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As I write on this stunningly beautiful day in mid-May 2020, a distressing story is unfolding just outside my apartment in New York and across the United States.
Last week the New York Times reported that unemployment has skyrocketed to 14.7%, the highest rate since the Great Depression[1]. In all likelihood this number underestimates by about 5-6% the actual rate as the official number doesn’t factor in those who cannot file for unemployment. This means, effectively, that fully 20% of the nation is without work with many now multiple weeks into a significant loss of household income. These are incredibly anxious and desperate times for people who were already struggling to make ends meet, and such desperation makes people vulnerable to those who wish to prey on them.
One of the long-time practices of preying on the desperation of the poor is that of usury, the lending of much-needed money at exorbitant interest rates. The Old and New Testaments as well as the history of the Church in the first five centuries contain stark condemnations of these lending practices, although these biblical references and tradition remain largely latent today. It may have been a while since you’ve heard a sermon condemning the sin of usury, yet high interest lending to the poor is a thriving and freshly deregulated industry in the United States and warrants the Church’s moral voice.
In South Dakota, just prior to a 2016 popular referendum that resulted in the banning of payday loans, the average interest on such loans was 652%. Consider the impact of such an interest rate on a South Dakotan family that must borrow $100 to make rent. Tragically, after a brief period of regulation, President Trump’s administration instituted a permanent loophole for payday lenders that has rendered South Dakota’s 2016 ban moot.[2] The payday loans are back.
Yet payday loans represent just one example of destructive lending practices that afflict the lives of the poor. Some of the most egregious examples of predatory lending emerged from the follow up investigations surrounding the 2008 financial crash, reports that showed how major banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo targeted low-income communities of color for subprime mortgages.[3]
In a shocking example of ‘reverse redlining’, Wells Fargo sent employees to Baltimore’s black churches to sell subprime mortgages, and in Memphis Wells Fargo intentionally targeted elderly African-Americans because they were perceived as less likely to understand the terms of the agreements they were entering into.[4] Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segmented America and Distinguished Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, noted “Many of the victims were in California, and of Mexican origin. Those in the East and Midwest were mostly African American. Although not specifically detailed in the government’s complaint, many lost their homes to foreclosure when they were unable to meet the harsh repayment terms to which they had agreed, mostly unwittingly.”[5]
In this blog post, I explore how one fourth century figure -- the complicated, unlikable, aristocratic yet populist bishop Ambrose of Milan -- condemned the lenders of his city (i.e. the wealthy) for stealing the poor’s land in On Naboth and lending money to the poor at exorbitant interest rates in his exegetical work On Tobit. In doing so, he drew heavily on the work of the Basil of Cesarea, whose sermon On Lending with Interest I will also reference. My hope is that this will inspire faith leaders to speak out forcefully against predatory lending practices that are happening even more so now today.
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The most well-known story about Ambrose of Milan pertains to his unexpected election as bishop. In 373, the bitterly divided Christian population of Milan gathered to elect a new bishop. As the provincial governor of the region, Ambrose came along as the head of a detachment of troops to prevent unrest between the two battling theological factions - the Nicenes and those who had supported the Homoean compromise - who each saw this new election as an opportunity to gain the upper hand. Upon seeing the provincial governor arrive with his detachment of troops, a small child began the cry “Ambrose for bishop!” which the crowd took up energetically. Ambrose is said to have at first strenuously refused this mob appointment and fled into hiding. The Roman emperor, however, pressured Ambrose to accept the appointment and so he was baptized, ordained, and consecrated bishop within a week.
