in all things” of St. Paul, the “honor and respect” for government of Romans Thirteen, and the selfless “love thy neighbor” of the Great Commandment has weakened. So as Peggy Noonan, President Reagan’s speech writer, has observed: “It is embarrassing to live in the most comfortable time in the history of man and not be happy. It is a terrible thing when people lose God. Life is difficult and people are afraid, and to be without God is to lose man’s great source of consolation and coherence. I don’t think it is unconnected to the boomers’ predicament that as a country we were losing God just as they were being born.”

Our Founding Fathers protected us with healthy checks and balances of opposing ideas. Yet we seem to have forgotten that America has never been a direct democracy where the uninformed, like me, make health care policies. The Founding Fathers wanted a representative form of democracy, responsive to the populist sensibilities of a moral people but not treating opinion polls as gospel. As John Adams famously put it: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The Founders clearly understood why Moses did not conduct an opinion poll before he went up Mount Sinai but Pilate did before washing his hands of Christ. 

At the bottom of the credit crisis, Washington over-rode public opinion by investing in some of our major companies. Even Warren Buffett has said our leaders did what needed to be done. While I detested the elitist manner in which Washington acted, I now have to agree that things are much improved, if not perfect. Washington only used one-third of what we thought probable and its investments have proven profitable on average. At the same time, most Americans have avoided stocks. So occasionally, Washington may have a reasonable perspective, even if we can’t see it.

There’s nothing more healing politically than to “be still” and try to see things from the perspectives of God and others. You’ve probably seen that map usually sold in the Big Apple labeled, “A New Yorker’s View of America.” It shows New York City being about twice the size of the rest of the country. It’s much the same with political perspectives. The politicized mind tends to see Washington as twice as big as the rest of the country. So very few Americans can see there’s a huge difference in the finances of the federal government and the finances of America. That’s like feeling you’re broke because your savings account is empty when your home and IRA have soared in value.

As I’ve tried to say for many years now, while our federal government has indeed gone deeper and deeper into debt as both parties want guns and/or butter but one party refuses to pay for either, our nation has grown richer and richer. To reiterate, the Office of Management and Budget in the White House estimates publicly held debt in 1960 was 10.3% of our nation’s net wealth but was 6.5% at the end of the 2008 fiscal year, even after adjusting for the effects of inflation. Yet every extremist opposed to health care seems to believe “America’s already bankrupt.” And that’s a spiritual matter as it’s deluded. 

So does that mean Washington can afford to insure us all? Not at all. Like a young husband promising his wife too much upon retirement, Washington has already made too many promises it can’t keep based on current tax policies. And common sense tells me you can’t insure all those additional people needing health care without it costing even more, particularly as Congress never got around to reducing the costs of the health care we do have. As most health care is this country is bought by business, it will be hard on many companies, even if the largest are currently sitting on record amounts of cash, which Washington obviously wanted to tap. But does that mean our nation can’t afford health care for its citizens? Again, not at all, particularly considering we buy most health care from our fellow Americans.

But we should all understand there was a hard reality behind Moses’ instructions to the Hebrews that they could not store manna for the future. There is no more real wealth stored in Social Security than in our bank vaults. It’s just accounting for how much of my income needs to be transferred through Washington to my mother and how much of my son’s income will need to be transferred to Sherry and myself. As a nation, we simply can’t store enough food and medical care for the future. So the crucial considerations are how much wealth we want and our children will create. If we don’t lower our expectations and/or they produce even more wealth, none of us will ever be happy. That means we need economic structures that balance opportunity and security.

Yet that’s also what’s so very dangerous about the politicized nonsense that America is broke and has no future. Such talk destroys the hopes of our children, not to mention our confidence to invest in the future. And that’s precisely why in The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis had old Screwtape, or Satan, explain to his nephew Wormwood that while the enemy, or God, wants humans focused on how we’re living today, it is Wormwood’s job to bedevil humanity about what might happen to us in the future. And whether America’s future will resemble a tea party or communion is deeply moral at heart.

As a conservative I believe there are two things the government should do for us: 1) what we can’t do for ourselves, such as national defense, interstate highways and so on, and 2) those sufficiently moral things that we won’t do for ourselves, which even conservatives agree includes having the state restrict abortion, for example.

Theoretically, we could provide health care for ourselves. There’s a Christian doctor in my hometown who down-sized from my gated community so he and his equally devout wife could buy a motor home. They turned it into a medical clinic to drive from one place where the needy and homeless gather to another. If more of our nation’s doctors and nurses were willing to do likewise--and more guys like me were willing to sacrifice more to support their work--our needy wouldn’t need Washington. But I don’t see that in the cards, even if doctors and investment brokers would find more joy when personally helping the needy than when paying taxes. So it seems we need to ask if universal health care is a sufficiently moral issue for the government to do what we don’t want to do ourselves.

There are two ways I usually begin thinking about moral matters: 1) the Golden Rule, which usually solves my dilemma, and 2) asking “What Would Jesus Do?” Oddly, the first is of little help to me in political issues as the Golden Rule is so personal in nature. And as a conservative, I honestly don’t know if I’d want the government to provide health care for me if it didn’t and I was unable to for some reason. As we discovered with my father-in-law, it is one thing to write “do not resuscitate” into your estate plans when you are middle-aged and healthy and quite another when you’re old and have just had a massive coronary.

Just as oddly as I can’t usually imagine imitating Jesus in the really tough areas of life, the WWJD approach may be more helpful this time. Jesus clearly went about healing people. No, he didn’t heal everyone; just those he could. If each of us did the same, health care would be plentiful. But realistically, that’s unlikely in post-Christian America. So if I was a politician, God forbid, this old Republican might have joined the moderate Democrats, rather than the uncooperative Republicans or the dogmatic Democrats. 

As in politics, American religion seems to have grown increasingly tribal. We are increasingly associating with those who think as we do while listening to increasingly narrow media that affirm we know better than the other guys. For example, an evangelical stewardship leader once told me that there was nothing he could learn from a Catholic. But the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a group of primarily Catholic institutional investors, filed literally hundreds of shareholder resolutions over the past decade asking America’s investment firms to clean up sub-prime lending, the issue that nearly brought the world economy to its knees.

That is a “social justice” issue, which helps people avoid poverty. The average evangelical rarely considers such issues as they focus exclusively on charity, which can alleviate poverty, assuming the charity gets to the poor and needy. Unfortunately, studies by Empty Tomb and others suggest relatively little of religious giving does. We thereby default that responsibility to government. If judgment--spiritual, financial and political--still begins in the house of the Lord, and I believe it does, too many of us Christians may be reaping what we sow by preferring political tea parties to spiritual communion.

***
Gary Moore has thirty years of Wall Street experience and has served as an advisor to Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett’s Empower America. He has authored five books on moral finance, the last being Faithful Finances 101 from the John Templeton Foundation Press. He is affiliated with National Planning Corp, member FINRA/SIPC, but these ideas are his alone. See http://www.financialseminary.org.

