Render Unto Caesar

A friend on Facebook, lamenting the tax-exempt status of churches, quoted Mark 12:17 – “Jesus said to them, ‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they were utterly amazed at him.” (NRSV) – and asked how this could possibly justify not paying taxes.

The question, of course, misses the point of the passage, which I quote here in full:

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him. (Mark 12:13-17, NRSV)

Let’s do some exegesis!

This pericope takes place after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and after his cleansing of the temple. During this period, Jesus is teaching in the temple and the chief priests and scribes are concerned because the crowds are finding him persuasive. Indeed, those chief priests and scribes – the authorities of the temple and thus the religious infrastructure of Jerusalem – are looking for a way to kill him (Mark 11: 18). Seeking a reason to kill him, they begin to approach him while he is teaching, asking questions that are meant to catch him in a moment of sedition. These moments are captured in Mark 11:27-33 (when Jesus’s authority is questioned) and Mark 12:13-17 (the passage we are examining here).

The point here is that these questions – and certainly the question about Jesus’s authority and the question about paying taxes – are not friendly, legitimate questions. They are questions meant to entrap Jesus and create an excuse to hand him over to authorities who can have him executed.

In the case of this pericope, the question is set up this way: if Jesus answers that it is lawful to pay taxes, then the people will see him as a collaborator and turn against him (thus neutralizing him); if Jesus answers that it is not lawful to pay taxes, then the Romans will recognize him as a seditionist and execute him (thus, again, neutralizing him). As a snare, this question is not simply about paying taxes even though it does include that. Rather, this question gets to an essential question for Jews: to what extent do we owe allegiance to Rome given our allegiance to God?

In a sense, this is a question for anyone who is expected to have some sort of allegiance to more than one theos, one of which demands absolute and unyielding allegiance. For Jews in first-century Roman occupied Judea, however, there was a less common issue at play. On the one hand, Jewish people were subjects of the God who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt and were expected through their religious commitments to recognize that God as the highest power. Indeed, when Jesus is later asked by a scribe what the greatest commandment is, he answers:

The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:29-30, NRSV)

On the other hand, however, Jewish people were subjects of the Roman Empire, which itself claimed quasi-divine status and demanded allegiance from those under its power. This extended so far as to name Julius Caesar as a god (Divus Iulius) and Caesar Augustus as his son (Divus Filius, ‘son of god’). As one can imagine, this places monotheistic Jews in a position that many of their polytheistic neighbors would not have faced. After all, some polytheists would be able to absorb Rome into their pantheon – and Rome would be able to absorb some of its subjects’ pantheons into its own – whereas the inhabitants of Judea would have seen Rome as a competitor to their own deity.

And so the question is clearly about more than taxes. It is not even about how one can serve both God and the state. It is about whether one should server God or the state. To answer either way would get in trouble with whichever one he didn’t side with.

Which is what makes his non-answer so brilliant. Jesus asks for a denarius, a coin that would have borne the image of Caesar and his divine title. The fact that Jesus needs to ask for one and that his interlocutors are able to produce one is important: it indicates that the Pharisees and Herodians had acknowledged at least some of Rome’s claims to power. Here, after all, is the image and inscription of what Jewish people would have considered a false god or, at least, the representative of such a god.

After they produce the coin and admit that it is the emperor’s image and inscription on it Jesus utters the line that started this post off: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17, NRSV) Once it is put in this context, we can hopefully see three things.

First, it doesn’t really answer the question about whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor.

Second, and more importantly, it turns the question into a choice. The claims of God and the claims of Caesar are mutually exclusive. If God’s claims to authority are valid, then all things belong to God and Caesar is owed nothing, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it is unlawful to pay taxes. If Caesar’s claims are valid, then one should at least give him his coin. Moreover, of course, if Caesar’s claims are valid then it is impossible to participate in a religion that claims that all things belong to God.

