The Divine Economy & A Theology of Debt

Debt and Reciprocity: Anthropological and Biblical Principles
An anthropologist whose thinking is very akin to Long’s is David Graeber. In his recent book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, we learn that all cultures are held together by a sense of mutual and reciprocal obligation that members have toward one another. This matrix provided a base for the informal yet complex systems of credit that preceded monetary exchanges for thousands of years before money was even invented. In these societies, everyone owed everyone something and therefore there was not a sharp class and moral distinction between debtors and creditors. Everyone was both a debtor and a creditor. The class distinction between the two is, therefore, something more recent in the long trajectory of human history. And in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is a concern to create a human community based on reciprocity and mutuality. This is what “law” in Judaism and Islam and “koinonia” in Christianity seek to accomplish. The biblical term for this is justice which also translates as righteousness.

Debt in and of itself is not bad when it is based upon a system of exchanges that assures everyone receives what is owed him or her according to the operative cultural norm. Alexander Hamilton regarded the national debt as a blessing for America because he thought it would help bind the colonies together as a new national entity. Of course, Hamilton was talking about reciprocity and mutuality among Euro-Americans. He had no intention of calculating in monetary terms the debt the nation owed Native Americans (American Indians) or the African Americans whose labor contributed significantly to its overall wealth and prosperity. The descendants of slaves who took a chance on the aspiration “not to owe anybody anything” in the late 1990’s and 2000’s by purchasing homes at then attractive mortgage rates are now being consigned by governmental decisions and the economy to the debtor class and condemned as morally culpable.

If one’s cosmology is confined uncritically within Adam Smith’s model then, yes, the poor, the unemployed, the hungry, the sick without health care, the homeless, and ill-housed have no one to blame but themselves because the fact that some one percent or less of the world’s population are multi-billionaires shows that wealth is being generated. The system works. Everyone will eventually benefit. God is rewarding the industrious and punishing the dullards and laggards. So extend tax breaks for the rich and impose more burdens on the poor by reducing their meager benefits even more because they do not deserve them anyway. We do not owe them anything.

This is a far cry from both the New Deal Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented and the Great Society President Lyndon B. Johnson championed. A new cultural ethos emerged in the 1970s during the Margaret Thatcher-Ronald Reagan Era. Giving a new twist to John Calvin’s notion of “double-predestination,” David Graeber wrote in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

Actually, one might speak of a double theology, one for the creditors, another for the debtors. It is no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperialism has also been accompanied by the rise of the evangelical right, who—in defiance of almost all previously existing Christian theology—have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of “supply-side economics,” that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich is the most biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity (p. 377).