Please note, this article represents Class Seven of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“The Lunatic You Work For: If the corporation were a person, would that person be a psychopath? Like all psychopaths, the firm is singularly self-interested: its purpose is to create wealth for its shareholders. And, like all psychopaths, the firm is irresponsible, because it puts others at risk to satisfy its profit-maximizing goal, harming employees and customers, and damaging the environment. It has no empathy, refusing to accept responsibility for its actions and feels no remorse…[And], the modern state has the capacity to behave, even in evolved western democracies, as a more dangerous psychopath.”
The Economist

About a decade ago, I received a call from a client who is a minister. He had married the daughter of another minister who, by decades of being very thrifty and astute investing, had left a nice trust fund to his widow. After he died, she had taken it to a lady broker as she was more comfortable with ladies than men. (Ladies, there’s a lesson here: You want head and heart regardless of the sex of your advisor.) The broker worked at one of America’s best known investment firms that dealt with retail, or mom and pop, investors. (Lesson: If size was important, we’d all have been at AIG.) Like most of my parents’ generation, she was ignorant about investing as her husband had taken total responsibility for it over the years. (Men, teach your wives to be widows.) Though the widow was elderly and ignorant about investing, the broker put a heavily over-weighted portion of the trust into technology stocks as they had been soaring during the late nineties. (Read Lesson Four again and again if necessary!) The broker justified that as she had simply chatted with the widow’s son, who was nearly as ignorant and emotional about investing, over the phone. Of course, it ended very sadly.

That’s when the widow’s son-in-law minister called to ask me what they should do. (Lesson: As with doctors, there’s nothing wrong with getting two opinions before disaster strikes.) I simply suggested they consult with an attorney friend who had once managed a substantial pension fund for a public company. He, in turn, suggested they take the investment firm to arbitration. While that’s a simpler process than a lawsuit, it’s a very stressful procedure for elderly novices in investing. I’ve since believed with all my heart that the widow died during the process as she was “so ashamed of her stewardship of her husband’s trust,” as she often told me while crying. As I had gotten to know her during all this, her children asked me to be a professional witness on their behalf. I agreed to share what I knew.

The investment firm sent a sharp young attorney from New York. He had done his homework by reading the website of The Financial Seminary. He began by asking if I thought brokers have a responsibility to do what is appropriate for the client. I replied that ever since I had been in the business, the cardinal rule had been we were to always make recommendations that are “suitable” to the individual, no matter what. That is, if a desperate elderly client wanted to speculate in commodities with his last few dollars, we should suggest a CD instead as that’s the professional thing to do. (Lesson: As in medicine, the client isn’t always right when it comes to money.)

The attorney asked if it would surprise me if the securities regulators disagreed with me. I replied that would surprise me greatly. He then uncovered a flip-chart with a quote on it from one of the very top regulators of the industry. It said brokers may indeed not have a responsibility to clients. The arbitration panel, which is largely industry professionals (yep, another lesson), must have been impressed with the argument as they denied the claim of the widow’s estate. And absent that responsibility on the part of brokers dealing with retail investors, I might have denied it too. But of course, I later discovered the quote had been taken out of context by the attorney. The regulator had responded to a question about whether the new discount internet brokerage firms that never have personal contact with clients have any responsibility to keep clients from bankrupting themselves when trading.

My clients never really understood what had happened to their mother. (Pastors really can’t understand how Wall Street thinks.) They had certainly never seen an ad or brochure from the firm about it not having any responsibility to clients. But their mother was simply a pioneer in the issue that nearly destroyed Wall Street the past couple of years. The firm she had used was forced to merge as it was going bankrupt. (Lesson for Wall Street: We still reap what we sow.) It is the reason major Wall Street firms have increasingly utilized money invested by Main Street to create hedge funds and proprietary trading desks that compete with Main Street for profits. It is the issue being explored by the federal commission headed by Phil Angelides to determine the causes of the credit crisis of ’08 and recession of ’09. It’s why the CEO of Goldman Sachs testified his firm could manufacture mortgage-backed investments for clients while the firm bet against those same investments with the firm’s capital.

That issue is neatly summarized in the teaching of Nobel-economist Milton Friedman that: “The only social responsibility of a corporation is to make money. Period.” In the mid-nineties, one of my books quoted British social critic David Selbourne as saying: “Milton Friedman has done more damage to the concept of civic good than any previous political or economic philosopher. You cannot remoralize citizen behavior when the civic order itself is being sold.” It then quoted Peter Drucker as saying: “It is futile to argue, as does Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, that a business has only one responsibility: economic performance.” Friedman’s teaching is why, on the day Goldman Sachs reported record earnings after taking public money in a federal bailout only a year earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported Goldman’s CEO in Germany had just told a group of business students: “Banks do not have an obligation to promote the public good.” Such thinking obviously encourages political liberals, like President Obama, to wonder why he should supply them with public money. 

Friedman’s teaching has been at the heart of the so-called Chicago School of Economics the past three decades, during which the Judeo-Christian concept of stewardship has been shredded. It is now more identified with Nobel-economist Gary Becker. I actually found Gary to be quite charming when I sat next to him at a Templeton Foundation symposium on “spiritual capital” at Harvard. And like Friedman, Gary has some good ideas. For example, I asked him if we didn’t need a broader definition of well-being than simple GDP and he surprised me by saying we do. The Chicago School is often associated with the concept of homo economicus, which suggests we are primarily economic rather than spiritual beings. And Gary does a great blog at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com. Its archive contains a blog from July 24, 2005 where he seems to delete the “period” in Friedman’s teaching. While his basic answer remains “no,” corporations do not have social responsibilities, he acknowledges “although maximizing value, meeting contracts, and obeying laws help achieve many of the goals by those claiming corporations should be “socially responsible” by taking care of the environment, considering the effects of their behavior on other stakeholders, and contributing to good causes.”

To use Christian language, Gary might suggest that corporations avoid doing harm by obeying the Law of Moses. As Adam Smith observed when talking about bakers, they often do good by simply pursuing their own economic interests. Yet Gary might also suggest corporate leaders stop short of the Spirit of Christ that compels human beings to consciously do good. As modern corporations often engage in activities hardly as beneficial as baking bread, I’d suggest a dose of that Christ consciousness is a crucial complement to our laws. That seems particularly important now that corporate leaders trained in Friedman’s philosophy are creating enormously complicated investments even Ph.D.’s can’t understand while the Supreme Court has just decided CEO’s can utilize unlimited corporate resources to shape our laws by lobbying Washington. 

Ok, enough “philosophizing,” as my son calls it. What does all this mean to you and your financial future? Very simply, barring a miracle in Washington that would rival Moses’ work in Egypt, you should expect to live with “the serpents” that Christ promised for some time to come. The challenge is to be just as cunning, while being as gentle as a dove. So the first step is to personally assure you are invested in corporations that exhibit a consciousness closer

to Drucker than Friedman. A good first step there is to consider “socially responsible” or “biblically responsible” mutual funds when investing in corporate America. They typically seek to not only avoid doing harm but actively seek to do some good. I’d offer one caution for conservatives considering “biblically responsible” funds however. Conservative Christianity has been heavily influenced by so-called “prosperity theology.” That is, it’s no longer sure that greed is still a sin. So when I recently explored a BRI portfolio that was managed by someone supposedly investing as Jesus would, I discovered substantial holdings in Goldman Sachs and AIG. If you believe greed on the part of investment firms is still a sin, you might have to explore some Mennonite or Islamic funds.

You can exercise similar responsibility when putting your money in commercial banks. The past thirty years, I’ve had a portion of my son’s college fund and my IRA in the South Shore Bank in Chicago. Rather than lend its money to hedge funds, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported mega-banks are increasingly doing again, South Shore primarily lends my money to lower-income people who want to rehabilitate affordable housing and escape government projects. That creates jobs in poorer rural and inner-city areas. Then people can afford to shop at small businesses. Yes, South Shore has struggled lately as the past decade has been particularly hard on lower-income Americans. But my deposit is government guaranteed. And should South Shore disappear, which I don’t anticipate, I’ll always know my money went to good causes rather than huge bonuses, speculation that impoverished Main Street, and so on.