This memorable and charming story about the Milanese Christians’ desire for a strong leader belies a remarkable shift in the relationship between fourth century Christianity and the Roman empire, one so significant that Peter Brown in Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD describes it as “more decisive, in the long run, than had been the conversion of Constantine in 312 AD”[6]. Diarmaid MacCulloch appears to agree in his A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, noting that the election represented an “extraordinary transformation of fortunes for Christianity that a man who might easily have become emperor himself now wielded the spiritual power of the Church against the most powerful ruler in the known world.”[7]
Ambrose was the first truly aristocratic bishop of the Christian Church, and as the provincial governor of what was the center of the Roman empire, he entered the episcopacy with both insider’s knowledge of Roman politics and the populist touch evident in the story of his election. As such, his rise to the episcopacy of Milan is a milestone in the leaving behind of low-social-profile Christianity, and this makes him a fascinating yet complicated figure as an icon of economic justice.
Over the course of his episcopacy, Ambrose would use his aristocratic connections, his past experience as governor, and his popularity to bring Roman emperors to heel in extraordinary exertions of power that would have been unimaginable for Christians just a century prior.[8] These are all on display when he condemns the wealthy in On Naboth for stealing land from the poor, and he joins Basil of Cesarea in being one of the most forceful voices from the fourth century speaking out against injustice of usury to the wealthy landowners of Milan. And yet, in this same figure we also find troubling, precedent-setting pro-slavery and anti-Jewish statements and actions. In one frequently cited demonstration of the Christian bishop’s extraordinary power over the Roman emperor Theodosius I, we find Ambrose refusing the emperor’s demand that the Christian Church rebuild a Jewish synagogue after a mob of militant Christians had attacked it. Ambrose’s description of the burned synagogue as “a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly, which God Himself has condemned” would set a tragic precedent and would be employed by later generations of Christians to disastrous effect.[9]
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Ambrose was born into a “new money” aristocratic, Christian family in Gaul in 339 C.E. and spent most of his youth and early career as one of the many recently ennobled teetering on the edge of downward mobility.[10] His father had sought nobility through military and government service in the wake of the instability caused by the emperor Constantine’s death, and was an acting Praetorian Prefect when Ambrose was born. He would ultimately be executed as a traitor during a period of civil war resulting in Ambrose and his mother moving to Rome. In Rome Ambrose received a classical education in rhetoric, law, and Greek, and had a legal career until he followed in his father’s footsteps into imperial service and became the provincial governor of Aemilia-Liguria (in northern Italy) with headquarters in Milan in 370.[11] Significantly, the emperor Diocletian had moved the capital of the Western Roman empire from Rome to Milan in 286, and so Ambrose’s provincial governorship meant that he was at the very center of Roman imperial power. It was in this role as provincial governor that Ambrose would lead a detachment of troops to ensure that the factious Christians would not become overly unruly as they elected a new bishop.
That Ambrose was elected through the rallying cry of the people speaks to his prior effectiveness and popularity as governor of the region, and it epitomizes how he understood and exercised power in general. Immediately upon his consecration as bishop, Ambrose is said to have adopted an ascetic lifestyle and donated a majority of his family’s considerable wealth to the church in Milan, actions which elevated Milan to the most important See of the West[12] and that ultimately strengthened his popularity among Christians who may have otherwise been skeptical about this relative newcomer.[13]
Ambrose would leverage this popularity in his future, complicated relationship to Roman emperors as he both advocated for a close alignment of the Church with the Roman Empire while simultaneously insisting on the Church’s independence on moral issues.[14] One significant example of this occurred between 385-386 when Ambrose was asked to relinquish a Christian church in Milan so that the Gothic soldiers in the emperor’s entourage might have a place to worship. Ambrose refused and he and his people filled the church until the order was rescinded.[15] As mentioned before, he also refused Emperor Theodosius I’s order to compensate a Jewish community in Mesopotamia whose synagogue had been burned down by a mob of militant Christians. He would later successfully order this same emperor to do penance for his massacring of the riotous inhabitants of Thessalonica.[16] In each of these exchanges, the sound of the crowds can be heard in the background.