Third, how one responds to the choice depends on where one stands. Someone who wants to be loyal to Caesar can give to him what that person believes he is owed. Someone who does not want to be loyal to Caesar can say that nothing belongs to him and thus he is owed nothing. Jews engaged in tax revolt find themselves vindicated. People who wish to have allegiance to both God and Caesar are also vindicated… unless, of course, they recognize that such a dual allegiance is in fact impossible.

The point being that the phrase didn’t really mean what my Facebook friend thinks it means. It is not a suggestion that church and state should be separated. After all, at the time the Roman Empire was a religion as well as a state. It is instead a subversive suggestion that the act of paying taxes to the Roman Empire is itself a denial of Judaism and later, of course, Christianity.

Toxic Charity: Ministry Entrepreneurs

This post is part of the series Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).

For reference, here’s the version of the book I’m using.

If short-term missions as they are currently practiced – vacationaries – are part of the problem, what’s the solution? According to Lupton, it appears that the solution is for the poor of the world to become assimilated into modern Western capitalist modes of economic relations. Or, to put it more simply: business and banking. The ‘charitable’ form that this takes is micro-lending.

Now, I want to be very, very clear here: micro-lending can and does work to lift people out of poverty. I am a strong supporter of them and nothing here should be taken to mean that we should stop micro-lending; although, it must be said, there are legitimate questions about the efficacy of micro-lending. Indeed, Lupton’s description of what he encountered on a visit to Nicaragua speaks highly to the power of micro-lending:

…the proud faces of peasants reading scripture together in clearings under the canopy of squat shade trees, collecting their weekly payments and savings deposits from one another, and praying together for strength, for success in their little businesses, and for wisdom to deal with village problems. (p. 20)

Going further, Lupton points to the problem of American churches and their vacationaries who arrive to simply give to the people: “People say ‘Why should be borrow money when the churches give it to us?’” (p. 20) As money comes in from well meaning mission groups and donors – not only churches, but others as well – the people ”become conditioned to wait for the next mission group to arrive instead of building their businesses through their own efforts.” (p. 20-21)

This conditioning is the result of the work of the vacationaries and donors – not just churches, but others as well – who bring “toxic charity and use obsolete service models” (p. 22) to address the problems at hand, in spite of the fact that we know better:

As a country, we understand that welfare creates unhealthy dependency, that it erodes the work ethic, that it cannot elevate people out of poverty. Yet we continue to perpetuate ill-thought-through models when we “invest” in service work. (p. 22)

If this sounds like familiar rhetoric, that’s because it is. The lesson Americans learned about welfare and unhealthy dependency is what he cites as causing us to reject this kind of charity with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, officially known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).

What I want to note here is this: when we export resources through philanthropic vehicles – whether gifts or loans or anything else – we are also exporting ideologies. When we give a gift, we aren’t simply handing money or a water pump to someone; we are suggesting a way to be in relationship based on generosity. Similarly, when we make a loan – even at a modest return – we are suggesting a way to be in relationship based on debt and profit. The latter of these makes sense when we are talking about capitalist notions of charity. It is, after all, charitable compared to what many businesses would normally do.

There are two problems here:

First, the problem what Lupton asserts remains only that, an assertion. He has offered no data to back up the idea that the poor have become inordinately dependent or had their work ethic sapped. I will wait to see if this trend continues, but I suspect that Lupton has bought into the idea of the ‘culture of poverty’, as well as some rather colonialist and assimilationist ideas about how to reduce poverty.

Second, and more related to the point about ideologies above, is that Lupton is writing from a Christian perspective and cites a Christian example of good charitable work: Opportunity International. As noted, such modes of philanthropy as micro-loans are indeed charitable compared to how businesses are normally expected to act. And it is possible – though not proven – that they also reduce poverty. However, it is not the duty of Christians and churches to be charitable in comparison to businesses. I would suggest that there is a considerably more demanding call being made of us and that we need to take care regarding not only what we do, but the way of thinking that lies behind it.