But what if you’re also interested in prophetically performing that miracle in Washington? Well, I’d suggest you be realistic. America is pluralist. Most of the elite educated at institutions like the University of Chicago who are now running Washington and Wall Street will never embrace the Christ consciousness. Christ intimated that when he simply asked us to be “salt,” or a preservative, for the whole of society rather than turn society into salt, preaching the Great Commission not withstanding. At least until Constantine, the Christian faith had no interest, or expectation, whatsoever of utilizing the coercion of the state to turn the Spirit of Christ into law. I don’t believe we should either. But I do believe the state could play a major role in helping the followers of Christ, Ayn Rand, Milton

Friedman, and so on live in greater harmony.

That might be as simple as having CEO’s declare the philosophy by which his or her company is managed. If the CEO of Goldman wants his internal hedge funds, proprietary traders and mortgage brokers to be free of responsibilities to clients, as Alan Greenspan once told Congress they should be, he might simply notify current and potential clients that Goldman is, for example, a “T,” or transactional, firm. If the firm that managed the widow’s money wants to advertise it is a “R” firm that accepts responsibility for clients, particularly mom and pop clients and especially widows and orphans, it should inform its legal department of the fact, live up to its responsibilities or pay the price. And if firms want it both ways, as they all do, they might declare they are a “TR,” mixed firm; but then identify each client relationship or even activity as being conducted on a “T” or “R” basis.

That is likely what Peter Drucker had in mind in Post-Capitalist Society when he prophesied responsibility will be the concept that organizes our post-capitalist society. I agree that most of the confusion on Wall Street and in corporate America would disappear overnight. Ayn Rand’s Objectivists, Friedmanites and Christ’s disciples would be happy conducting business in diametrically opposed fashions. Investors would again have confidence they know what’s going on. And perhaps best of all, we’d all have fewer reasons to “invest” in politicians and they would have more time to attend to legitimate affairs of state rather than fund-raise. 

Of course, that’s precisely why this simple plan will take a miracle of biblical proportions to occur. If this old political science graduate turned stewardship advocate were you, I’d focus most of my resources on exercising personal responsibility rather than expecting politicians to save us. 
***
Gary Moore has a degree in political science and thirty years of Wall Street experience. He once thought of attending seminary to study the moral and spiritual foundations of political-economy but discovered they don’t teach it anymore, which is why churches rarely mention the subject. He has authored five books on moral finance, the last being Faithful Finances 101 from the John Templeton Foundation Press. He is affiliated with National Planning Corp, member FINRA/SIPC, but these ideas are his alone. See financialseminary.org.

Please note, this article represents Class Six of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“Stewardship must not be reduced to a fund raising campaign on behalf of institutions, religious or otherwise.  It is a way of life and not mere rhetoric for motivating charitable contributions. God has a prior claim on everything and not just that which we label as tithe.”
Bishop Ken Carder
United Methodist Church

I recently attended another “stewardship” conference. I was surprised when someone asked if we should even use that word anymore. Some, myself included, volunteered that we rarely use it as the church has basically reduced it to financing our institutional needs. A conversation ensued about the definition of stewardship.

Some thought it should be purely about raising money to pay the church’s bills. Conference organizers seemed to agree. Virtually every break out group, regardless of subject, led directly or indirectly to funding our churches and ministries. Some said it was about the proverbial “time, talent and treasure,” without being very clear about what that meant. Several shared the belief that “it’s all God’s,” again without being clear on how to put that theology into practice. So I realized I may have gotten ahead of myself with these classes and might need to explain what I’m trying to convey. 

Thirty years ago, stewardship to me simply meant that dreaded time of the year when we had to appeal to my Episcopal church to get the bills paid. Our efforts were exclusively about buying a juvenile pledge card program and going to creative lengths to get people excited about it. Truth be told, people hated it. And the only person who hated it worse than I did as church president was our pastor. After all, his talk usually began with the “theological distortion” that we were giving to God, which is impossible if God really owns it all to start with. What we were really giving to was God’s work on earth. That included the pastor’s salary, which the most honest pastors I know acknowledge creates dissonance for them on stewardship Sunday. As to the laity, they surely wondered how much faith we church leaders truly had if we had to ask donors to estimate the church’s revenue before we could prepare a simple budget. Just try to imagine a businessperson doing that! 

Those experiences and my supposed financial expertise resulted in my helping 120 churches on the West Coast of Florida as a volunteer planned giving officer. I did my best to get people to come hear about wills, trusts and so on; but it was futile. People viewed the sessions as just another fundraising effort on the part of an increasingly irrelevant church. Oddly, when I did seminars about the same techniques as an investment executive trying to save people taxes and increase their incomes, attendees thought I was some kind of whiz kid.

That work caused me to attend several of my denomination’s annual stewardship gatherings. They too were exclusively about funding the church. Yet that led to my writing a financial book for the national stewardship department. It was picked up for publication by an evangelical publisher. It did cover all the “stewardship” topics I’d been trained in by the church. But my research into how money managers like Sir John Templeton managed our denominations’ endowments and pension funds caused me to include a chapter on the embryonic “socially responsible investing” movement. Christianity Today said it was the first book that explained the biblical roots of the exploding movement to create as well as give money ethically. At the end of our next annual stewardship gathering, our leader acknowledged the meetings were getting boring and asked what would interest us. The number one reply was “socially responsible investing.” He quipped that I would have to speak at the next meeting. But of course, when we got there the church’s financial needs trumped the interests of attendees and we talked about the same old techniques for funding the church. By now I had noticed a pattern so I essentially made a deal with the church that I would talk and write about everything but giving. While I try to acknowledge the importance of giving, we seem to have adequate people covering that topic and my including it in my seminars wasn’t helping attendance. 

Writing the book seemed to make me some sort of expert. So I was invited to speak to ecumenical groups. I quickly noticed two completely different approaches. The mainline churches of Canada and the United States meet annually for the North American Conference on Christian Philanthropy. Oddly, it went far beyond philanthropy into issues of social justice, environmentalism and so on. I realized this was residue from the so-called “social gospel” of early last century. On the other hand, evangelical stewardship leaders met annually as the Christian Stewardship Association. Oddly, despite it using the word “stewardship,” I spoke at it several years and never observed any interest in anything but Christian philanthropy. I spoke about the growing disparities in wealth, which contribute to unwanted pregnancies and other social pathologies, the anti-Christian ethics of Wall Street, the misperceptions about the American economy which greatly reduce giving, and other challenges that true and holistic stewardship might help solve. But while my evaluations were solid, they routinely indicated few understood what any of that had to do with stewardship. Basically, evangelicalism is so new on the church scene it simply doesn’t have the historically deeper perspectives of the subject. It’s simply funding the Great Commission.

So how do we understand stewardship in its holistic and biblical sense? First of all, it’s not fundraising, or even tithing and giving. Fundraising begins, and usually ends, with the financial needs of our institutions. It’s not unlike the ancients paying Temple taxes to keep the fires burning. Tithing also usually begins with a legalistic understanding of your finances. It’s a standard that the church still teaches despite having forgotten most other dimensions of stewardship. It’s safe to say that institutional self-interest, which is legitimate but theologically limited, has a lot to do with that concept’s survival. That’s likely why Jesus chastised the Pharisees for tithing even the mint, dill and cumin from the garden while ignoring the important teachings of the Law. Interestingly, that would surely include the responsibility to manage wealth in a socially responsible fashion as Moses said habitually refusing to do so is actually a capital offense (Ex 21:28). Now that’s important! 

Giving however begins with your needs as a child of a loving God. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who wrote The Wealth of Nations, actually achieved fame by writing A Theory of Moral Sentiments. It begins by saying that regardless of how selfish we humans seem, we actually have a very deep need to see our neighbors do well, even if we get nothing out of it other than the pure pleasure of seeing it. That’s far more spirituality than we usually hear on pledge card Sunday.

