First published in 2014 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
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140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ
© 2014 Peter Selby
The right of Peter Selby to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-232-53111-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Phototypeset by Kerrypress Ltd, Luton, Bedfordshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
For
HARVEY GUTHRIE
and in grateful memory of
JOHN AUSTIN BAKER
Mentors Teachers Friends
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
1 Introduction – life in a casino
2 Whatever happened to our money?
3 When money rules
4 From sovereignty to empire – sovereignty sans frontière
5 What is an idol?
6 Money as an idol
7 Mammon’s economy portrayed
8 A merciful economy
9 Faith in the economy
Bibliography
In the decade and a half that has elapsed since I wrote Grace and Mortgage – and indeed in the five years since the book was reissued in response to the financial crisis of 2008 and all that has followed from it – nothing has happened to inspire confidence that fundamental lessons have been learned. There has been a great deal of activity and debate: most notably there has been much discussion of what might be the regulatory changes that would prevent such a crisis from happening again. On the other hand some have for good reason suspected that regulation would not bear the burden that was expected of it unless there was deep change in the underlying corporate culture; without that, some traders and bankers would continue to direct their enormous financial ingenuity towards finding ways around any regulations.
Partly because of that suspicion, but partly perhaps in the hope of avoiding further regulation of their activity, the financial sector has adopted ‘culture’ as one of its most fashionable terms, and most corporate bodies would wish it to be known that they are determined to change their ‘culture’ for the better. Their hope is that what were at best imprudent and at worst immoral activities that had precipitated the crisis of 2008, and in the process done enormous damage to the level of confidence in the financial sector, would be prevented by being very evidently contrary to the approved way of behaving.
However, several commissions and reorganisations later, and with much new mission-statement composition behind us, the level of distrust remains high. There are many reasons for the culture of blame which persists, but there is no doubt about what is a principal cause of this distrust. To put it very simply, in a period where some of the poorest have suffered greatly from the policies which governments have instituted to restore the world economy and where even those who would not think of themselves as poor have experienced a jolt to their expectation of rising living standards, conspicuous salaries and headline bonuses have continued unabated in the financial sector.
While we may consider that the opening question following my Hugh Price Hughes lecture in 2013, ‘Why have no bankers gone to prison?’, is somewhat harsh, and while we may indeed sympathise with the second questioner who asked, ‘What did anyone ever learn by going to prison?’, the sense of injustice is palpable. After all, ‘money talks’, and in this case the message conveyed by the figures seems to be that while something went wrong and a few people sailed rather close to the wind, the rewards available in that sector are fully justified and indeed absolutely necessary if the ‘talent’ required for putting things right is going to be recruited. Leaving aside the obvious question whether the talent that was so evidently involved in creating the mess is the talent we need to get us out of it, the level of anger at the high rewards provided for failure is surely understandable, and the Occupy protests struck a chord with a far wider constituency than those who would normally sympathise with activities of that kind.
So if money continues to talk, and to talk in that way, maybe money itself needs some examining: is there something about money which makes it talk in that way, and prevents that kind of talk from being silenced? After the 2008 crisis was well under way, an eminent person wittily suggested that I should write a follow-up to Grace and Mortgage and call it I Told You So. It is not just the appalling smugness of such a title that rules it out; the fact is that there were far too many gaps in the argument of that book, far too many aspects left unexamined, for me to make such an extravagant claim. That book was overwhelmingly to do with debt, and while debt is a crucial aspect of the crisis that has overtaken humanity it is in many ways a symptom. Debt is, after all, mostly computed in money – if I borrow my neighbour’s lawnmower I am duty bound to return it, but that isn’t usually called a ‘debt’. More important, it is not just that debt is an issue about money but, as will become very clear as the argument of this book proceeds, by far the greatest proportion of our money is in fact debt.
So during the intervening years I have become preoccupied with the issue of money, what it has become and what it now is and does and the language, if you will, that it now talks. In that pursuit I am far from original: many have been working on this theme for far longer than I; some of their writings are referred to later, and there is far more now available than I have had the time or the ability fully to understand. There have been small, often brilliant, always admirably persistent, organisations making the point that money is behind most issues of justice and sustainability. Top of the league among my acquaintance – which is not to say anything negative about others whom I may not know – is the Christian Council for Monetary Justice (http://ccmj.org.uk) and its remarkable Chair, Peter Challen; their gathering together of literature, argument and friends in solidarity has been exceptional, particularly since they carry on with this even when neither corporate life nor academy nor church pays them anywhere near the attention they deserve.
