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TV isn’t just for entertainment, it’s also a valuable conduit for information (and entertainment isn’t out of bounds either … humans need it.)

If a poor family has a couple of 23-inch sets and a basic digital cable account, I’m not going to fault them. On the other hand, if they’re spending their money on a 50-inch LCD screen and signing up for the most expensive cable packages and then complaining about food and shelter costs, that’s their own fault.

But payroll lenders are still vermin no matter what. They target the most vulnerable, who are usually less educated and may not understand what they’re signing up for, and charge them exhorbitant interest. That’s wrong no matter what.

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If Mother Jones is right about their point, God will judge the believers who are involved in this, if indeed they are believers. The church is full of “tares” – weeds that look like wheat. They will not be sorted out till the end of the age.

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On the other hand, I am well acquainted with the abuse of power in the organized church.

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However, the Republican Party in Georgia (where conservative Christians are a major force if not the controlling factor), have been trying mightily to make them legal again.

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The Exodus passage forbids usury against poor people who are part of God’s covenant with Abraham’s descendents. Note the qualifiers: “any of my people that is poor.” NT, that means if you are not charging excessive interest to an impoverished Old Testament Jew, you are not violating any explicit biblical command. WIGLAF was correct. However objectional the practice in principle, the determination of whether a specific transaction is usurious is subjective and context dependent.

For me the issue with this report, as I argued in my prior post, is that the correlation between predatory lending and Christian influence that “Mother Jones” is asserting is created by a disingenuous statistical “cooking of the books”.

““We can be 99% sure that about 56% of the time when the Christian Power goes up, then payday lending per capita also rises.”

This precise sounding percentage rate for something as amorphous as “Christian power” traps the unwary into thinking some definitive statistical finding lends weight to their assertion.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statsitics!” variously attributed to Mark Twain, Benjamin Disraeli

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Whilst working with lower income people for years I came to the conclusion and tried to do something about the fact that people generally do not know how money works. While this is true among middle and upper class people as well, it is especially devastating to the poor.

Poor folks often are underemployed (lack of education, lack of transportation, lack of skills, poor life choices) and as a result don’t have access to well paying jobs.

In a society that has so much pressure to live a certain lifestyle, it erodes a persons resolve to live within their means. While middle and upper income people can get away with a certain degree of money mismanagement because they have a cushion between what their basic needs mandate and the amount of money they make, poor people do not have any cushion but the level of temptation is much the same.

The rate of default on these payday loans are very high. Even though the market will eventually balance itself as more of these institutions open up, I suspect that the charged interest will still be higher than what a client can find at a bank or credit union.

One more thing, do a tour of some of these neighborhoods and you will be confronted with an absence of banks, large grocery stores, WalMarts, Home Depots etc. That’s why I said that in a “warped sort of way they provide a service.”

This lack of big box stores is often being addressed by Korean and Arab small shop owners who are willing to take the risk but charge very high prices for basic commodities. Milk, bread and eggs can be as much as 50% higher because the big box stores don’t want to deal with the liabilities of servicing those communities. And in a “warped sort of way”, these Koreans and Arabs provide a “service” to the commmunity. Where else are you going to get milk, bread and eggs?

That’s why I said that it is part of the systemic dysfunction found in these poor neighborhoods and to isolate only one area as the “key” is to ignore the other parts of the system that contribute to the whole problem.

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Christians who study the Bible and try to live by the spirit of Christ understand that the ‘letter of the law’ can kill but the Spirit gives life. That’s the Bible’s teaching–2 Cor. 3:6. So we tend not to make blanket statements about what is forbidden for all humanity today based on proof texts from the Old Testament. We don’t ignore such passages, but we look for New Testament passages and principles to confirm it and we keep the spirit of the law in mind. We know that the spirit of the law calls us to a HIGHER standard of morality than the letter of the law ever could.

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