Still, even soulful giving hardly satisfies our responsibilities as stewards. Jesus clearly knew the difference between giving and stewarding treasure. He taught that if we are about to “give” at the altar and remember a neighbor has something against us, we should go away and make peace with that neighbor before coming back to give. No, we don’t hear that too often these days. But like the prophets, Jesus knew the sacrifice of selfishness in our daily lives was the sacrifice God preferred, not simply cash in the Temple. Jesus also said our hearts will always be where the “treasure” we steward for ourselves is, not where the money we gave went too. As one corporate leader has said, tithing is simply about what we give away; stewardship is also about what we keep. Try this: Give to Focus on the Family to stop the spread of casino gambling but invest your IRA into casino stocks. Open the paper the next morning and see if your heart is sad or glad that your casino company is prospering. In short, if our treasure is invested in our culture, our hearts will be that of cultural Christians.

That’s why I specialize in stewarding all the financial resources that belong to God. That even includes areas like trying to pay the full amount of taxes I owe each year without being a grump, as Paul commanded in Romans 13. Yes, I’m still working on that one. But I know finance is only one dimension of stewardship, and far from the most important one at that.  Watching Sir John Templeton grow old, as my father never had the chance to do, convinced me that time is far, far more than money. In fact, the less time we have left, the more money we usually have. If possible, we would gladly trade it for more time. So I decided twenty-five years ago to imitate John and use one-half of my time for ministry and one-half for business. But I found the hound of heaven to be a jealous God. The more time I gave, the more God wanted. So I soon realized that God wanted all my time, as well as all my talent. So my investment practice and my ministry were soon “integrated.” That causes both “worlds” enormous indigestion. I lose a lot of business and ministry opportunities as Americans, and probably pastors most of all, are so skeptical of people who actually mix faith and life. Wall Street thinks I’m totally nuts. 

I’m not. When I was exploring seminary about the same time my son was born, the psychologist told me I had a very distant relationship with my father. He knew dad was an entrepreneur who was loving but always working, a cultural characteristic that has afflicted men since we left our family farms and began working in factories and offices. He also knew dad had died without my receiving “the blessing” of biblical times. Both caused a sense of loneliness deep in my soul, even if they drove me at work. Not wanting my son to grow up with that spiritual poverty, I moved my office into my home. An unintentional by-product is that I greatly reduced what we now call my “carbon footprint” by no longer driving to work each day. Sherry, who had worked in the marketplace to that point, did the same by coming home to school Garrett.

As I have less and less time on earth, I realize the blessings of those days could never be matched by corner offices, titles and pension plans. Sure there were financial costs, assuming I could have stayed sane while living in two worlds and thinking with two minds. Stewards should never fail to estimate those. My best friend in management training school, who was a Christian, ran the huge Wall Street firm last year, as I predicted he would. His annual bonus was probably more than my accumulated net worth. Even in my far lower orbit, I produced one-half the commissions last year that I did when I left the major firm twenty-five years ago. Adjusted for inflation, they were probably one-fourth. Yet by any standard other than Wall Street’s, I was still blessed beyond my wildest expectations as a youth. My wife has now put up with me for thirty years. My son and I are close. I have time to write, speak and serve African orphans and on boards. On one of those, I served with Ken Lay of Enron. He gave lots of money to ministry but will not be remembered as a great Christian steward.

So God hounds me for even more. The more I’ve seen and church history I’ve studied, the more I’ve realized we are all called to steward the life-enhancing teachings and traditions of the church. Those are under assault from secular humanism on both left and right so we have forgotten many of them. Knowing what had once made the church so relevant to economic life, I also realized the church is in dire need of a Second Reformation. So on counsel of an ordained friend, Sherry and I became Lutherans. My friend knew the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is both evangelical and socially responsible and would meet this old Baptist’s needs for down-home people and polity, as well as my wife’s need for higher liturgy and sacrament. Lutherans tend to be as ecumenical and public-relations oriented as the Amish and Mennonites. So few know that Forbes has estimated Lutheran Social Services is substantially larger than the YMCA, Red Cross and Salvation Army, America’s second, third and fourth largest charities. It is four times Habitat for Humanity. I attribute that to Luther teaching there’s nothing more holy about a priest tending a church than a person plowing a field or tending a home. That theology is known as “the priesthood of all believers” and is another idea we desperately need to resurrect, even in the ELCA at times. 

Just as importantly for me, Luther also launched the first Reformation after hearing a fundraiser named Tetzel preach the ungodly theology that we can achieve heaven by simply giving some money to the institutional church. Ironically, Tetzel was fundraising for St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, one of our most treasured buildings today. But Christ knew even that could be destroyed very quickly. So the importance of the project did not prevent Luther from penning his 95 Theses that night and supposedly posted them on the door of his church in Wittenburg. Depending on how you read them, between a fourth and a third are about the church’s poor stewardship theology, which was nevertheless quite effective for fundraising. Yet Luther soon discovered even his own parishioners liked the idea that simply giving a few coins is all it takes to get into heaven. Luther also discovered church leaders’ self-interest caused them to like the theology even more. It was famously said that he was attacked by the church the rest of his life as he had touched the crown of the pope and the bellies of the monks. But it’s my guess that he was blessed by Christ. After all, when Jesus also essentially reformed God’s wayward church, he whipped Pharisees and cleansed the Temple of money changers. The examples of both Christ and Luther might suggest the modern church will never be relevant until it deals with money. That, in turn, might free all our time and talents for God’s work. 

Ironically, our Jewish and Catholic friends seem to have learned. During the eighties, the only person who asked me about investment ethics was a Jewish lady who became a dear friend. The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops has confessed this in a pastoral letter: “Concentrating on one specific obligation of stewardship, even one as important as church support, could make it harder--even impossible--for people to grasp the vision. It could imply that when the bishops get serious about stewardship, what they really mean is simply giving money.” And before he died, John Paul said, “The decision to invest in one place rather than another, in one productive sector rather than another, is always a moral and cultural choice.”

So the challenge we face today may not be the ones that Jesus and Luther faced. The real challenge may be with the newer branches of Christianity. I believe they too are quite popular today largely as they demand so little in the way of stewardship. The November 2009 issue of Christianity Today contains an article about J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, who has long battled “prosperity theology.” In it, he says: “Martin Luther had to say something, or they were going to keep selling indulgences. Now we have that going on in our midst. If someone says ‘Send your $100 to be saved,’ that is selling indulgences, and there are people doing that on Trinity Broadcasting Network.” If we realize that’s essentially, if unwittingly, also going on in most conservative churches, and many mainline churches as well, we just might ignite that reformation. 
***
Gary Moore has a degree in political science and thirty years of Wall Street experience. He once thought of attending seminary to study the moral and spiritual foundations of political-economy and personal finance but discovered they rarely teach it anymore, which is why churches rarely mention the subject. He has authored five books on moral finance, the last being Faithful Finances 101 from the John Templeton Foundation Press. He is affiliated with National Planning Corp, member FINRA/SIPC, but these ideas are his alone. See financialseminary.org.

Please note, this article represents Class Five of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law
that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways.” —Will Rogers

I confess to being one of the worst, or greatest if you’re a man, car men ever. I even bought a car recently whose sticker price was a hundred thousand dollars. (Don’t stop reading. I didn’t pay that!!) While I struggled with the money I spent, I didn’t struggle at all with God. I’ve learned that may be the most important stewardship concept I share with Christians who’ve graduated from financial elementary school through university and want to mature to the financial seminary. Here’s why.

