Economic Fundamentalists

Campus Report ^ | March 16, 2009 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Economic Fundamentalists

by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 16, 2009

A Baptist minister gave a sermon on economics that the ACLU and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State would surely regard as crossing the theological divide. “During the last two years, some of the most notable commercial reputations have been hopelessly destroyed,” he said. “Men in the great world of trade, who were trusted, around whose characters there hovered no cloud of suspicion, not even the shade of doubt, have proved themselves reckless of honesty and devoid of principle.”

“The fiery trial has been too much for the wood, hay, and stubble of many a gigantic firm.” The preacher who delivered this broadside, C. H. Spurgeon, did so in 1869.

Moreover, he made them in London at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Nevertheless, the world of British commerce he neatly dissected then seems eerily like what we have come to regard as quintessentially American today.

“Probably we have more of this to come, more revelations still to be made of apparent wealth which covered insolvency, as a rich paper may cover a mud wall, crafty schemes which duped the public with profits never made, and tempted them to advance to deeper speculations, even as the mirage of the desert mocks the traveler,” Rev. Spurgeon warned one and a half centuries ago. “We have seen in the public prints, month after month, fresh discoveries of the modes of financing adopted by the villainy of this present age, to accomplish robbery respectably and achieve felony with credit.”...

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The pulpits of old were hot with fire and brimstone ... and contemporary commentary with a biblical understanding of what’s right and wrong, holy and evil.

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