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Christianism and Some of Its Pestilent Droppings

Who would have thought that usury would be more prevalent in Christian communities? The thought should come easier, somewhat like a greased banana, if you replace "Christian" with "christianist." We're not talking about plain-vanilla usury here, but predatory lending to the tune of APR rates as high as 570% (or even rates with no limits in Idaho and Utah). Forget about loan sharks, this is the new payday loan industry.

Steven Graves and Christopher Peterson have a journal paper on this subject due in the Spring 2008 issue of Catholic University Law Review.¹ For their study, available as a pre-publication draft in PDF form, the authors survey "over 20,000 payday lender locations, cast against a backdrop of Christian political power, local and regional electoral districts, and a variety of demographic considerations." Their conclusion:

The "strong correlation between the density of payday lending industry and the political power of conservative Christians" certainly suggests that conservative Christian communities are letting this happen, and may even approve of it. Equally interesting is their methodology in getting to a measure of the political power of Conservative Christian Americans. Recognizing the difficulty in calculating "the power of Christian values in the legislative process," the authors come up with a useful proxy they call "Christian Power Index" or CPI. They generate this CPI by ranking states according to these three variables:

While this goes a long way toward measuring the "christianist" category and giving substance to the socio-political influence of this conservative group, it is worth noting that, in the process of building their rubric, they leave Roman Catholics fully outside of the "Christian Right" category, and this even serves to offset the scoring in their first variable.² Clearly their CPI encompasses only Protestant denominations.

It is appalling to see the extent of the payday loan industry, especially in these statistical clusters:³

Their picture of the payday loan industry, congested in these heavily christianist regions, has much in common, I think, with a recent map of the impact of humans on the world's oceans. This composite map, drawn by a team of scientists led by Ben Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, CA, tells their story from a very different frame of reference:⁴

1.  See "U of U Professor Coauthors Study Mapping Correlation Between Christian Right, Payday Lenders," University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law News, February 11, 2008. See also "Usury Study Says Payday Lenders More Prevalent In Areas Of High Christian Conservative Power," The Consumerist, February 17, 2008.
2.  The terms "christianist" and "christianism" weren't invented by Rémi Brague, despite the appearance of the distinction between Christians and "christianists" in his classic book, Europe. La voie romaine. William Safire finds the distinction as far back as Milton in 1649: see Safire's "Isms and Phobias," New York Times, May 15, 2005.
3.  Get this map and others by following these breadcrumbs: California State University Northridge / College of Social & Behavioral Sciences / Geography / Dr Graves / Research / Usury Law and the Christian Right.
4.  See "Scientists Map Ocean Damage," at NPR's All Things Considered, February 14, 2008, for story and larger map.

Labels: Christianism