I became a teenager during the muscle car days of the mid-sixties. My first real car--that is one I didn’t have to share with my dad--was a slightly used 1968 Camaro SS 350 with bucket seats, four on the floor, red stripe tires, and Crager chrome reverse wheels. It was just the toy to bring a shy young country boy out of his shell. I bought it from a guy who’d re-upped in Vietnam and made me one very special deal on it. That is, I was a vulture capitalist who stole it. Yet my struggle had started earlier in life; so it wasn’t pure joy for me despite the rubber it would burn. 

That feeling began a couple years earlier when my dad literally walked away from a slightly used Cadillac by telling the salesman: “If I drove a Cadillac, they wouldn’t let us in the parking lot of our Baptist church.” And that wasn’t a negotiating tactic. We went to a tiny country church and there was only one neighbor we knew who drove a Cadillac. He was the only millionaire in our county and was no Christian. I’ve always wondered if he even wanted to be as he might not get to enjoy his Cadillac. (Let me quickly state that many fine Baptists now drive Cadillacs!) Anyway, dad then bought a slightly used (yeah, there’s a definite pattern there) Buick Electra 225 Limited for more than the Cadillac would have cost. I’ve always thought he really wanted the Cadillac. But at least he could go to church, which was far more important to him. I admired that but still thought it a shame.

The first stewardship lesson my parents taught me was that you can’t eat your seed corn and plant it too. It’s also the longest lesson as mom’s now eighty-two and still reminds me of that reality each time we get together. (God help Wendy’s if they mess with the dollar menu!) And they planted so much there were times we didn’t usually have all we might want to “eat” when I was a kid. That is, while they married penniless, they invested in a farm, John Deere dealership, gas station, trucking company and goodness knows what else I didn’t know about. But first, they always tithed at least ten percent. I’ll never stop hearing mom say, “God can do more with 90% than you can do with 100%.” If two Christians ever deserved to drive a used Cadillac if they wanted to after planting rather than eating their first twenty years together, it was mom and dad. 

When I got out of college before reporting to the Army, I worked for a few months doing economic research for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in the shadow of the capitol building in Washington. I roomed with a soldier who worked in the Pentagon. Quickly learning my weakness for cars, he came home one night telling me I should buy his commanding officer’s old car. He had just made general and was going to buy a sporty new Mercedes. That meant he needed to sell his twenty year old Mercedes sport coup. Yes, a 1959 190SL; the two-seat convertible. It was white with red leather and four on the floor. So I sold the Camaro; bought the Mercedes for $1,800; drove it four years with no mechanical issues; and sold it to a friend for $10,000. That seemed like cheap transportation. 

When I married my VW bug-driving fiancée, we moved to Florida with no money. We literally could not afford insurance for two years on the old compact cars we had. But we started giving and planting. And by the mid-eighties, we could afford a very nice car as God had planted me on Wall Street at the beginning of a bull market. I noticed the dollar was unusually strong from the high interest rates of Paul Volker. That meant ours would buy a lot more overseas than it would here. So I imported a slightly used Mercedes 280 SL directly from Germany and paid cash for it. It was red with saddle interior; so my young son and I even got to drive the queen of the Strawberry festival in the parade each year! We put 160,000 miles on it and sold it for what we had paid for it. Again, that seemed like cheap, but fun, transportation.

It was about that time that I drove into the wall of Wall Street (having it “all” and realizing it was meaningless without God) and thought of going to seminary. When I didn’t and began studying stewardship instead, I thought I had to get rid of the Mercedes. It seemed like every Christian financial author I read made clear connections between righteousness and the make and age of the car I drove. But during all my soul-searching, my global perspective kept reminding me that hundreds of millions of my fellow Christians do not even own a bicycle. So when I wrote my first book, I included a throwaway line about knowing ethical Christians who drove expensive cars and ethically-challenged Christians who drove old cars, so I concluded God probably wasn’t all that concerned with what we drove. When Larry Burkett reviewed the book for Moody magazine, he emphasized that quip. After I got to know Larry, I learned his primary hobby was restoring cars and he was irritated by the car thing too.

I later worked with a fellow who had a picture of Jesus above his desk. He drove a VW bug but was still, let’s say, less than reflective of that fellow who rode that donkey into Jerusalem centuries ago. Despite his thrift with cars, he still owes me enough for me to buy a very nice car. But I haven’t heard from him in years. It wasn’t much later that I was invited to speak at an economic conference that Chuck Colson put on. Jack and Joanne Kemp were in attendance. As I had served on Jack’s board of advisors, he knew what I taught. So Joanne came to my session. When we all got together afterward, Joanne exclaimed rather excitedly, “He says we can drive a nice car.” I realized two of the most wonderful and successful Christians I knew were struggling with the car issue. Ironically, after Jack lost his bid with Bob Dole to be vice-president, we asked him when he knew it was over. He replied he didn’t until the morning after the election when he got into the back seat of his limo and realized there was no driver! 

About the same time, I was serving on Robert Schuller’s board at The Crystal Cathedral. It’s no secret that one of Bob’s very affluent friends gave him a limousine so Bob could read, write and chat while being driven around that parking lot called Los Angeles. Of course, I was expected to do a little fundraising for Bob. But virtually all my affluent Christian friends were friends or disciples of my mentor Sir John Templeton. And John famously insisted on driving old cars. A hotel I was staying at in Nassau once insisted I take its limousine to see John. I sweated all the way down the island and told him I’d rather a fearsome God see me in all my wretchedness than for a Calvinist like him to see me in a limousine! Late in his life when he was worth hundreds of millions, I strongly encouraged John to buy a new car. He had driven to meet me while holding the driver’s door shut with his left hand. He couldn’t even close the door once he got to his club, where we were to eat lunch. Not too much later, John splurged on a new Kia, as I remember. Humor aside, it seemed that each time I asked John or his friends for some funding for Bob, the subject of cars popped up.

Sir John also has a cousin who lives in my town. He is a devout Southern Baptist and a very successful Toyota dealer. So he has established a foundation that is quite generous to Christian causes. But my guess is he won’t be funding too many financial ministries that teach good Christians always drive old cars. He understands the “paradox of thrift”; that one man’s thrift can cost another man’s job.

And so it goes, seemingly in the lives of all American Christians, whether over cars, as in my case, or houses or something else. We might quote the Bible as saying man looks on the outside but God looks at the inside; but we don’t really seem to believe it. But I guess that’s why I still need to tell you that I only paid about a third of sticker for my Mercedes, even though it only has twenty thousand miles on it. I honestly intend for it to be my last car. (The sounds you hear are my wife and son laughing!) And my rationale is that with all the deficits Washington is running these days, it’s a fairly good hedge against the dollar. Yet deep in my soul, I know that’s not why I bought it. Truth is I’ve always figured I can live in my car but I can’t drive my house. (Sorry honey.) And I truly admire the human genius and creativity behind the automobile, foreign or domestic. It’s at least as impressive as all those tractors dad supplied to me when I was tending the farm after he became an entrepreneur. Yeah, I know I’ll little resemble Jesus to most of my Christian friends when I drive it to church. Guess we’ll always look on the outside. But I know where God is looking; and I’m all right with that these days. And I can always buy a John Deere cap to wear while driving. 

There is a legitimate financial message in all this. I believe that what is really changing in America is that consumerism is dying. We may become more European in that we may no longer be what we buy, as I thought I was when I bought that muscular and quick Camaro when in college. That could be very good for the budget and therefore spiritual life, of my son, even though he spends enough on cars to remind us that nut hasn’t fallen too far from the tree. But I still hope that he, and you, will always appreciate and enjoy the beautiful things of this world. the creativity of human beings, and that we are truly created in the image of an awesome God.