I believe I will have the opportunity to delve into both of these topics later.

Toxic Charity: The Short-Term Service Industry

This post is part of the series Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).

For reference, here’s the version of the book I’m using.

There is such a thing as a short-term service industry: countless nonprofits that rely on groups fo volunteers who come to work with them for a few days or a week and then disappear into the ether. The group – either the same individuals or the same organization with different individuals – might reappear a year later to perform the same exercise, but they are, in a sense, tourists. They do not have a consistent presence, they don’t learn about or get to know the community, they don’t join in anything approaching solidarity with those they serve.

The existence of such ‘vacationaries’ – a clever combination of ‘vacation’ and ‘missionary’ – is only reinforced among youth by the increasing demands, both formal and informal, for service work. When schools come to expect service work – either as part of their curriculum or for admissions – without checking the quality of that work, simply encourages volunteers to find make-work situations and gives the impression that the act of volunteering is more important than the effectiveness of that volunteering.

And Robert Lupton has no difficulty finding examples of vacationary work that is utterly, utterly pointless: a wall built at an orphanage that was torn down after the mission group left, a church that was painted six times by six groups in one summer, a church that was built and went unused because the community did not need it. He also identifies the core problem: a combination of the desire to serve and a misdirection of that desire caused by the volunteers’ viewing “aid through the narrow lens of the needs of our organization or church – focusing on what will benefit our team the most – and neglecting the best interests of those we would serve.” (p. 15)

That this is a serious problem is not in doubt. Many nonprofit volunteering opportunities are inefficient. But what do such opportunities result in? According to Lupton, such service work does not ”empower those being served, engender healthy cross-cultural relationships, improve local quality of life, relieve poverty, change the lives of participants [or] increase support for long-term mission work.” (pp. 16-17) Fair enough. Many volunteer opportunities fail to do any of these things and the vast majority, I imagine, fail to do all of them (in the sense, that very few actually accomplish all of them). This is a legitimate criticism of the vacationary tendency.

But it’s not just about what doesn’t happen in service work, it’s about what “most mission trips and service projects do: weaken those being served, foster dishonest relationships, erode recipients’ work ethic [and] deepen dependency.” (p. 16; emphasis original). Lupton illustrates this with the story of a Cuban seminary that hosts American vacationaries. This seminary arranged food, lodging, faculty presentations, materials and supervisors for volunteers who were laying tile, but who did not have any experience in doing such work all while skilled laborers were waiting outside the seminary gates hoping some paid work would be left for them. This was clearly a misapplication of the $30,000 the group was spending on its trip as well as the resources the seminary put into hospitality for the group.

And the seminary president was afraid to talk to the group about this for fear of losing their more modest donation.

I agree that such a situation probably weakened those being served (by requiring the seminary to waste resources of hospitality) and fostered dishonest relationships (because the volunteers did not understand the impact of what they were doing). However, I fail to see how it eroded anyone’s work ethic or deepened dependency. Indeed, I can see how inefficient charitable work can be a weakening force insofar as it prevents the charity from making positive investments in its community and I can see how a charity can foster dishonest relationships – Lord can I see how a charity can do that – but the claim of eroded work ethics and fostered dependency seem to be little more than assertions on Lupton’s part.

But perhaps that will change.

Slacktivist: Broadway vs. Community Theater: Why Pastors and Presidents are not CEOs

As always, Fred Clark over at Slacktivist has a worthwhile post. Here’s the key bit:

If you’re in charge of a business, then you simply fire the bunglers and the screw-ups, the Snouts and the Starvelings. Or you never hire them in the first place. What becomes of them after they’re fired, or if no one ever hires them? Not your problem. Not your concern.

But if you’re in charge of a country, or if you’re in charge of a local church, then it isyour concern. You can’t just restrict yourself to the winners of the audition, to “the best and the brightest.” Your job is to make sure that everyone is allowed, encouraged, enabled and empowered to contribute to the best of their ability — whatever their ability may be. Everyone is your concern. Everyone is your problem.

