I posted something on Facebook the other week that riled up several capitalist Christians:
The borrower is slave to the lender.
Lenders are slavers.
Interest (profit on lending, including houses) incentivizes slavery.
What these capitalist Christians didn’t realize was that:
a.) I was quoting the Christian Bible, and
b.) I was referencing Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism.
Awkward.
Slavery = a person held in forced labor without recompense.
As we’ll discover in today’s essay, debt does indeed qualify as slavery.
The next day, I received an email from a pastor.
He asked me to write about what a biblical banking system might look like.
But here’s the thing:
Banking is downstream of money creation.
So before we can reform banking, we need to reform money itself.
First, fix the money
Interest ensures there’s never enough money to repay all the principal + interest owing, therefore guaranteeing compounding indebtedness.
(Globally, we’re at $315 trillion and increasing daily.)
People are literally forced by the state to work under threat of bankruptcy, imposing penalties, limiting future opportunities, repossession, seizure, homelessness, and generational poverty.
Corrupt money-creation forces humanity to work by shackling us with debt.
Interest is literally a form of slavery.
Not antebellum whipping-Africans slavery, but still a form of slavery.
This is nothing new; it’s been acknowledged for millennia.
We need a generation of William Wilberforces to abolish the slavery of debt and interest.
Make bankers bank again
Once we bring back honest honey — gold, silver, Bitcoin, and/or sovereign money — then we need to make bankers bank again.
As in, we must once again separate banking from moneylending.
Here’s a recent essay I published on why and how:
Dear Bankers: Stop Making War
In 1910, a group of New York bankers representing J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Rothschild family covertly boarded a train — disguised as duck hunters — and headed south to Jekyll Island in Georgia.
Banks must actually bank — store and protect wealth in vaults for a fee… not act as moneylenders that create interest-bearing debt-based money out of thin air.
A new vision for lending
At present, lending exists for one sole reason: to maximize profits for shareholders.
In other words, the goal is to maximally indebt the world.
The first thing to say is that the goal should be to wean the world off debt.
Ultimately, we want to eradicate the slavery of debt altogether.
Luckily, reforming money removes the structural trap that forces people into debt in the first place.
And abolishing interest removes all incentive to keep the debt system going.
We need to rethink how our economies work.
Our goal should be capital formation — the building up of savings and usable assets — not a perpetual and ever-growing reliance on creditors.
We need to wind down the credit economy.
We need to restore the capital economy.
So ALL moneylending that exists should do so in support of building up the borrower’s wealth, not looting and ransacking it, and enslaving the borrower for life.
Christian banking is a ministry that ministers to people, not one that makes their lives miserable.
So once we’ve straightened out our thinking as to where we’re headed and corrected the structures that are forcing us in the opposite direction, then we can create a banking system that blesses instead of enslaves.
“But who will lend if we ban interest??!!!!”
As you can imagine, when interest is abolished, the for-profit money-lending system will evaporate, along with people who lend for the wrong reasons.
Christians lend to bless.
The sorts of people who largely get into banking right now are, by their very nature, parasitic, predatory, and non-contributing people — reaping interest off the work of others is far easier than actually working, after all.
So where will people go if they need to borrow?
They’ll go to the people and institutions that actually care about human well-being instead of shareholder profits.
People who are in moneylending not for shareholder profit, but for community abundance.
IE:
Co-operatives
Credit unions
Charities
Not-for-profits
Denominations
Municipal, county, state, regional, and federal governments
Christians and others willing to lend interest-free
New global interest-free banks that Christians start to rival the horrific World Bank, BIS, and IMF.
Biblical moneylending
For those who aren’t familiar with Christian economics, here’s the theological context:
The old Jesus law said not to charge interest to fellow Jews or the poor, but then Jesus comes along in Luke 6:35 and says to lend freely to anyone, even your enemies, and expect nothing in return.
The nothing here doesn’t just mean “no interest.”
It means no principal, either.
Check out the verse before, Luke 6:34 — “If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount.”
Christians lend, expecting to never be repaid.
To be robbed.
Great riches accrue to your kingdom account for doing so.
In this way, our lending truly reflects the character of our God. God has lent us everything, we have repaid nothing and can’t repay anything, yet He doesn’t hold it against us.
“Robbed?!” we might say.
Yes, robbed.
In Luke 6:30, Jesus says, “Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back.”
Jesus himself puts this into practice by giving Judas Iscariot control of their company’s money purse, despite knowing he was a thief, perhaps as a way of inviting him to a life of integrity.
Jesus takes the old law of only lending interest-free to fellow Jews, and fulfills the law’s intention by extending total grace, even to enemies.
Every time a Christian gives, lends, or is robbed, and doesn’t demand repayment, their heavenly bank account grows richer.
Inflation stealing from lenders
Most people refuse to lend interest-free because it costs them.
Lending money interest-free doesn’t work very well under our current corrupt model because inflation leaves the lender poorer, because they’re repaid with currency that’s been debased and lost some value.
Millions of borrowers — and especially billionaires — actually borrow as much money as possible when interest rates are lower than real inflation, because it allows them to arbitrage. This is evil.
Imagine if you lent me a gold bar and I repaid you in silver.
Imagine if you lent me $1,000 and I paid you back two years later with $1,000 that was only worth $900. That’s theft.