My awesome dad joined that God long ago. Dad died from cancer a few months short of retiring at age fifty-five. The only Cadillac he ever rode in was his hearse. And when I recently bought my awesome mother a slightly used Lexus, I found she’s afraid she’s now too old to enjoy it by actually taking it out of the garage. Let’s pray that “stewardism,” or the spiritually-infused capitalism I hope is coming, re-prioritizes spiritual riches over material riches in the decades to come. But let’s remember the incarnation of Christ insists they are eternally and intimately connected. 

Please note, this article is Class Four of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“Most people who time the market are terrible at it: Cash flows into stock funds hit peaks in early 2000 and ebbed as the market hit bottom. This kind of activity is incredibly costly. From 1989 through 2008, the S&P 500 gained a bit more than 8% a year, but the average equity fund investor earned less than 2% thanks to lousy market timing.”
Fortune
December 21, 2009

You’ve finally listened to the wisdom of ministries telling you to pay off your credit cards. You’re giving more. Like the typical American, your savings rate has increased from 2% to 6%. You read The Automatic Millionaire, as suggested by a major ministry a couple years ago and have even prayed for the stocks in your IRA to go up, as suggested by The Prayer of Jabez. But it’s smaller than it was two years ago. Has your faith failed you? Not at all. You’re simply learning the hard way what humanity has insisted on learning the hard way since Plato compared life to living in a cave. (Google “Plato’s Cave.”)

Plato essentially said most of us live as if we are sitting in a dark cave. There is a fire behind us and other people are making shadows on the walls in front of us. We believe the shadows are reality. Occasionally, someone like Jesus--but perhaps Lincoln, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King--strolls into the cave to lead us to the light. To paraphrase, Jesus was the way out of the cave, the truth rather than the shadows, and life in the light rather than the darkness.

Unfortunately two things prevent our following them: We are bound to our chairs by having grown accustomed to the darkness and shadows, and the people making the shadows usually kill the enlightened ones. They do so as they like the way things are. Their incentives can be political, which is usually about money sooner or later, but it’s usually about money directly, particularly in a capitalist society.

For example, The New York Times used to run a very effective ad. It was striking in its simplicity: a full page with a small world with a crack running through it. A tiny man was sitting on top. The caption below simply read “The Times Demand the Times.” The implication was that this investment counselor couldn’t survive the problems of life unless I subscribed to their publication.

But my mentor Sir John Templeton, the Rhodes Scholar turned legendary mutual fund manager who was often called the “Dean of Global Investing,” was telling us we’d never invest wisely if we read the popular press. He even suggested most newspapers would soon go out of business as they were almost exclusively focused on the bad news that sells papers rather than the good news that shapes a richer life for us.

Of course, we Christians know “the world,” operates that way. That’s why we can depend on religious leaders we know. Wrong. In fact, Jesus knew the Pharisees made so many shadows he never had time to fight with anyone else. But surely we know better as we have that biblical Truth. Wrong again. The more you listen to Christian media the more you are likely to think the Bible, our real source of Truth, is about how life was, rather than is.

For example, the January 2010 issue of Christianity Today contains a story entitled “Chicken Little Was Wrong.” It begins by cautioning cave dwellers that: “The statistics we most love to repeat may be leading us to make bad choices about the church.” It then quotes a leading religious sociologist as saying: “Why do evangelicals recurrently abuse statistics? My observation is that they are usually trying desperately to attract attention and raise people’s concern in order to mobilize resources and action for some cause….Evangelical leaders and organizations routinely use descriptive statistics in sloppy, unwarranted, misrepresenting, and sometimes absolutely preposterous ways.”

So what’s that got to do with your IRA? Everything. During the early nineties, the Dow was at 3000 and I was telling as many evangelicals as possible that John Templeton was predicting a strong economy and roaring bull market. And being an advocate of debt-free living, as well as a fan of “Austrian economics,” John was most aware of the federal debt. But few listened as they had been reading books about the federal debt being a giant that would prevent our entering the Promised Land.

In the late nineties, John began saying that even though he believed the Dow would rise to one million during the coming century, he thought investors would be lucky to break even during the coming decade. Good advice again. Sadly, few heard him as they were preoccupied with tapes and books about Y2K being another giant.

And in March 2009 when the Dow was in the dumps, Dick Towner asked me to come to Willow Creek and address perceptions that America was already in Great Depression Two. Fortunately, I explained why I thought John would be buying some stocks. The media was uniformly negative. Everyone seemed to “know” the federal debt had finally shook the economy to pieces. And the American consumer was “drowning in a sea of red ink.” So the stock market could go nowhere. Wrong again. It rose 70% during the coming seven months.

As we discussed the federal debt in class one, let me shine a bit of light on the American consumer being broke; for that is commonly accepted as truth when it comes to why we don’t give more, as well as why many of us are again fearfully hoarding trillions of dollars in very low-paying CD’s when they could be creating jobs and so on. 

There is a scholarly new book on the market entitled Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money. It finally explains what I’ve been trying to tell the church for years that analysts, like the Federal Reserve and Faire Isaac, routinely say about credit card debt.

“One commonly cited statistic in the media is that the average American owes more than $8,000 in credit card debt. That kind of liability, if true, would certainly get in the way of more generous religious and charitable financial giving. The evidence, however, suggests that, while a fairly small minority of Americans really is in serious credit card debt, the majority are not. Numbers like $8,000 are inflated in the calculation of mean averages by a relatively few people who are in huge debt.”

Reality is that the median credit card debt, the one that affects you, me and our charities, is much lower and very manageable. Now, I’m not saying credit management isn’t highly important. But it’s not enough. We need to be more holistic in our teaching. And it’s in our interests. If God’s people had heard as much from true economists and investment counselors, like John Templeton, as credit ministries, they might have more money to give today and invest to be able to give more in the future. 

Unfortunately, we won’t accomplish that if we simplistically ask “What would Jesus do?” He’d always sell anything he had and give it to the poor, as he advised the rich young ruler who was seeking perfection. Pretending we’re investing as Jesus would might boost the egos of some Christian investment advisors and
bring a few naïve dollars into their firms. But it dramatically distorts the nature of God by creating God in our own image. God knows any advisor and any company they might invest in have fallen far short of perfection.

But Jesus was realistic about human imperfection and respectful of the prophets. So I believe he wouldn’t mind if we imperfect investors ask: “What would Jeremiah do?” You may remember that Jeremiah once invested in a field (Chapter 32). But he didn’t do so when things looked sunny. He did when things looked very, very cloudy. That took a lot of faith. That’s why he did it at that time, rather than hoard his money until things looked sunnier. Still, I’m sure that he, as John Templeton famously preached, knew that prices are usually their lowest when things look their worst.

The corollary is that prices are usually their highest when things look their sunniest, as during early 2000. The political shadow makers were talking about Washington running surpluses that would allow it to pay off the federal debt. The financial shadow makers were talking about the “automatic” riches to be made in internet stocks as the Dow streaked toward 36,000, or even 100,000. So investors were telling the Paine Webber annual survey they expected to make 18% annually during the coming decade. But of course, when the market bottomed in March 2009, surveys revealed investors were their most pessimistic in history.

So how do you know in our media saturated world who is being prophetic and who is selling shadows? Begin by reflecting on Jeremiah 11 and 12. They talk about the plots on Jeremiah’s life just before he asks God why wicked men always prosper and succeed on this earth. Then remember Jesus’ caution to religious leaders to be careful when everyone speaks well of them as our Gospel of love is irritating to both those who want to fearfully hoard and/or greedily get rich quick. That is, Christianity’s hard but most enriching truth is that popular, successful shadow makers are very rarely prophets.