No, wait, not your “problem.” That’s the wrong word. That’s CEO-speak. People are not problems — that’s a lie told by “business books.” Everyone is your community. Everyone is your neighbor.

I also, though, really like this description of the disappearance of the parish:

“Parish” is an archaic term referring to the long defunct notion that a local church carried certain obligations based on its geography and not on brand-affinity, ethnic and economic demographics, and partisan political identity. The automobile abolished the parish more than a generation ago. Any church with a parking lot does not have a parish.

Toxic Charity: The Problem with Good Intentions

This post is part of the series Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).

For reference, here’s the version of the book I’m using.

The second chapter of Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) opens with a study in contrasts. Lupton first tells the story of his Presbyterian church travelling to Honduras on a service trip with every intention of building long lasting relationships between the church and the people of the village they were serving. They drilled and paid for a well for the village, to help the women of the village avoid the drudgery of carrying water from a supply source miles away. However, when they returned the next year they found the women again carrying the water as the pump for the well had broken. And so they repaired it. But the same thing happened the next year and the next and the next. It was as though the village was simply waiting for the church team to return to fix the pump.

He then tells the story of Opportunity International, a micro-lending organization. When faced with a village that needed a well and a pump, they helped the village find information on costs and develop a budget and a business plan, made a loan to the village and helped them organize a water commission and collect bills and maintain their pump.  The villagers did all of the actual work and, in the end, had such an abundant water supply that they could sell it to a local school and a neighboring village. As Lupton puts it, “They now owned and managed a wealth-producing asset.” (p. 13, emphasis original).

It’s hard to imagine a deeper contrast. In the first story, the people of the village are given a gift but do not take care of it. When it breaks, they simply wait to be given another gift. They are, as those who stand in lines for food and clothing in the first chapter, robbed of their dignity, made dependent upon their benefactors and sapped of their initiative. In the second chapter, the villagers are made to work for their well and invest their meager resources in it. They become not only self-sufficient, but able to sell their new wealth to others.

But wait. Something’s missing. Some questions are unanswered.

First, the people of the first village did have to trudge to a water source and carry jugs of water back to the village, but this is both something that they did before their benefactors came and something that they returned to when the pump broke. Was this a problem to the villagers? Or was it only a problem for the people of the church, who were presumably used to having water in their own houses? Was this, in short, a gift that the people of the village wanted, or one that was forced upon them? Even Lupton telling us that they celebrated and said thank you tells us little: I know people who are quite adept at making relatives believe that undesired gifts are absolutely thrilling.

Second, assume that the people of the first village did want the well and truly appreciated it. Were they taught how to maintain and repair it? If not, we can hardly fault them for not maintaining it. Nor can we fault them for waiting until someone with the necessary knowledge arrived to have repairs done any more than we fault the average American for calling a plumber. That the villagers had no plumber to call and needed to wait for the church group to return is not their fault.

Third, is the real distinction here that one village was given a gift and the other made to pay (both through wealth and through work)?  It seems like a crucial difference between the two stories is not simply that the second village had to come up with the money and dig the trenches and develop a business plan, but that they were taught how to maintain and repair the pump and developed a system of shared ownership: they had the knowledge and social systems necessary for it.

Fourth, what would have happened had either village been given the pump and the knowledge to maintain and repair it and had been helped in developing the social infrastructure necessary for it in accordance with their indigenous social systems? This is the critical question that goes unanswered.

But one thing is clear. The people of the second village gain not only self-sufficiency, but the power to have other dependent upon them. They own and manage a wealth producing asset. As asset that they can use to make money off of others who do not have access to the same – or a similar – asset. In short, the second village obtained capital and, through it, the power to make others dependent on it. This, of course, raises another question: what if, instead of selling the water, the second village had given it away? What if they did the same with the knowledge of obtaining and maintaining pumps? And their knowledge of building social systems to support those pumps? But, again, the question goes unanswered.