In more recent years, it has been my privilege to be associated with St Paul’s Institute (http://stpaulsinstitute.org.uk), the agency set up by the Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral to seek to be in dialogue with those who work in the field of finance in the City of London. Distinguished work has gone on under its auspices, much of it through the creativity of its successive directors, and my association with that body began with an invitation to speak at an event and then write a series of articles for the Institute website. That invitation has required me to think, discuss and read, and I am enormously grateful for all that my association with the Institute has given me, particularly during the most recent period when I have been allowed to be part of the team which has been leading it, alongside Canon Mark Oakley, the Chancellor of St Paul’s, David Rouch, and the Institute’s Manager, Robert Gordon. The events we have been able to organise have been enormously stimulating, and have without doubt advanced the conversation that needs to happen. As colleagues they have been enormously patient with my riding of hobby horses, and have been kind enough to permit me to use in this book, in adapted form, much of the material that appeared first in those website articles.
For this book is in effect my attempt, with their encouragement and that of others, to draw together the threads of disparate pieces of thinking and writing that I have produced over the years, in the hope of making out of them a more sustained argument. It is not, therefore, a ‘collection of essays’, but it does make use, in adapted form, of lectures and other writings that have appeared before. I have been grateful to the following who have kindly granted me permission to use material which they first published:
The publishers of the Church Times (www.churchtimes.co.uk), for permission to repeat points made in a number of articles which they have been kind enough to commission over the years, and in particular to include an extract from my article ‘Lament for Octavia Hill, which first appeared in the Church Times of 19 April 2011.
The publishers of The Tablet (www.thetablet.co.uk), for permission to use material from an article of mine, ‘Wake up call’, which they published on 4 August 2012.
Bloomsbury Publishing plc for permission to quote from my chapter, ‘The Merciful Economy’ in Alistair McFadyen and Marcel Sarot (eds.), Forgiveness and Truth (T&T Clark, 2001), pp. 99ff.
CAFOD for permission to use material in ‘Trading in Debt’, in Rebecca Dudley and Linda Jones (eds.), Turn the Tables (CAFOD, 2003), pp. 15–18.
I have also gained enormously from the stimulus provided through invitations to speak about the issues examined in this book, and I have gained more than I know from the conversation and questioning which those invitations enabled to happen. In particular, I was honoured to be asked to give two lectures in Westminster Abbey, excerpts of which are included here:
‘Structures of Disdain’, the Gore lecture of 2006, was given by me at the invitation of the Dean and Chapter; and
‘Misestablishment’, the Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture of 2012, I delivered there and at Keble College, Oxford, at the invitation of the lecture Trustees. The texts of both can be found at www.westminster-abbey.org/.
But these formal permissions reflect just a small part of the conversations I have had over the years since the 2008 crisis (‘the tip of the iceberg’ would do justice to the proportion but not to the warmth and fellowship of those many discussions!) and I cannot begin to recall by name all those who have encouraged me to pursue the issues and enriched me by their insights. However, the particular slant of this book, its reflections on and connection with idols and their worship, is one for which I need to take responsibility, and since I am still a member of the St Paul’s Institute team I must make clear that the opinions expressed in this book are my own and not to be regarded as in any sense those of the Institute.
Jan, my wife, has now collected a number of experiences of what it is like to live with me while I am trying to write a book, and the gestation of this one, as well as the background activities associated with involvement in events to do with faith and economics, have continued to cause her to raise questions about what ‘retirement’ might ever mean in my case. It has certainly meant her giving me huge support and understanding during the process; without that this book would not have come to fruition, and for that I am far more grateful than I can say.
It gives me enormous pleasure to dedicate this book to my two most significant mentors and teachers. They have never met each other, but among many things they have in common their intellectual roots lie in the study of the Old Testament; although I have no pretensions to scholarship in that field of study, it will be evident from this book that their presentations of it left an indelible mark on my approach to faith. Neither of them is responsible for inaccuracies that may be apparent in my exegesis, but both of them gave me huge inspiration.