Among Ambrose’s significant achievements is the development of a threefold understanding of the senses of scripture; he argued that scripture contained a natural, rational/ theological, as well as moral sense.[17] His concern around morality/ethics is particularly evident in On the Duties of the Clergy, considered to be the first treatise on Christian ethics. Modeling himself after Cicero’s De officiis, Ambrose offered the Milanese clergy moral guidance with Christianized versions of stoic insights.[18] Although I am not focusing on this text in this blog post, the text includes the popular theme of the poor being an almsgiver’s debtor in regard to salvation, a conception of justice that does away with privately-held property, and the right use of wealth.
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With Ambrose, however, there are transactions of power at every turn and this includes his advocacy for the poor.
In Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, Peter Brown argues that Ambrose’s railing against the wealthy for their land grabbing and usury may have been both a condemnation of immoral practice and a slight of hand. He notes that at the time, many in the empire were blaming Constantine’s conversion to Christianity for the weakening of Roman imperial power. They saw Constantine’s apostasy and the abandoning of traditional values as one of the main causes of the Western empire’s ongoing societal disintegration. In this light, Ambrose’s condemnation of the wealthy might be seen as a means of shifting blame from the Christians, leveraging his power and popularity to instead focus it on the economic corruption of the wealthy elite. They were to blame for society’s disintegration, he argued, their avarice having caused a both fall from a past golden age[19] as well as society’s coming apart at the seams.
This strenuous assertion of blame is particularly evident in Ambrose’s homily On Naboth, a text that synthesizes Jewish teachings on land ownership with the then-popular Greco-Roman belief in a past golden age in which all property was held in common. In this homily, he retells the story of Naboth from 1 Kings 21, a man who had the misfortune of having a vineyard which abutted King Ahab’s palace grounds. The King desired to have Naboth’s vineyard but Naboth refused in keeping with the Levitical teaching that families avoid selling their ancestral lands.[20] A murderous plot on Naboth’s life ensued, with Queen Jezebel taking a leading role, and this ends with Naboth being stoned to death. Chillingly, when Naboth’s death is announced, we hear of a seemingly untroubled King Ahab setting out immediately for his newly acquired vineyard.
Ambrose’s use of this biblical story offers him the opportunity to speak to the Milanese elite as Elijah, the prophet who would later condemn King Ahab for the murder of Naboth. In On Naboth, we hear him condemning the wealthy for land grabbing schemes. “Daily the rich and prosperous covet other people’s goods, daily they endeavor to dispossess the humble, robbing the poor of their possession, their little ancestral plot of ground.” This homily also hearkens back to a popular Greco-Roman belief in both the numinous fecundity of the earth and a past golden age in which all property was held in common, [21] one that had considerable resonance and overlap with Christian tradition. Ambrose was drawing on both belief systems when he proclaimed that “Earth at its beginning was for all in common, it was meant for rich and poor alike; what right do you have to monopolize the soil? Nature knows nothing of the rich; all are poor when she brings them forth.”[22] As Peter Brown summarizes, through his preaching Ambrose voiced one of “the deep humane dreams that encouraged Christians to resist the present. They should at least imagine a society that might yet be as open to all as was the undivided earth.”