Please note, this article is Class Three of a series. Other Classes are available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“There are doubtless as many ways of associating Jesus Christ
with the responsible life as there have been ways of associating him
with the ideal life or the obedient one…The Christian ethos so uniquely
exemplified in Christ himself is an ethics of universal responsibility.”
—H. Richard Niebuhr
The Responsible Self

Last month’s column did a little preaching about the new philosophy of political-economics recently developed by secular libertarians. We focused on Ayn Rand who termed us Christians “sacrificial animals,” as well as Nobel economist Milton Friedman who taught the only social responsibility of a business is to make money.

Had either actually worked in the canyons of capitalism, or Wall Street, they might have better understood that even modern capitalism begins with us: 1) sacrificing consumption and 2) saving in a way that 3) creates a more abundant life for others as ourselves. Obviously, sacrifice, saving and ethical wealth creation are central concepts of the Christian faith. Trust lubricates the process. Lose them and you lose the foundations of the abundant life, as we learned in the recent credit crisis. 

There’s a scholarly new biography of Ayn Rand entitled Goddess of the Market. It’s written by Jennifer Burns, a professor of political science. She explains Rand’s philosophy very clearly: “Rand was blazing a trail distinct from the broader conservative movement, as indicated by the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness. Whereas traditional conservatism emphasized duties, responsibilities, and social connectedness, at the core of the right-wing ideology that Rand spearheaded was a rejection of moral obligations to others.”

Burns explains the political and theological battles between God-loving conservatives who believe we have a moral responsibility to love our neighbors as ourselves, and the elitist disciples of Rand who don’t think so.

For example, in the area of charity, Rand famously told Playboy magazine: “What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.” She consciously worked to turn her values, like selfishness, into virtues, as indicated by The Virtue of Selfishness.

The result, as we now know, was stated by Nobel economist Daniel McFadden in the August 21, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal is:

“What’s been lost is the idea that a banker has some responsibility to protect the client’s interest.”

Yet it wasn’t “lost”; it was moralized away so our cultural elite might make a buck on Wall Street and our politicians might maintain power. The rest of us are now quite skeptical, perhaps cynical, of not only them, but other elites as well. 

Yet you can still go to the website of Friedman’s contemporary at the University of Chicago, Nobel economist Gary Becker, and find he’s still preaching the philosophy that businesses basically have no social responsibilities other than to make money through whatever is legal. (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/ 2005/07/do-corporations.html.)

Adam Smith, who most businesspeople consider an advocate of laissez-faire economics as they’ve only read The Wealth of Nations, began his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments with this thought about being human: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” It’s the ageless story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim. 

Now we should meddle by addressing our personal finances. We on Main Street and Church Street usually find Rand and Friedman’s philosophies to be abhorrent. Yet very few of us consider the social consequences of our investments. In the words of noted Wall Street critic Michael Lewis in The New York Times magazine on June 6, 2004:

“The investor likes to think of himself as a force for honesty and transparency, but he has proved in recent years that he prefers a lucrative lie to an expensive truth. And he’s very good at letting corporate management know it. Investors, in their short-sightedness, encourage companies to neglect their social responsibilities.”

In the church, this is accomplished by the theology of Andrew Carnegie that it’s no sin to get rich as long as we don’t die rich, or that we can make money even as robber barons assuming we give it all away before we die. That theology created enormous misery for Christian CEO’s like Ken Lay of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom and several people I know. Yet some ministries still argue we can be Christian in portions of our lives, or times of our lives, without being in other portions and times. 

During the nineties, two of the most visible evangelical planners in the country, who always strongly advocated charity, actually discouraged the consideration of social responsibilities when investing. They usually made the case that ethics simply have to cost you money, not realizing that simply investing for the most money possible is precisely the philosophy of Rand. Today, the website of one of the most popular financial celebrities who promotes “Bible-based” debt management also discourages ethical investing.

The Bible suggests ethics must be a part of every act of wealth management. (See particularly Ex 21:28 which says the habitual failure to manage wealth, even the relatively small wealth of biblical times, in a responsible fashion was a capital offense, and Ex 21:33, 22:25, 23:4, 23:9 and 23:10). 

So how might we be faithful with stocks, bonds and CD’s rather than sheep and vineyards? First, imitate the holistic consciousness of Christ; and understand that’s not simply sound theology but sound economics. It’s highly doubtful the two hundred billion dollars of charity we give each year can repair the damage that can be done by the world’s two hundred trillion dollars of capital. Not only our giving but the use of our capital should be guided by the teachings of Christ.

There is peace of mind in understanding that we might need less welfare, government housing, and food banks if we invest in beneficial businesses that create jobs, affordable housing and so on. We might also need fewer bailouts if we invest in responsible banks and investment firms, rather than blindly seeking huge returns.

Second, do no harm to your neighbors. Simply look at the holdings of your mutual funds and see if you want your children utilizing their products. Are they irresponsibly creating problems for society, or taxpayers if you prefer that term? If so, consider socially/biblically responsible funds (socialfunds.com or dlsconsult.com.)

Third, do some good for your neighbors, particularly the jobless and poor. For example, there are smaller “community development” banks and credit unions that responsibly finance a better life for people from the inner-cities to Appalachian areas to Native Americans. You can now even earn market returns by lending your money to “micro-enterprise” or “micro-lending” organizations, including Christian ministries like Opportunity International on whose board I have served. It will lend your money as tiny loans to people who want to create absolutely life-changing jobs in the Third World.

Next, do this holistically rather than politically. You may hear conservative planners say you should assure the companies you invest in do not make contributions to liberal causes like Planned Parenthood. That’s fine. But the primary concern of biblical prophets was opposing the prophets of Baal. We might too if we’re not blinded by politics. 

For example, John Allison, the chairman of BB&T bank is a devout disciple of Rand. He recently told The New York Times that Rand’s philosophy will “be the dominant one in this country in 25 years.” According to Jennifer Burn’s book (page 297), the bank’s foundation helps that happen by being a major donor to the Ayn Rand Institute, which puts her philosophies into our schools, though Bibles are still unwelcome.

Of course, that funding originates with those who do business with the bank. In short, understand the Christ consciousness realizes we’ve all fallen short but we shouldn’t encourage that fallen nature. 

Finally, understand there is hope for America, as exemplified by the number of recent economic books suggesting some have learned their lessons about the need for our responsible morality. The senior editors of The Economist magazine have recently authored a book entitled God is Back and Robert Fogel, another Nobel-laureate, has authored The Fourth Great Awakening. Only one of those three authors is a believer but each sees major changes ahead that should be good for our nation’s businesses and financial system.

Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society specifically denounced Friedman’s teaching and suggested we are headed for a responsibility-based society. Last but not least, the Financial Times of London has recently published a series on The Future of Capitalism. One article by Lord Richard Layard entitled “Now Is the Time for a Less Selfish Form of Capitalism” said:

“Accelerated economic growth is not a goal for which we should make large sacrifices. In particular, we should not sacrifice the most important source of happiness, which is the quality of human relationships. We have sacrificed too many of these in the name of efficiency and productivity growth. Most of all, we have sacrificed values. In the 1960’s, 60% of adults said they believed ‘people could be trusted.’ Today, the figure is 30%, in both Britain and the U.S….So we need a trend away from excessive individualism and towards greater social responsibility. That is the kind of capitalism we want.”

I coined the word “stewardism” for our ancient kind of responsible capitalism to acknowledge its biblical roots and distinguish it from Rand’s new selfish and irresponsible kind. I hope, no pray, it’s the kind of capitalism Christians still want. 

Please note, this article is Class Two of a series. Class One is available for viewing under the “Classes” tab.

“Only compassion can save--the wordless knowledge of my own responsibility to whatever is being done to the least of God’s children. That is knowledge of the spirit.” —Peter Drucker

During the recent election, most of my conservative clients were concerned then-Senator Obama would try to “save” the world’s economy with greatly increased government spending. The senator even joked during the Al Smith dinner that it was not true that he had been born in Bethlehem; that he had instead been born on Krypton, where Superman was born. Few clients thought even that more humanistic role would save them. 