I was in my mid-teens when John Baker, then lecturing in Old Testament at King’s College, London, came to live in our parish and was a regular preacher there. I learned from him that there was nothing more rewarding to think seriously about than Christian faith, and that that faith deserved language of the beauty and directness of which his sermons were such fine examples. Those qualities are evident in his well-known writings; he is also an example to me of the requirement that we follow our arguments to the point where, however inconvenient, they lead to truthful conclusions: whether on nuclear weapons, or on the ordination of women, or on human sexuality, he is well known for refusing to shy away from the conclusions of the Christian argument. When I came to serve as a bishop, John, then Bishop of Salisbury, was never far from my mind, representing so clearly that while bishops can avoid following the Christian argument to an inconvenient conclusion they do not have to do that, and indeed their calling is not to. To have enjoyed so long a friendship with the person to whom I owe the beginnings of my own faith has been a great honour and enrichment. Sadly John died between my writing the book and its publication, and so did not see the text; but it was good to hear from him that he was happy that he should be one of those to whom the book is dedicated.
It was nearly a decade after I met John that Harvey Guthrie, then Professor of Old Testament, and in charge of admissions, welcomed me into the stimulating and challenging environment of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My two years there as a seminarian were life-changing years for which I have always been enormously grateful, but without question Harvey was for me as for many of my fellow students a person who provided seminal interpretations both of ancient texts and of the often turbulent events through which we were living in those days. Making connections between faith and the ‘public square’ is both demanding and inevitably contested; what is certain is that if that is to be done in a way that opens up debate rather than shutting it down the teacher, preacher and minister needs to be deeply involved equally in both text and event as well as in the community of his hearers. That level of involvement led Harvey to a way of teaching and preaching that was immensely memorable for us all, and has been for me a paradigm for the theological enterprise. Again, it is an enormous blessing to have been able to enjoy his friendship for all the decades since.
I hope what is written here is the kind of contribution to the following of the Christian argument that honours what I have received from two people to whose leading in faith and thought I owe so much.
Peter Selby
London, Eastertide 2014
1
Money exercises a spectral power that exceeds all merely human powers. Adapting itself to any desire, it also shapes desire. In the first place, the value of money is transcendent: it is a promise, taken on faith, and only realised to the extent that this faith is acted out in practice in exchange. One cannot hold the value of money in one’s hand, even if one can use the value to pay for things.
Philip Goodchild1
There may be some fashionable semi-philosophical scepticism about the continuous self, but it reflects a culture ... marked by compulsive withdrawal into a world of symbols that can be endlessly exchanged and manipulated, symbols that have lost their anchorage in a genuinely representation-oriented and therefore critical and exploratory engagement with the environment. Not to labour the point this is manifestly part of the toxic fascination of playing games with virtual wealth that has threatened the economic viability of whole nations in recent years.
Rowan Williams2
They have neither knowledge nor understanding; they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
Psalm 82:53
For very few are to be found who are of good cheer, and who neither mourn nor complain if they have not Mammon. This [care and desire for money] sticks and clings to our nature, even to the grave.
Martin Luther4
‘It could be you’
I decided to get to the post office early to avoid (as I thought) a Saturday morning queue to buy some stamps. To my horror, at five minutes before opening time, there was already a long queue. But not for stamps: I had failed to take into account the fact that Saturday was the day to buy a ticket for that evening’s National Lottery draw, and that was what the queue was about.
The faces of those waiting for opening time contrasted dramatically with the invitation they were responding to. The invitation on the board at the head of the queue said, ‘Play the lottery’, over the well-known, downward-pointing, crossed fingers that are the National Lottery logo, often with the strap line, ‘It could be you’. But the faces were definitely not playful, rather grim and bored. They reminded me of the faces I had once seen facing one-arm bandits in Las Vegas as money was being fed, as by a robot, into the coin slot on the machine. The cycle kept being repeated: the coin fed in, the pull on the lever, the lost stake, the next coin. Occasionally there was a win; in that case the coins were gathered up and fed in until they too were exhausted.
The prospective purchasers of the lottery tickets were not (at least not yet) reduced to such robotic behaviour, and lottery tickets lack the addictive quality of the one-arm bandit. Nonetheless the image of the faces in the queue has stayed with me. ‘Play the lottery’? Not at all like any other ‘playing’ we are used to. No smile, no excitement, just waiting to buy the ticket.