Ambrose continues his condemnation of the wealthy in his exegetical work On Tobit. There he affirms Tobit’s advice to his son to lend without interest and to ‘not turn [his] face from anyone who is poor’[23]. In speaking to the wealthy of Milan, he was speaking to the money-lenders as Roman banking and lending was conducted by private individuals. “You rich, such are indeed your favors! You give little and demand much in return. This is your compassion: you plunder even when you say you are giving help. For you even the poor are a source of profit. You subject the poor to usury; you know how to oblige them to pay you interest even when they do not have enough to look after their basic needs.”[24]
In writing this, Ambrose was drawing on a rich biblical history which I’ll apparently have to get into at another time. Another source for Ambrose, however, was Basil of Cesarea’s homily Against Lending with Interest, a text that also contains memorable phrases beginning with “You rich…” as in this gem: “You rich, listen to the advice that we give to the poor in view of your inhumanity: Bear any suffering than the calamity that will come from usury.” And in a description that captures the continuing reality of living under the debt of high-interest loans, Basil says “The poor ask for medicine and you offer them poison; they beg for bread and you give them a sword; they plead for freedom and you subject them to slavery; they implore to be freed from their bonds and you entrap them in an inescapable net.”[25]
Of course, with Ambrose, there is always an asterisk attached to his moral crusades. Unlike Basil of Cesarea, who condemned usury in general, Ambrose argues that while one is not allowed to charge interest to a fellow Christian believer and to a fellow citizen, one may do so to a foreigner or to one’s enemies.[26]
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I want to return to the story of Wells Fargo employees going into black churches to sell subprime mortgages. In this example of reverse redlining, defined as lending money at higher interest rates to non-whites than whites, one sees a uniquely American version of the evils Ambrose railed against in On Naboth and On Tobit. Richard Rothstein’s observation that these loans frequently resulted in foreclosures and loss of property for Latinos and African Americans calls to mind King Ahab’s smooth walk to Naboth’s vineyard after Naboth had been stoned to death.
For this reason, I believe that one of the most interesting programs in the Episcopal Church today is that of a credit Union run by the Diocese of Los Angeles. Founded in 1992 after the Rodney King riots through a grant from Episcopal Relief and Development, the Episcopal Federal Credit Union was founded to “replace the unscrupulous check-cashing vendors, pawnshops, liquor stores and payday lenders that had set up shop after the big banks left town following the riots.”[27] Especially important in times like these, this credit union offers loans at low interest rates to people who would otherwise not have access to capital, and its website notes that 40 percent of its membership is Hispanic, 30 percent African American, 20 percent Caucasian, and 10 percent of other ethnic groups.[28] This is a powerful example of how the Church can advance economic justice for people who are oftentimes the targets of predatory lending.
It has likely been quite a while since you have heard a sermon on predatory lending practices such as payday loans or those carried out by major banks targeting low-income communities of color, yet this feels more necessary today than even just a few months ago. The incomprehensible fact of 20% of this nation experiencing a loss of income spells opportunity for unscrupulous lenders who feed off of people’s desperation. How can faith leaders speak out against such practices? How can the Church follow the lead of the Episcopal Federal Credit Union in offering concrete alternatives? My hope is that Ambrose's words and insights can still serve as an example.
[1] Schwartz, Kasselman, Koeze. “How bad is unemployment? Literally off the charts.” May 8, 2020
[2] Moattar, Daniel. “Trump to Payday Lenders: Let’s Rip America Off Again.” February 2020
[3] Rothstein, Richard. “A comment on Bank of America/Countrywide’s discriminatory mortgage lending and its implications for racial segregation.” January 2012
[4] Rothstein, Richard. “A comment on Bank of America/Countrywide’s discriminatory mortgage lending and its implications for racial segregation.” January 2012
[5] Rothstein, Richard. “A comment on Bank of America/Countrywide’s discriminatory mortgage lending and its implications for racial segregation.” January 2012
[6] Brown, Peter.Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, 120
[7] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 299
[8] Brown, Peter.Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, 121-122.
[9] Ambrose of Milan, Letter 40, paragraph 14
[10] Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, 123
[11] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Loc 475
[12] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity.Loc 475
[13] Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, 123
[14] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Loc 478
[15] Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, 121
[16] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 300
[17] McGrath, Alister. 172
[18] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Loc 488
[19] Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, Loc 3441
[20] Leviticus 25. 8-34
[21] Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, Loc 3314
[22] On Naboth as translated by Helen Rhee in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. 105
[23] Tobit 4.6-8
[24] On Tobit. As translated by Helen Rhee in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. 108
[25] On Lending with Interest. As translated by Helen Rhee in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. LOC 419
[26] Oslington, Paul. Oxford Handbook on Christianity and Economics. From the entry on “usury”.
[27] Miramontes, Jennifer. “Credit Unions for Economic Justice” in ECF Vital Practices. March 2020.
[28] https://efcula.org/about-us/
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