Transformative Religious Experience: The Key to Ending Usury
By Scott Craig Mooney
Clearly, money has become a crisis. Soon it will be necessary to resort to drastic measures. Something will be done; there is no doubt. However, there is only one thing that possibly could prove to be a durable solution. Ray V. Foss put his finger on it (page 20): “A positive, life-sustaining, civilization-lifting change in the economy is impossible unless spirituality intervenes.”
Modern money has become what we now know it to be due to an ingrained world-spirit of theft, fraud, and covetousness. These values destroy the reality of the religious experience. The only way out, therefore, is recovery of religious experience in the mundane sphere of economic life. Religious scholar Joachim Wach defined “religious experience” as “a response of the whole person to what is perceived as ultimate [power], characterized by a peculiar intensity, and ‘issuing in appropriate action.’” As regards monetary issues, rethinking usury and theft is key to triggering a transforming, genuine religious experience. Toward that end there are three stepping stones.
Creation: Reverence for life represents the sacred nature of creation. The ethic of sustainability encompasses the Christian’s charge to multiply upon the earth and be God’s caretakers of it. Original creation was “very good.” Implicit was, and is, a full range of cultural institutions, including production, management, and exchange of property, according to charity and goodwill. As an adjunct of exchange, money is an integral part of the creation ideal.
Failure: Christians see failure of cultural institutions as a turning away from the creation ideal. This failure does not destroy nature, but corrupts it. We still produce, manage, and exchange, though with difficulty and by the sweat of our brow – and now with self-serving schemes, such as money manipulation and usury.
Spiritual Renewal: The only way out of the corruption of failure is to find a way to a crisis of transformation, whereby the original ideals of creation once again are accorded cultural force. Money manipulation and usury must be seen as corruption and failure. Therefore, turning back from these things will point our culture back to the place where human life once again can be animated by the unity and power that marked its original creation. Those who long for that kind of transformation must practice in their own lives – and exhort others toward – the charitable values of going about economic life without theft, fraud, or covetousness.
A cultural movement of transformation toward the goal of goodwill and charity necessarily will crowd out money manipulation and usury. Short of this kind of transformation, economic life will exhibit the same corrupting spiral of decline that has characterized the last several decades. Let us resolve to stop this spiral now; this can happen only as each one embraces the inner transformation of religious experience that banishes theft in all its forms, fraud in every guise, and every shade of covetousness.
Scott Craig Mooney is author of USURY: Destroyer of Nations and Money: Symbol & Substance. His new book is The Fall of the House of Usury (Parakrisis, 2011).
