The BIG Sin Christians Don’t Care About
When you look at the founding of our country — how the United States of America actually came into being — one shameful detail keeps surfacing: the whole thing rests on a sin the Bible prohibits outright.
And this isn’t some relic of history. It’s a sin we keep committing, day in and day out.
No — that sin isn’t slavery. Both the Bible and Jesus are disturbingly acquiescent about enslaving other human beings. (Although slavery continues in this country, both illegally and legally.) [1]
But the sin the Bible prohibits outright is the one that enabled slavery in the first place — along with the theft of land from and genocide of indigenous Americans. It’s a sin that opens the door to a multitude of others.
And yet, despite the Bible’s repeated prohibitions, no Christian seems bothered by it. Most probably don’t even know it’s a sin at all. But it’s still the tainted lifeblood of the global economy of extraction.
It’s called usury — lending money at interest.
A sin in both Testaments
Today, making money off of lending money is a ubiquitous practice. Without it, we’re led to believe our entire world economy would grind to a halt. But that was not the case 2,300ish years ago.
In at least three places in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which contains God’s original law for the ancient Israelites), charging interest on loans to one’s fellow Israelites is strictly forbidden:
- “If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them.” — Exodus 22:25.
- “If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on you, you shall support them… Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God… You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance.” — Leviticus 25:35–37.
- “You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent.” — Deuteronomy 23:19
(For those keeping score, homosexuality is only banned twice, although even that’s debated.)
These laws reflect the Hebrew Bible’s deep commitment to social justice — many of its rules and regulations went to ensuring those with more helped those with less. [2]
As the financial historian Charles R. Geisst points out in his excellent book, Beggar Thy Neighbor: A History of Usury and Debt, most loans in ancient Israel’s agrarian society were used for consumption purchases. That meant a borrower needed money or food simply to survive a temporary crisis. Charging interest on a loan to somebody in a time of need was seen as highly exploitive and immoral. [3]
This prohibition, however, was limited only to fellow Israelites, as Deuteronomy 23:20 goes on to explicitly allow this. In this tribal society, outsiders were likely viewed as a bigger credit risk, since they fell outside the shared social and legal obligations that bound Israelites to one another.
But zoom out further, and the practice of charging interest on loaned money was looked down upon more broadly, since the money a) came from someone in need and b) you didn’t do anything to earn it. Charging interest was seen as trying to make money “beget” itself without creating any real, productive value, serving only to enrich the idle lender at the expense of the desperate borrower.
This attitude persisted into the time of Jesus. Taking interest on loans to another Jewish person was still prohibited, so Jewish lenders in the area where Jesus lived focused on non-Jewish borrowers instead. Cultural attitudes still looked down on the practice broadly, and Rome capped interest at 12%. They would eventually ban compounding interest altogether.
In his own preaching, the biblical Jesus takes the prohibition further than the Torah ever did. The Torah’s ban applied only to loans between fellow Israelites — Deuteronomy 23:20 explicitly permits charging foreigners interest. Jesus removes that boundary entirely. In Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, he says this:
If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. — Luke 6:34–36. [4]
Where the law of the Hebrew Bible drew a line at the tribe, Jesus draws no line at all — lend to your enemies, and expect nothing back. The Biblical case against lending with interest is pretty clear: don’t do it.
The world that took this seriously
At least, that’s what the church thought for over a millennium and a half. The early church banned the practice for clergy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., and later extended the ban to the laity in subsequent councils across the fifth and sixth centuries.
By the Middle Ages, the church’s stand against usury had hardened. In 1139, the Second Lateran Council declared public usurers infamous, stripped them of the sacraments, and denied them a Christian burial.
By the Council of Vienne in 1311, usury was a grave sin — and denying that fact had become heresy in its own right. Clement V, presiding over that same council, declared that anyone who insisted usury wasn’t a sin should be punished as a heretic. The threat of the Inquisition now hung over anyone who lent money for a living.
Which is exactly why nobody charges interest on money today. Oh wait — what happened?
The world that doesn’t
In a word: white, European colonialism. After Europeans reached the Americas in 1492, the demand for capital — the funds necessary to cross the ocean and plunder the continent’s resources — exploded.
The discovery produced a rush of “explorers” hoping to cash in on the wonders this new world might hold, and because the potential reward was so great, merchants were more than willing to pay the high interest banks would charge to fund highly risky, 15th century sea travel.
That early capital didn’t wait for the church’s blessing — it was small, risky, and often technically illicit. The fortune it eventually returned is what broke the dam.
Essentially, the ruling class figured out two things: there was a ton of money waiting to be stolen from the “new” world, and their existing money could make them a ton more of it. And when faced with a choice between being moral and getting richer, the ruling classes chose richer — and the church was forced to retreat from its once iron-clad prohibition against charging interest.
To be fair, the retreat was gradual, and happened far slower in Rome than in Protestant Europe. Calvin was the first major theologian to declare the prohibition against interest irrelevant, in the mid-1500s. Rome wouldn’t formally abandon its ban until the mid-19th century — three hundred years after merchants had already been paying interest on colonial ventures without waiting for anyone’s blessing.
Both traditions eventually produced an elaborate — though plausible — theological explanation for the shift. Scholastic theology (the reasoning developed in the Middle Ages by thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas to prove the teachings of the church were entirely natural and self-evident) had rested the ban on usury on two pillars.
