WHO MESSED UP?

By Eric Von Salzen

A couple of Sundays ago, the Old Testament reading told the story of the Israelites complaining in the Wilderness that they were better off in Egypt, and “the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” This reflects a common theme in the OT, that bad behavior by Israel – and from time to time by other nations – leads to disaster, not just snakes, but also military defeat, conquest by pagans, drought, famine, disease, etc., as divine punishment. Thus, if Israel (or an individual Israelite) suffered some disaster, the inference drawn was that Israel (or the individual Israelite) must have done something wrong, something displeasing to God, to deserve the punishment. The Book of Job famously questions that inference, and so in a different way does Genesis 45, but overall the Old Testament attitude seems to be that when disaster strikes, we should ask ourselves, What did we do wrong to deserve this?

We moderns have an approach that’s a little different from the ancient Israelites’. When disaster strikes, we tend to ask, not What did I do wrong to deserve this, but Who screwed up, ’cause I know for sure it wasn’t me. We’re like the sailors on Jonah’s ship, looking for someone to throw overboard.

Right now, the United States and the world generally are in the midst of a financial crisis, and in typical modern fashion, we ask, Who screwed up. Who should we throw overboard? (The AIG employees that Congress wants to punish with a 90% tax on their bonuses must be looking around hopefully for the great fish right now.) But perhaps finding Jonah on our financial ship isn’t all that easy.

Is the economic crisis that faces the world today God’s punishment for sin? Not your sin or mine, of course, but somebody’s sin?

It’s certainly true that the business and political news in the last several months has been filled with stories of human sin. There’s not one of the Seven Deadly Sins that hasn’t been on display. Corporate executives pulling down salaries and bonuses that beggar the dreams of avarice, while their companies sink deeper into a pit of debt. Politicians who show more concern for the interests of those who lavish gifts and contributions on them, than they do for the public weal. Greed? Gluttony? Sloth? Pride? Wrath? Envy? Lust? Yep, they’re all there.

(Well, Lust not so much lately. Since Governor Spitzer resigned a year or so ago, I don’t think we’ve had a juicy sex scandal in the political or business news. Or maybe I just haven’t been paying attention. Perhaps we tend to pay less attention to sexual misbehavior when our 401(k)’s are tanking.)

There’s been enough sinful behavior in the news to keep all our preachers and pundits well supplied with material for sermons and op-eds for years to come. If you’re a preacher or pundit you could regard that as a silver lining, or at least as proof that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.

But it’s hard to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between all that sin and the punishment. Yes, indeed, a lot of bankers, and investment advisors, and stockbrokers, and Senators and Congressmen, and assistant deputy undersecretaries of this and that behaved badly, but did their sins cause the financial collapse? The world economy is huge. Even if an investment advisor made off with billions of investor dollars, that doesn’t account for a multi-trillion-dollar problem.

In fact, there’s a real possibility that the crisis we face resulted, not from evil hearts, but from failed efforts to do good.

Three causes are commonly blamed for the crisis in the financial sector: sub-prime lending, FNMA and Freddie Mac, and deregulation. What’s “sub-prime lending”? It was an attempt to make it possible for lower-income families to buy their own homes. As Christians and as Americans, isn’t that a goal that we normally applaud, not condemn?

What about FNMA and Freddie Mac? They were established over 40 years ago to increase the availability of home mortgage money, which primarily benefitted low and moderate-income home-buyers. If it weren’t for the secondary mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities, created by FNMA, Freddie Mac, and others, much of the American middle class would still be living in rented housing.

As for “deregulation”, well, that’s a misnomer. Banking and securities remain among the most highly regulated sectors of the U.S. economy. What happened is that regulations have changed over time, supposedly to address new situations or to correct perceived problems caused by older regulations. Some of the changes may in retrospect have turned out to be unwise. Other proposed regulatory changes that might have prevented or reduced the crisis were rejected, because they threatened to undermine the objective of fostering home-ownership among low-and-moderate income families. Speaking for myself anyway, I find it hard to get too moralistic about legislative decisions on technicalities that are too arcane for me even to pretend to understand them.

I’m reminded of the song from the musical Carousel, that says of the imperfect hero, Billy Bigelow, and his wife Julie, “There’s nothing so bad for a woman as a man who thinks he’s good.” Perhaps there’s nothing so bad for a national economy as a bunch of politicians and bankers who are trying to do something good.

I don’t mean to absolve our political and business leaders of the errors that led to the current crisis. Some of them were undoubtedly guilty of bad judgment, even stupidity. Some were crooks, or corrupt, or dishonest. Greedy, gluttonous, envious, prideful, etc. The bums should be thrown out, and the crooks should be thrown in jail. My point, though, is that if we’re looking for a moral or religious lesson to draw from all this, we may have to look a little deeper than “divine retribution for our sins”. Or even than “divine retribution for that other guy’s sins”.

My wife says that in this time of uncertainty and fear, our faith is our life raft. I think that’s right. Economic disasters, like natural disasters, remind us that we aren’t in charge of the world. I can’t begin to understand why disasters happen, any more than Job could. But without understanding why disasters happen, I do think we can use disasters for our betterment, as individuals and as a society, if we learn from them to be a little more humble, and to trust a little more in God.