radical economics – a mandate for the new church?

Michael Kruse closes of a series of posts on economics at Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed. In this installment he notes, "Most theologians and church leaders I've encountered have considerable ambivalence, at best, and outright animus, at worst, toward the marketplace." I think that economics is not only a horribly ignored topic in seminary, but in any liberal arts education in general. Students simply are not aware how the economic system binds them together as soon as they matriculate. How? They all have accumulate debt of some sort because the system requires it for those who do not have liquid assets to invest out of the gate. That would be most Americans, which is quite obvious.

One assumption that I think we ought to look at more closely is this statement:

Furthermore, the powerful persistently tried to impose monetary exchange on to the community to facilitate the collection of taxes and fees. Lending was a way of trapping people in debt and confiscating their land. Where we see money as a liberating force, the peasants of Jesus' day viewed money as a means of oppression. This is the context into which Jesus delivered his message of the coming Kingdom.

Currency is not local as it once was and barter economies that use receipts for currency are consistently pushed out by larger coporate interests and the politicians that support those interests. The federal reserve does the same thing as a wealthy merchant who hoards grain to increase its value and thus his investment. The Fed literally determines the value of the dollar in relation to the debt that the dollar has to hold.

College students graduate with 10's of thousands of dollars of debt, home ownership is a myth since few people stay long enough in the same home to own it, car leases, credit cards, etc. The value of the US economy is purely speculative and that is clear by the ratio of produced goods and exports versus the ratio of speculative investments and exported labor.  The US economy needs debt in order to be prosperous and that means it needs the public to hold that private corporate debt. Even more troubling is that the US budget invests in these debts through subsidies. One does not need to look much farther than massive corporate agriculture to see how this works. Profitable local farming is all but dead as a way of life – unless you're Amish (they don't pay federal taxes by the way). The dollar is thus only branded as something liberating when in actuality it is a vehicle of oppression itself.

If this is all true, and I think it is, then the call of Jesus that Michael raises remains almost identical to that of his day. He was a radical as far as the socio-political and economic structures of his day. The church is far from radical, but merely a leech on the very structural problem itself which you rightly say is indeed a means of oppression. Property and invested funds remain some of the top issues that sessions and councils discuss on a monthly basis. Budgets are hurting as giving continues to go down in a large majority of churches (even if some mega-churches skew the mean figures to suggest higher rates of investment in some cases). As Putnam has observed in Bowling Alone community involvement has been on the decline and that hurts churches since there is less human labor and work invested in the life of the church. This has even been transferred to dollars.

I would ask how the church can engage in alternative economies that do not use any federal dollars on loan from the federal reserve to large banks! How can the church stimulate local economies where we can create systems to make love of neighbor not the exception, but the norm? How can the church raise assets for local economies rather than find ways to break even in order to maintain payrolls and property costs? How does the church add value to local economies rather than absorb value from those economies? These are the issues of the early church as it struggled against the empire of the Romans. To say that these are not almost identical issues that the church must realize today misses a major assumption in our fundamentally oppressive economic system.

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