The first pillar held that money was “sterile.” Unlike a flock of sheep or a field of wheat, a pile of coins sitting in a vault couldn’t reproduce itself, so charging for the “use” of money was charging for something money couldn’t actually do. The second held that money’s value was fixed, like a yardstick. You could have more or less of the thing being measured, but the ruler itself never changed length.
Together, the two pillars made charging interest immoral: it was profit from a process that couldn’t naturally occur, for work the lender never did. Calvin and others argued that theory had been disproven.
A flood of stolen American gold and silver sent the cost of living in Europe climbing for decades. If a coin bought less bread this year than it did the last, the coin’s value had moved. Money wasn’t a stable measure anymore — it was a commodity, rising and falling with its own supply and demand, the same as wool or grain or anything else with a market price.
And once money behaved like a commodity, Calvin and others argued, the sterility pillar didn’t have much left to stand on either. Something whose value shifts with scarcity is, by definition, already doing what usury doctrine insisted money could never do on its own.
But church historians have the order backward. The ruling class acted first. The theology was written to explain what had already happened.
The danger of interest
But here’s what didn’t change: the words of the Bible. What Aquinas argued was a reasoning for the ban that made the ban seem natural. Calvin and others argued those natural reasons were no longer true — so the ban was no longer valid. But what Christian today can tell you what sterile money is? When was the last time you heard a sermon on the dangers of interest?
And yet, the dangers of interest are incredibly real and far more fatal than what you’re told will kill you. Corporate media harps on the dangers of crime and immigrants. Hollywood likes blockbusters about apocalyptic asteroids. But far more deadly to most people is the prison of poverty, and the lock on that prison is interest.
Approximately 48% of American adults carry credit card debt — with an average interest rate of 21 to 22%. Another 36% of American households carry medical debt. And the typical consumer pays between $279,002 and $300,000 solely in interest over their working lifetime — a number that climbs to nearly half a million dollars if you have a poor credit score. That’s the evil of our system: the people least able to pay it are charged exorbitantly more.
The health effects of this debt — something we’re taught from birth to treat as an inevitable, inescapable boogeyman — are innumerable. A landmark 2020 study found that high financial debt burden and acute financial crises are independently associated with a statistically significant increase in suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. And that’s to say nothing of the people who die prematurely because they can’t afford healthcare, and so fail to seek out preventative medicine and advice before it’s too late.
Following Jesus
But what if we took the words of Jesus seriously? What if we actually centered his commandment to “do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return”?
Centering that commandment means building an actual architecture, a real way for a society to move money from the people who have it to the people who need it, without extracting a toll along the way.
That architecture isn’t hypothetical. Jewish communities have run interest-free lending funds called gemachim for centuries, neighbors pooling money so other neighbors can survive a crisis without paying rent on their own desperation.
Credit unions were chartered on a similar premise: member-owned instead of shareholder-owned, built to serve the people who use them rather than extract from them. To be sure, a credit union isn’t zero-interest lending, but it isn’t extraction either — covering your own costs and charging 400% aren’t the same species of interest, whatever the Scholastics’ math said.
Debt-buying charities now purchase medical debt for pennies on the dollar and simply cancel it, proving something the church spent three hundred years arguing around: debt can just be forgiven. The moral case was never actually the obstacle.
This alternative has always existed at a smaller scale than it should, starved of capital and outcompeted by a financial system built on the opposite premise, that money should never stop generating more of itself, and that the people with the least should pay the most for the privilege of surviving. This is the system working exactly as designed, and it was designed by the people who profit from it.
This country was built on that design before it was even a country. Land theft, and slavery, and colonial extraction all ran on capital that usury made available and usury made profitable — enslaved people were routinely mortgaged as collateral for the same loans that financed the plantations working them, and slave ships were financed and insured the same way any merchant vessel was.
A nation that took Jesus’s actual commandment seriously would owe this country a different economy, and an apology wouldn’t come close to covering it.
We don’t live in that economy yet. Every gemach, every credit union that still remembers its charter, every dollar of medical debt bought up and forgiven instead of collected, is proof the alternative isn’t a fantasy. It’s a discipline. And it’s the one the church walked away from the moment it became inconvenient to the people writing its theology.
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FOOTNOTES:
- On the Bible’s acceptance of slavery, see Exodus 21:2–6, Leviticus 25:44–46, and Ephesians 6:5; even Jesus’s parables (e.g., Matthew 25:14–30) treat master-slave relationships as ordinary, without moral comment. And yes, salvery is still alive and well in the United States: the Thirteenth Amendment bans slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” a clause still used to compel prison labor. Walk Free’s 2023 Global Slavery Index counted the United States among just seventeen countries still practicing state-imposed forced labor, with an estimated 1.1 million people in modern slavery nationwide — legal and illegal combined.
- For a fuller treatment of this tradition, see Rabbi Jill Jacobs, There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2009), which traces how Jewish law and textual tradition address poverty, debt, labor, and housing — the same territory covered by the usury laws discussed here. Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, writes from inside the tradition rather than about it.
- Unless otherwise noted, the historical account in this essay draws on Charles R. Geisst, Beggar Thy Neighbor: A History of Usury and Debt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
- The Jesus Seminar rated this saying gray, meaning the fellows could not agree whether Jesus said it, though most felt it reflected ideas consistent with his teaching (Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels [New York: Macmillan, 1993], 296).
Written by Andrew Springer
Journalist. Writer. Entrepreneur. Democratic Socialist. Founder of NOTICE News. Get my newsletter about the historical Jesus: https://bit.ly/jesusmovementemail
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