Another book about money
This is a book about money, what it has become, what it does and what it represents in our lives. In the years since I wrote about debt and its religious meaning,5 the literature about money has grown vastly, and the implications of the monetary and banking crisis of 2008 and all that has followed from it have been analysed by official commissions, economists, economic historians and many others. The bibliography in this book is but a tiny part of the massive literature that now exists. The 2008 crisis has made money a much more fashionable topic of exploration than it had been, and excellent books like Felix Martin’s Money: The Unauthorised Biography and Niall Ferguson’s very different The Ascent of Money show up very graphically the role money has played and the vicissitudes through which it has passed; while David Marquand explores the dramatic consequences of what has happened to money in his recently published Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now.6 As we learn more of what money is and how it functions, we see certain patterns emerging in the way it is regarded and what it is doing to our society. The quite widely held view that money is not in itself harmful, only the love of it or greed for it, is turning out to be out of date, a view one might have been able to entertain when money was largely notes and coins, an instrument of trade and exchange. But something has happened in the years since the Second World War, a process of change that has accelerated as the twentieth century drew to its close and then exploded in the banking crisis of 2008.
More specifically, this book belongs in the category of theological books about money. It proposes that alongside the important insights contained in what economists and historians can tell us about money there is a faith aspect to what money has become. That is, money will not be rightly understood if it is not also seen in the light of the experience of the people who have seen the meaning of their lives in terms of a covenant relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ. There is within the literature and history of that people a wisdom about money that deserves to be taken seriously, and has in particular revealed its value significantly in the aftermath of the recent crisis. Much of that wisdom is to be found in the Bible, but because (as the Bible itself acknowledges) the covenant people have frequently ignored their own wisdom and departed from the covenant that gave their lives meaning, the struggle with money has had to continue: vows of poverty, heroic choices of various ways of life that renounce wealth for the sake of others, have been many believers’ strategies for dealing with an aspect of life that they knew had its power and its dangers, dangers which they also knew tempted religious institutions to follow the way of money rather than the way of the covenant. Other traditions of faith, notably Islam, have noticed those departures and stand as a recall to a way of dealing with money that is loyal to divine commands.
Money has of course been examined theologically before: many have sought to recall believers to the priority of concern for the poor and the risks of developments such as globalisation where these are not held in check by a vision for humanity living together in justice and peace. The bibliography at the end of this book shows just a sample of the impressive work that has been done in the service of the conviction that following the way of money can have disastrous consequences, for humanity as well as for the planet we share with other species. But this has not just been a matter of the writing of books: believers have often led in the campaigns for justice and development, for reducing the impact of carbon emissions, for the defence of the world’s biodiversity; many have been quite explicit in their campaigning that if humankind was to survive, let alone flourish, the making of money and the short-term thinking to which that goal often gives rise had to give way to objectives that are in the long-term interests of the world. And in the fifty years since the Congregational Union of Scotland published Money, a Christian View, the First Report of its Christianity and Wealth Committee,7 the Christian Council for Monetary Justice has maintained in collaboration with many partner groups a small, very persistent campaign for monetary reform, while St Paul’s Institute, with which I am also associated, has this among a number of topics in which it seeks to be in dialogue with financial sector institutions in the City of London.8
There have been other very important reflections on money as a theological issue. Peter Dominy’s Decoding Mammon9 is a strong wake-up call to take seriously modern developments in the character of money, and in particular its outworking in the changing of the nature of our desires; Philip Goodchild builds up a serious case in his Theology of Money against what he describes as the ‘masquerade of [money’s] moral neutrality’.10 Equally, in the chapter on Money in its 2003 report Being Human, the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England underlines the point that so far from being a neutral substance about which human beings are free to entertain good attitudes and avoid bad ones – summed up as the love of money – money is in fact something that has the love of it embedded within what it has become.11
I seek in this book to build on that theological inheritance and to gain inspiration from the often very courageous stands taken by those who have thought through and worked out appropriate responses to what they rightly discerned to be a major challenge to humankind generally and believers in particular. This book, however, as well as being part of that developing tradition, is written for a very particular reason. I shall seek to show that alongside the developments I have already mentioned money has acquired the characteristics that were associated with the religions that worshipped idols. The significance of that term, one that has been used colloquially in the modern celebrity world, needs to be examined closely, and the ways in which money’s behaviour, and our behaviour with money, echo the characteristics of the polytheistic world of the idols must be brought into clear view.
