Greece, Debt and Democracy: A Theological Reflection

The drama of Greece and the Euro is an ancient one. It harks back to the origins of democracy, which was born in Athens out of a struggle against debt bondage.

Writing some two hundred years after the reforms that laid the foundations of democracy in Athens, Aristotle sees the demand for an amnesty of debts and an ending of debt-slavery as central to the origins of democracy.

For Aristotle, politics was a means through which the common institutions of self-government preserved the sense of community necessary to subordinate the power of money to the pursuit of the common good.

In the light of the recent referendum, it seems the people of Greece share Aristotle's view of things.

Aristotle reflected the view in ancient Athens - a view echoed in contemporary Athens - that lending and borrowing should be situated within relations of koinonia, or fellowship, that reflect the obligations of citizenship.

For Aristotle, lending money at interest - or usury - led to the fracturing of the proper relationship between citizens. Aristotle condemns the usurer: like the pimp, he takes more than he ought, from the wrong sources and for reasons of sordid gain. He discusses the usurer under the category of "meanness," defined as deficiency in giving and excess in taking - which is to say, the usurer is someone who lacks the virtues required to be a good citizen.

In the midst of serried banking scandals, the seemingly endemic corruption in the financial services industry and the intransience of Germany in relation to debt relief for Greece, it is difficult not to see the continuing salience of Aristotle's insight.

We find an analogous set of concerns in the Bible. Central to the salvation narratives in the Scriptures is liberation from debt slavery. A primary narrative template for understanding salvation is given in the book of Exodus, where the key dramatic act is liberation of the Israelites from debt slavery in Egypt. The book of Genesis closes with the story of Joseph. At the end of this account, although saved from famine, the Israelites, along with everyone else in Egypt, are reduced to debt slavery. This is a "voluntary" process entered into in order to receive the grain from Pharaoh's stores that the people had given to Pharaoh for safe keeping in the first place. The inhabitants of Egypt come before Joseph and pledge their bodies and their land as security for the grain they borrow (Genesis 47:18-19). Therefore they lack both the means to repay the debt and someone to pay it for them (as everyone is now indebted). The inevitable consequence is debt slavery on a massive scale.

The first chapter of Exodus opens with a new Pharaoh who takes advantage of the Israelites' debt slavery to exploit them. So the Israelites were not prisoners of war or chattel slaves; they were debt slaves undertaking forced labour on behalf of the ruling elite. It is this condition from which the Israelites are redeemed. So the admonition that we cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:19-24) is not a trivial matter: the drama of salvation is envisioned as an act of liberation from debt bondage. To put the pursuit of money before the welfare of people, and use money to dominate and exploit people, especially the poor and vulnerable, is to turn your back on God's salvation and deny in practice the revelation given in Scripture of who God is.

The story of Athens and the story of Exodus have been key points of reference in the struggle for political freedom down the ages. Faith in the power of the people and faith in the power of God have frequently combined to provide the energy and vision to resist the idolatry of money. The idolatry of money is nothing less than the over investment of faith in the power of money to deliver the good life so that everyone and everything becomes for sale, nothing is priceless and what is sacred is profaned.

But of late, we have lost faith in the power of people and the power of God and have come to believe there is no alternative to debt as the mechanism for achieving the good life. Contemporary capitalism is built on the idea that debt is a means of salvation: financial debt and the globalized, disembedded flow of credit money are posited as the means through which to achieve human fulfilment, however conceived and at whatever scale. The tragedy of Greece - both for the European creditors and the Greek debtors - is driven by this faith in the power of money.

Unlike in ancient Athens, in the contemporary context, personal and national debt are not seen as threats to good citizenship and political order. Instead, the citizen is often conceptualized as a consumer and the economy, not civic life, is demarcated as the sphere of free, uncoerced relations. Modern ideas of citizenship tacitly envisage debt as the condition of good citizenship as debt sustains the dominant political order and its analogue - a mortgaged, highly speculative and debt-driven economy in which social relations are mediated and represented through consumerist modes of common action and identity formation. And other than in a diminishing slice of Western Europe, debt is a necessity for most people to sustain a life. Housing, education and healthcare, for example, increasingly require taking on debt. In the process, we mortgage our future - literally, make a death pledge with it - so that both our personal and collective work now and to come is in bondage to the banks.

But what the policies required of Greece to stay within the Euro unveil is how debt is used to subjugate, command, manage, order and normalize particular behaviours. The conditions to be imposed on Greece will prohibit the social means of citizenship (affordable or free housing, education, healthcare and so on) from being provided by the state and funded by tax revenues. Instead, they will of necessity be outsourced to the "private" sector and paid for by taking on individual debt (thereby shifting the debt burden from being held collectively, to being held individually). Rather than provide the means of agency so that citizens may act with parity in relation to others politically and economically, the provision of public goods such as housing, education and healthcare through regimes of personal indebtedness create dependency, vulnerability and concentrates power in the hands of those who control the means of credit.

But a linguistic inversion hides the real structure of power from us: instead of being understood as the condition and possibility of shared political agency, welfare and government programs are said to create dependency. Conversely, instead of making explicit how providing these public goods through regimes of personal indebtedness concentrates power in the hands of the financial services industry, providing them through forms of debt bondage is said to give freedom of choice! The shadowy brilliance of this move is that the means of alleviating political and economic oppression by providing the conditions for citizens not to be dependent on others is converted into the means of oppression.

This is always how debt operates as a means of domination. Indebtedness is like digging a well for much needed water only to have the sides collapse as one digs, such that one is buried alive by the very means through which alleviation is sought. Every time you turn on the light, buy food or clothes, get the bus, or heat the house, you exacerbate the debt and make matters worse. One's means of living and existing socially becomes the means through which one is dominated and isolated. And all of this occurs "voluntarily" and legally.

Regimes of indebtedness do not simply create objective conditions of oppression; they also operate by forging subjective conditions of domination. This subjective dimension of domination operates by inducing feelings of shame, guilt and inferiority: to be moral, righteous and just is to be responsible and payback what you owe. But when we are increasingly burdened with and embedded within an infinite series of debts, whether at the personal level (through payday lenders, mortgages and the like), or in our public life (through sovereign debt), then we are constantly made to feel morally suspect. Our credit score becomes a placeholder for our character. Yet, in another inversion, those we are made responsible for and to are the banks and the "masters of the universe" who themselves constantly act irresponsibly with other people's money, privatize profits while socializing costs, reward risky behaviour, are dependent on benefits and bailouts they did not earn, and straightforwardly steal from and betray those they have a fiduciary responsibility to serve.

Against the faux morality of finance capitalism, the potency of a story about a God who forgives debts can be heard afresh. Rather than the story about an oppressive system to which there is no alternative, a story that can only invoke nihilism and despair, the church must proclaim a story about a God who comes to a people in debt bondage and makes a way where there is no way; who lavishes credit on, and has faith in, those the world considers sub-prime; who riskily invests, to the point of emptying himself, in those who cannot repay; and who seeks a dividend of love and Sabbath fruitfulness not of material prosperity.

In the face of the enclosure and financialization of our imagination within capitalism, what is needed is nothing less than the reclamation of a vision of the good life as a commonwealth born out of the power of people to act together in fellowship and the power of God to liberate and redeem.

This article first appeared on ABC Religion and Ethics and we are grateful for permission to republish here.