And this gets to the heart of one of my objections to Lupton’s diagnosis, which I will simply sketch here. There are different modes of dependence. There are times when we are mutually dependent – as in many of our closest relationships – and this kind of dependence can be empowering. In fact, I would suggest that when a village is given the equipment and knowledge to create and maintain a water source for itself, it is so empowered even if they make no payment for it.

But there is another kind of dependence that creates a hierarchical relationship. The kind of relationship where one party must pay the other – in money, goods, labor, dignity, humanity, etc. – for access to something they need. I would suggest that this kind of dependence is at the base of capitalism: if you want water, you must pay.

In the first village, the villagers were not made dependent on their benefactors. They did not become lazy. They responded to the problem at hand by walking for miles to obtain what they needed. The church group may have thought that silly and the villagers may have thought it inconvenient, but neither was any worse off than they had been to begin with.

In the second village, the villagers were also not made dependent. They were given the power to make others dependent (though one hopes that those others had access to other water supplies if they did not wish to pay… of course, one also wonders what sort of debt collection scheme might be set up for those unable to pay their water bill, and what interest rates were).

Is the first village really more problematic than the second?

Toxic Charity: The Scandal

This post is part of the series Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).

For reference, here’s the version of the book I’m using.

In Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It), founder and president of FCS Urban Ministries Robert Lupton wants to present us with two things: a diagnosis of where the charitable sector has gone wrong and a prescription for getting it on the right track. The first chapter - The Scandal – lays the diagnosis out in brief. The core of the problem is that “[Americans] are very generous in charitable giving, [but] much of that money is either waster or actually harms the people it is targeted to help.”

The fact that charitable giving is not as efficient as it could be should be obvious to anyone who takes the time to examine the relationship between the time, money and energy that go into charitable enterprises and the actual results. Lupton certainly finds no difficulty in coming up with examples:

In the last fifty years, [Africa] has received $1 trillion in benevolent aid… Country by country, Africans are far worse off today than they were half a century ago. Overall per-capita income is lover today than in the 1970s. Over half of Africa’s 700 million population lives on less than $1 a day. Life expectancy has stagnated, and adult literacy has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. (p . 3)

For all our efforts to eliminate poverty… we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work. (p. 3)

Out free food and clothing distribution encourages ever-growing handout lines (p. 4)

Expenditures for a week of service by church and college groups are grossly out of proportion with what is actually accomplished. (p. 5)

And so on.

But the diagnosis isn’t simply that charity has failed in achieving specified outcomes, that is merely the symptom.

Here’s the diagnosis: “Dependency. Destroying personal initiative.” (p. 3) In fact, this shows up in the examples I gave above (though I carefully excised it from some). The efforts to eliminate poverty dismantle family structures and erode work ethics because they create a sense of dependency and destroy personal initiative. The food and clothing distribution systems are “diminishing the dignity of the poor while increasing their dependency.” (p. 4) The weeks of service by church and college groups do for others what they could do for themselves more cheaply.

What Lupton aims to do in this book is show us that the charitable sector as it is currently is, in fact, harming those it claims to help by increasing their dependency and propose a group of principles that will help charitable actors avoid doing such harm in the future. While, unlike Rothschild, he doesn’t go on to have a chapter on each of these principles, it is worth laying them out here:

• Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.

• Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.

• Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.

• Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.

• Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said – unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.

• Above all, do no harm. (pp. 8-9)

We will see whether he returns to these principles in detail later.

Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog – and many thanks to both of you – then you may suspect that I have some problems with this diagnosis and with at least some portions of these principles. However, I think it would be unfair to delve to deeply into those problems having been given only a summary of both. So I will leave that until another post.

TruthOut: PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary “Citizen Koch” to Appease Koch Brothers

“Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker.

I’m sure I’ve said it before and I’m sure I will have to say it again: the giving of a gift does not give the donor power over the recipient.