Yet no one seemed concerned when the cover of the November 8, 2008 Forbes, The Capitalist Tool, featured former presidential candidate Steve Forbes and the headline, “How Capitalism Will Save Us.” But despite my working on Wall Street and never having had a government job other than being an Army officer, it gave me pause.

During the mid-nineties, revered management consultant Peter Drucker wrote a prophetic book entitled Post-Capitalist Society precisely as he didn’t think capitalism would save us. Peter, as he liked to be called, had literally told Forbes magazine that executive compensation was “a disgusting spectacle” that reminded him of “pigs at the trough.” And he suggested there was anger brewing that would threaten our economic system. Though I was an advocate of moral markets and limited government, I had to sadly agree as I had too had witnessed egregious compensation at Wall Street firms. 

It was about that time I coined the word “stewardism” to distinguish markets integrated with The Puritan Gift, a book by two friends, from the “free” markets of modern capitalism. As St. Paul explained the paradox, we must be “slaves” to that ethic so we can live in true freedom and prosper.

During class one I mentioned that contrary to conventional wisdom, it was the earning of interest (Ex 22:25) and not debt itself (Lk 6:35) that was forbidden by the Bible. Yet Christianity has long grown along-side ideas that germinated in three soils of the Middle East: Greek, Roman and Judaic. Most Greeks, like Plato, were socialists, or communists, but essentially what we call “liberals.” Today, they’d favor governmental health care, Social Security and so on.

The Romans, like Cicero, were “conservative,” believing the only true role of government was to protect wealth with large armies. Today they’d also favor the FDIC, Homeland Security, border fences and so on. But the economic thought of Israel transcended both human approaches by claiming God owns wealth and we stewards should manage it within a Judeo-Christian moral framework. 

Faith & Wealth by Justo Gonzalez says those three ideas begat three different ideas about the earning of interest, and therefore capitalism. He quotes Socrates as saying the wealthy “do not want to prohibit the extravagance of the young (as) their intention is to make loans to such imprudent people…The money makers continue to inject the toxic sting of their loans wherever they can, and to ask for high rates of interest.” Apparently the Greeks allowed the earning of interest but considered it morally dubious. Yet Gonzales also wrote: “All the great writers of Roman antiquity are conservative (and) since the earliest of times, the maximum rate had been fixed at 1% simple interest per month, and this was generally the legal limit throughout the history of Roman legislation.” As the Bible attests, Romans weren’t known for loving their neighbors. C.S. Lewis confirmed Gonzalez’s perspective when he wrote these words in Mere Christianity:

“There is one bit of advice to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews of the Old Testament and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending at interest--what we call investment--is the basis of our whole system [capitalism]…It does not necessarily follow that we are wrong. That is where we need the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three civilizations had agreed in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.”

Notice three points: First, Lewis did not include the Romans as being concerned with charging interest. Second, he said the “great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages” had been. The Roman Catholic Church forbade earning interest until around 1500 AD. It was actually the Protestant Reformers who morally legitimated the earning of interest, if interest did not exceed 5% annually, the loan was for productive uses and not consumer purposes, and borrower and lender shared the risk equally. That change in moral thought helped legitimate banking, and therefore capitalism. Yet the Reformers continued to insist on interest-free loans to the poor. Luther actually taught: “Money lenders who do not want to put up with these terms are as pious as robbers and murderers.”

The Puritans brought that morality to America. In God and Mammon in America, Robert Wuthnow of Princeton tells the story of a Puritan merchant named Robert Keayne. In 1639, Keayne was thrown out of the First Church of Boston and was tried by the Commonwealth for dishonoring the name of God. His sin? Greed. He was earning 6%, 2% too much! 

Prominent mutual fund manager John Bogel recently began his book Enough with this quote: “The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence…Over the past thirty years, much of that has been shredded.”

Doug Meeks, who authored God The Economist, believes the church helped to shred that ethic. He wrote: “The way stewardship is practiced in North America often has little to do with the Bible. It stems primarily from the most influential American theologian, Andrew Carnegie.” Carnegie is famous for saying a man who dies rich dies disgraced. But during his time, he was considered a ruthless businessman.

Teddy Roosevelt once said: “I’ve tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for one who makes a god of mere money-making.” It is no secret that some of the most notorious CEO’s of recent years--such as Ken Lay of Enron with whom I served on a Christian board; Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom; and Richard Scrushy of Health South--were highly visible CEO’s who also gave substantial monies to churches and ministries.

The summer edition of the most conservative Claremont Review of Books confessed other conservatives have consciously worked to keep
God out of American business: “Many of the most visible capitalist intellectuals--giants like Milton Freidman, Fredrich Hayek, and Ludwig Von Mises--embraced a new moral case for capitalism that decisively rejected the old one based on the natural and divine significance of the individual. This new moral case was, either explicitly or implicitly, utilitarian and anti-metaphysical.”

Freidman was the thinking man’s economist. But some of us wondered about his heart and soul. He once said, “The church tends to believe it should exercise control not only over the spiritual realm but also over the material realm, and that’s where all the difficulties arise.” In Post-Capitalist Society, Drucker pointedly termed as “futile” Freidman’s famous dictum that, “The only social responsibility of a business is to make money.”

I once wrote The Wall Street Journal that Freidman’s term for the Third World poor, “under-utilized labor units,” did little to encourage ethics, much less compassion, in global markets. And our credit crisis and recession were caused precisely by the new capitalism rejecting the Judeo-Christian ethic and foolishly believing lenders could charge even higher interest rates to sub-prime borrowers than to prime borrowers like myself. 

Yet the most secularizing of these capitalist philosophers has undoubtedly been Ayn Rand, mentor to Alan Greenspan, junk-bond king Michael Milken and tens of thousands on Wall Street and in corporate America. The Library of Congress has rated her book Atlas Shrugged the second most influential in America after the Bible.
That’s ironic as both Chuck Colson and Martin Marty agree they pretty much say the opposite, particularly about selfishness, which Rand deemed a “virtue.” At the end of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s superhuman CEO savior makes the sign of the dollar across the world. It symbolized the moral purpose of our lives is now to make money, rather than to love God and neighbor. Yet in 1994, The Economist said Rand’s ideas were most popular with economic libertarians (who disdain government) and were instrumental in Reaganomics. Yet Rand taught “every argument for God rests on a false metaphysical premise,” charity is “not a moral duty,” and most importantly that capitalism and Christianity “cannot exist in the same man or in the same society.” She also taught that “abortion is a moral right” and had a very public affair. Not surprisingly, she died lonely and very depressed. Still, the head of BBT bank, a Rand disciple, recently told The New York Times that her philosophy of selfishness will soon dominate America. But while most church leaders ignore the root of all evil, evangelical leaders really avoid Rand. 

So what do you do if you too are frustrated about choosing between Nancy Pelosi and AIG for your health care and/or Barney Frank and Wall Street for your retirement? Begin by understanding the Claremont Review’s statement: “Nor did [these capitalist philosophers] have much to say to social conservatives, who are an indispensable element of the political coalition upon which capitalism’s survival depends.” It is a false political choice that we must become Greek if we’re tired of pagan Rome. There has always been a third way of stewardism. 

As Drucker wisely counseled, it’s a simple matter of accepting personal responsibility for what happens to neighbor, the least of these, the environment and future generations… when making money as well as giving money.  Wall Street calls that idea “socially responsible investing” (SRI) and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). Drucker, who also taught theology, believed only that sort of love can save us. Finally looking up after all these years of looking left and right while studying political science and working on the Street, I can now see his point.