Andrew Leonard: Christianity's role in the financial crash
[Andrew Leonard has been working at Salon as a technology reporter, editor and blogger for quite a bit longer than he ever anticipated being employed by an online magazine -- 12 years.]
"Did Christianity Cause the Crash?" is the kind of leading headline question ever-popular with bloggers desperate for readers to click through. (Yes, I plead guilty.) Whether the answer that pops in your head is yes or no, you're impelled to read the story, if only to disagree viscerally or happily find your worst prejudices confirmed.
Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article exploring the economic consequences of the so-called "prosperity gospel" is no mere blog post, but before reading it, I felt my own hackles rise in preliminary disagreement with the provocative lead-in. No one factor deserves all the blame for something as incredibly complicated as the global economic crash we just lived through. Everyone has their own favorite villain -- the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, China, the repeal of Glass-Steagal, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Goldman Sachs self-dealing, the conflict of interest inherent in how credit rating agencies work, the originate-to-distribute model of mortgage loan securitization, bad computer models, mismatched incentives, Wall Street executive greed, government leadership failure, the list goes on and on. The story of the crash is how all these different factors interlocked, reinforced each other, and blew up....
... Rosin's chief narrative vehicle, Fernando Garay, the pastor of Casa del Padre in Charlottesville, Virginia, didn't just preach the prosperity gospel, he prepared the loan papers too.
Read entire article at Salon
"Did Christianity Cause the Crash?" is the kind of leading headline question ever-popular with bloggers desperate for readers to click through. (Yes, I plead guilty.) Whether the answer that pops in your head is yes or no, you're impelled to read the story, if only to disagree viscerally or happily find your worst prejudices confirmed.
Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article exploring the economic consequences of the so-called "prosperity gospel" is no mere blog post, but before reading it, I felt my own hackles rise in preliminary disagreement with the provocative lead-in. No one factor deserves all the blame for something as incredibly complicated as the global economic crash we just lived through. Everyone has their own favorite villain -- the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, China, the repeal of Glass-Steagal, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Goldman Sachs self-dealing, the conflict of interest inherent in how credit rating agencies work, the originate-to-distribute model of mortgage loan securitization, bad computer models, mismatched incentives, Wall Street executive greed, government leadership failure, the list goes on and on. The story of the crash is how all these different factors interlocked, reinforced each other, and blew up....
... Rosin's chief narrative vehicle, Fernando Garay, the pastor of Casa del Padre in Charlottesville, Virginia, didn't just preach the prosperity gospel, he prepared the loan papers too.
From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city's growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.
The demographic correlation between foreclosure hotspots and the newer "prosperity churches" is also interesting, as is the evidence that lenders executed a conscious strategy of reaching out to churches in order to target low-income, minority populations...