Over the past 10 years, Michelle and I have made tens of thousands in interest-free loans, and it’s cost of nearly $5,000 in lost value. But, God has blessed us with excess, so we can afford to take the interest hit in order to help others.
But if we abolished fractional reserve banking, inflation would disappear, meaning if you lent me $1,000, you wouldn’t lose anything when I repaid you.
Imagine a biblical bank
You go to the bank.
You deposit $1,000.
The bank offers you several options:
“Would you like to store your $1,000 in the fiat currency of your choice — USD, CAD, GBP, etc — or would you like us to convert and store it as gold, silver, platinum, Bitcoin, sovereign currency, or our in-house inflation-defensive asset currency?”
You choose.
The bank converts to the currency of your choice at their true cost.
They store it for you in their vaults, and you pay a small monthly fee for the service of having them protect your money, which they use to pay overhead, insurance, employees, etc.
Real banking.
The beauty of this sort of storage optionality is that your savings no longer lose any value due to inflation.
Now imagine a biblical moneylender
Instead of lending at interest to maximize profits — lending to arms manufacturers, polluters, etc — lenders now focus solely on that which builds up society.
You go to the moneylending “bank” and ask for a loan to build an affordable home or start/grow your business.
All loans are 100+% collateralized by the asset being purchased so the loan is risk-free for the money-lender.
They offer to lend you any of the following:
$300,000 worth of gold
$300,000 worth of silver
$300,000 worth of Bitcoin
$300,000 worth of sovereign money
$300,000 worth of the bank’s own inflation-defensive asset-backed currency
The idea is that the bank will lend you $X in value and you will repay the exact true value in return — no interest benefiting them, no inflation benefiting you.
The moneylender makes a normal, reasonable living as a commodity/utility service by charging you a loan origination/maintenance fee to cover their true costs — overhead, default insurance, paying employees, etc.
What’s great about interest-free borrowing is that you only have to pay for your house once, instead of twice — once as principal and once as interest.
In other words, the average home buyer could become a debt-free homeowner in just 10–15 years instead of 20–30 years.
The only remaining question is:
Who will front the money to lend?
There are loads of options, including:
Governments can create non-debt-based sovereign money to lend interest-free to not-for-profit moneylenders, co-operatives, credit unions, charities, etc for them to reloan interest-free to borrowers.
Governments can let money-creation be free market again, so anyone can create money and compete on the open market to retain their value.
Christians, churches, and denominations could donate to kickstart their own moneylending institutions.
With people’s permission, real banks (where people store their savings) could partner with moneylending institutions to re-lend people’s savings to others interest-free.
There’s also a $130 trillion behemoth that will become more than happy to lend to people interest-free once corrupt banking is abolished…
Non-bank moneylenders
The new institutional moneylenders — good-hearted, community-spirited, well-being-enhancing folks — won’t be the only people with motives to lend interest-free.
Businesses would do a vast amount of interest-free moneylending.
They already do.
In order to encourage people to buy their products, many businesses will sell their products on installment plans.
Car dealerships already do this all the time. (Though, they often just raise the financed price versus the cash price, effectively charging interest by another name.)
Cars, tractors, houses, factories, SMRs, virtually anything can be sold on installment plans.
Installment plans aren’t rocket science: A company will build a car for $25,000, sell it to you for $36,000, and you’ll pay them back $500/month for six years.
It’s how your grandma bought her washing machine that still works sixty years later.
Remember, under this new model, moneylenders risk NOTHING because all loans are 100+% collateralized by the asset being purchased, plus the borrower pays default insurance in case of death or a severe accident.
And borrowers risk nothing because the worst-case scenario is that they simply lose the item, not a boatload of interest, a down payment, the foreclosure/seizure of their other assets, and bankruptcy that ruins their family for generations.
Recap
We must abolish fractional reserve banking/money-printing interest-bearing debt-money out of thin air
We must restore honest money that doesn’t lose its value (gold, silver, Bitcoin, sovereign money, inflation-defense asset-backed currencies, etc)
We must re-seperate banking and moneylending
We must abolish interest on lending
There’s absolutely zero profit for parasitic shareholders in biblical banking, but it’s wildly enriching for society.
Until abolition, we will continue to see compounding inflation, debt, economic struggle, and poverty.
Until abolition, we are not free people.
Until abolition, we remain in a slavery system.
Massive wealth benefits
At present, banksters print interest-bearing debt-based money out of thin air, systematically guaranteeing inflation, the literal enslavement of humanity, and perpetual compounding debt.
Under the future banking/moneylending system:
Debt will shrink, within, and disappear
Inflation will cease to exist
Today’s current bankers and parasitic shareholders will have to get real jobs that actually contribute new value and wealth to society
Borrowing will diminish as people become wealthier
Borrowing will become shorter-term
Society will adopt a longer-term mindset
People’s net worths will soar
People’s health will improve as poverty evaporates
Capital formation will lead to an explosion of asset creation
We’ll enjoy more prosperity, peace, social cohesion, unity, and community
Moneylenders will become a real blessing to the world instead of an enslaving curse.
The Christian vision for lending is to bless, not to profit…
…but isn’t it ironic that blessing others actually profits everyone?
PS —I steward Christian-Bank.com, ChristianBank.net, ChristianBank.ca, and ChristianBank.co.uk… if you know any Christians who might want to explore bankrolling a small biblical banking startup, please send them this article and get them to email me via jaredbrock.com.