I shall describe in subsequent chapters the effect of money in its most recent developments on aspects of life which we would hope it might not affect. That is principally due to the vast expansion in the amount of money in the banking systems of the world and the speed with which computer technology allows it to circulate. Such growth, I shall suggest, has the inevitable result that what is more becomes more influential: our lives are more and more dominated by money, even when we think we are not particularly interested in it. We can see its effect on the way sovereign rule is exercised, because money has moved from being itself a sovereign act, authorised by the sovereign – whether that sovereign is an absolute monarch or a government that exercises authority in a parliamentary democracy − to being increasingly a virtual reality, created by private institutions as debt. We shall see just how powerful money and the private institutions that create it for their own profit have become.
God and the gods: life as a gamble
I began this chapter with a paragraph of personal experience of many years ago, in the early days of the National Lottery. That experience, for all its distance, has provided an image that has stayed with me, and which will, as we shall see, express the fundamental purpose of this book. Years have passed since I observed that queue outside the Post Office; the number of weekly draws and scratch card offers has grown vastly, alongside many new opportunities to gamble. The ‘super-casino’ debate was a very heated one, and in the interim we have had casinos developing and a massive growth in online gaming. Meanwhile in such a competitive world the National and Euro Lottery prizes, especially in rollover weeks, are sums of money way beyond the wildest dreams people entertain in their everyday lives. The industry has grown massively since that first week when the holder of a losing ticket was seen on television tearing up the ticket and exclaiming, with evident anger, ‘This whole thing is just a lottery!’
All this is very profitable for those who provide the gambling opportunities. Alongside the growth of this industry has emerged a whole science of grant application, and across the country are now thousands of plaques on the walls of churches and other restored buildings acknowledging Heritage Lottery Fund grants, not to mention public acknowledgments of the support given by the Fund on a large scale to events like the Olympic Games.
What is going on here, before our very eyes? Who buys the tickets, and what is the net result of this increasingly popular activity, now regarded as a well-established part of life? Certainly there is concern for those who become addicted to gambling, and expressions of that concern in initiatives to help those who become trapped in that way. But what does this activity do to us as a society, and what does it represent?
My intention here is not to mount a conventional, puritanical attack on people enjoying themselves in some harmless pursuit. A congregation ending its harvest supper by raffling items that have been given to raise money is not, in my judgement, transgressing against the claims of the gospel. But the expansion of gambling into an industry of massive proportions is a very different matter. We know now that the original promise that nothing would be funded from the proceeds of the National Lottery that should be provided at a cost to the public purse was a false promise: it may indeed be that basic public services are not (so far) funded from lottery proceeds. But we also know that for any important task that is not currently part of what is provided from taxation, perhaps the necessary restoration of an ancient building or the construction of a new theatre or a local project to enable unemployed young people to find their way back into work or a new piece of medical equipment for the local hospital or most conspicuously the London Olympic Games, the first recourse will be to lottery funding.
We know other things too about this industry. We know that it tends to be the poorest who purchase the tickets. That is not because they are unwise in the handling of their limited money but on the entirely rational basis that for a person who sees no way out of their poverty even a very tiny chance of a win represents the most obvious way of solving their problem; by contrast, a person who already has sufficient money will know that there are far better ways of gaining more money than buying a lottery ticket.
As my initial story made clear, this is not in any normal sense of the word ‘playing’; there is nothing playful about it. I am suggesting rather that once gambling becomes an industry and a major source of funding for public works it represents a belief system. I shall further suggest that that belief system is far from limited to those who ‘play’ it: the expansion in the role of money has co-opted humankind into values and practices which are at the heart of our monetary system and of which the events of 2008 were a sign and portent. We were brought to the edge of chaos when the lottery we are all playing produced not prizes but a disaster we need to learn from. To do that requires that we recover a very important piece of our ancient inherited wisdom. It is wisdom about what happens when you submit yourself to an idol. Others have mounted vital critiques of our monetary system, and what they have discovered we all need to take seriously. But there is a theological critique that needs to be mounted as well.