And this case speaks right to that core: if David Koch believes that he should be able to expect favorable treatment because of his donations to PBS, and if PBS believes that David Koch should be able to expect favorable treatment because of his donations, then they are in agreement. What was given was not a gift, it was an exchange: large amounts of cash for favorable treatment.

I understand that in real life it’s more complicated and there are plenty of examples that exist in gray areas. This does not appear to be such a case.

But go read the article.

Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It)

This post is part of the series Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).

For reference, here’s the version of the book I’m using.

Let me begin by again offering an overview of the slow read: This is not a traditional review, in that I won’t be doing a single post that covers all – or even many – of my thoughts on this book. It also won’t be a traditional book discussion, in that we haven’t all agreed to read this book and we aren’t reading it together in order to have a conversation. Rather, what this will be might be thought of as an extended review. I will be going through chapter by chapter – and at times using shorter passages – and providing my thoughts on each, as well as my cumulative thoughts.

My first slow read was of Steve Rothschild’s The Non Nonprofit: For-Profit Thinking for Nonprofit Success (you can find all of the posts in that slow read here or here). Around the time I was reading that on the advice of my employer, I was handed another book that a church book group was reading: Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It). At the time, I was unimpressed with Toxic Charity, in part because I was reading it as covering much of the same ground as The Non Nonprofit.

Having put some distance between myself and The Non Nonprofit, however, I want to take a closer look at Toxic Charity.

I’ll start the slow read on Friday.

Actually… Not Bad, House for All Sinners and Saints… Not Bad

If you aren’t reading Nadia Bolz-Weber’s blog Sarcastic Lutheran, you should be. More importantly at the moment, however, you should watch her church’s – House For All Sinners and Saints – stewardship campaign video. I, personally, like three things about it (I haven’t done a ‘three things’ post in a while!):

• It tells people how the church is actually funded (and in doing that demolishes some myths that plague a lot of churches)
• When talking about what financial gifts do, it talks about people and events (not buildings and bills)
• It makes a case for why people should be giving (not just that people should be giving)

So, while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty good… and I might be borrowing from it in the future.

Here it is:

Eric Reitan’s Description of Sin in his Interview with Randal Rauser

Randal Rauser has an interview at his blog with philosopher Eric Reitan regarding the latter’s most recent book, coauthored with John Kronen: God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism. I haven’t gotten to the book yet, but in the interview Reitan lays out a very well written version of a traditional definition of sin:

As I see it, sin is essentially a distortion within a rational creature’s values: some things are valued more highly than they ought to be and others less highly. The cause of this distortion is alienation from God. Put simply, God is not just the most intrinsically valuable reality, but the infinitely valuable source of all that has value. Get cut off from that, and you’re entire value system is unmoored. Something else fills the gap, becoming the chief value around which your other values are organized. Maybe it’s personal pleasure or money. Maybe it’s another person whom you deify. Maybe it’s an institution or a book. This sort of idolatry—making something other than God the primary object of your devotion—lies at the heart of sin.

Effectively, sin is a distortion of values.

Now, I would disagree with one portion of this description. I would say that we do not have distorted values because of some alienation from God. Rather, I would suggest that we distort our values and as a result live under the illusion of an alienation from God. That is, our distorted value systems suggest to us that some other theos - see here – is the ultimate valuator or values; and that other value system becomes the lens through which we evaluate God.

That said, I think this is an excellent description of sin and one that works in all theological systems. That includes secular systems. So, for example, there is a compelling argument to be made that the basic sin in modern Western culture is the failure to pay one’s debt. Failure to pay one’s debts is, of course, a quite literal failure to grant appropriate value as measured in that most basic valuator of values: money. Along these same lines, failure to pay debts results in growing interest and therefore growing debt, alienating one further and further from that same valuator of values. Poverty, in this way, becomes a mark of sin. And not simply sin, but overwhelming debt.

This is, of course, just a rough sketch in reaction to an effectively stated description of sin. What are your thoughts?