The people’s interest: A new battle against usury

Christian Century: The people's interest: A new battle against usury

Walking down Trade Street in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, Melinda Graham spied the Bank of America football stadium a few blocks away. "That's all my money, right there," said Graham, one of hundreds who marched on B of A and Wachovia one day last October to demand a 10 percent cap on credit-card interest rates.

A few minutes later, Graham noticed a pair of brown leather stilettos on a sharply dressed young woman. "Look at her shoes," she urged her 21-year-old daughter. Then she looked at me, who had just asked her about her credit-card debt: "I'm a shoe fanatic," she admitted.

Graham can no longer afford such luxuries. She started cutting her spending after her debt topped $8,000, which is about average for the nearly half of all Americans who carry a credit -card balance. She used to go to the cinema once a week or rent half a dozen movies to watch over the weekend, but not these days. "I can't do the things I like doing, like getting away on the weekend," she said. "I buy only the necessities."

Still, it has taken her four years to pay off $3,000 of her debt; she has $5,000 more to go. After she lost her job at a cardboard factory last April, JPMorgan Chase raised her interest rate from 17 percent to 24 percent—an industry trend that prompted Congress to restrict rate increases last year (it takes effect in 2010). As she attends community college to become a physical therapy assistant, Graham pays $200 a month to Chase, $85 of which goes to interest.

"It's hard to get that payment down when so much of it is going to [the bank]," she said. "You feel helpless because there's nothing you can do. Well, until today," she said, referring to the march. "Hopefully, this makes a difference."

Graham came to Charlotte with members of her church, New Life Worship Center in Lexington, North Carolina, one of more than 500 congregations from the Midwest to the East Coast (along with some in Great Britain) who support limits on interest rates.

While conceding that careless spending is the chief cause of consumer debt and needs to be addressed, the march organizers object to the way credit companies make enticing offers of easy credit and then increase interest rates and impose profitable penalties.

The lead sponsor of the "10 Percent Is Enough" campaign is the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community-organizing network whose local chapters have worked for living-wage laws, affordable housing and school reform. Perhaps best known for training and employing Barack Obama in the 1980s, IAF's history stretches back to the meatpacking labor movement of the 1930s and '40s.

For many Christian leaders, who are the main recruiters for the interest-cap movement, concern for interest rates is rooted in biblical texts and traditional teachings of the church against usury—that is, against charging a fee for the use of money, otherwise known as interest. …

Lengthy article with an interesting overview of how usury has been dealt with by the church throughout history.