Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. It would be hard to imagine a better conversation partner for that kind of discussion than Jim Wallis, whom we have with us today.

Jim, as you probably know, is the editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine and founder of the Sojourners peace and justice movement. He is also the best-selling author most recently of a very fine book called The Great Awakening, looking for something significant happening in the spiritual life of America just now, as it addresses both spirituality and social justice issues.

Jim Wallis is also recently named to President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives; and if you have read your morning newspaper yet, you have also learned that he has been named one of the five key pastors who are going to be advising the president on an array of matters going forward.

Jim has spent a career thinking about economic issues and especially poverty in light of Christian teaching, and he’s going to talk with us today about the pastoral, spiritual implications of the economic crisis we are going through. We look forward to your joining in the conversation with us.

Jim, it is wonderful to have you here.

Jim Wallis: Great to be back. Thank you.

Lloyd: Well, here we are in the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, something that Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has called, in a different context, a crisis of faith of a certain sort. Is there something theological and spiritual going on amidst this economic meltdown?

Wallis: Well, I think there is. In fact some have pointed out that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. I think that may in this case be true for us as the people of God because how many times, Sam, do you remember that everybody was talking about the same thing, almost all the time? And the first question, you know, we always ask is, what does this mean for us economically? But the second question should be our first question. What does this mean for us as Christians, as people of faith? And so I think, as I will say in the sermon today, I think that we will have a real moment of opportunity to clarify our mission really in a time of crisis. You know, this is a structural crisis. But it is also a spiritual one. So it calls for a new social regulation but perhaps self-regulation too.

Lloyd: What makes this a spiritual crisis? What is going on as we have watched the stock market go down and the banks collapse and corporations get in trouble? What is it underneath this that has to do with our souls and our values and the decisions we make that reflect what we care most about?

Wallis: I feel very comfortable here in this cathedral. I have been here so often. This is a natural context for me. But I was in a rather unnatural context last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and they had a panel on this topic. It was called Moral Values and Market Capitalism. So I am on this panel, talking to all these CEOs and heads of state—not my usual crowd, you know—and Tony Blair was also on the panel and the next day he said “There must be a crisis, because they would not have had that panel and they sure would not have had you on it.” (Laughter)

And every morning we woke up in Davos, in our hotel rooms, turned the TV on. Here was this CNN reporter interviewing these bundled-up CEOs, behind the magic mountain of Davos, with the snow coming down, always asked the same question. “When will this crisis end?” And they had a white board and they were predicting when it would end.

So I said, that’s the wrong question: when will it end?

The right question is, how will this change us? To your question: our ways of thinking, our values, our priorities. I said we have failed to bring virtue to our decision-making. And we trusted that the invisible hand, you know, would make things come out okay.

But the invisible hand let go of the common good and let go of our values and things spun out of control.

So I think when these Davos CEOs…and afterwards they would all be taking me aside for confessionals and pastoral conversations; for two days I had this sort of values spiritual dialogue with these CEOs. So they understand that, as you say, there is a values crisis here. I think it is something we all should pay attention to.

Lloyd: It is such a complex reality to try to get our hands around, and there are so many ways to assign blame and there are probably some inappropriate places or complex places to assign blame. I think you wrote somewhere of talking to a women who had been a vice president at AIG. You want to tell that story? Because it just shows just how complex this thing is.

Wallis: She had been there for a long time. I think she was one of their best sorts of financial advisors and she had been quite scrupulous in her practices. And in fact, she had her whole future retirement in their stock.

All of a sudden her world is coming apart. Her stock is worth less than, I think, fifty cents per share, and the company’s behavior has wiped her out. Now, she herself really was being very responsible. But the larger context has really destroyed her economic future. And so many people are feeling that.

Lloyd: And that seems to me in a lot of ways, a parable of this moment, when a lot of people—a lot of people I suspect sitting here were being just as scrupulous, just as responsible, just as good of citizen and investing their money appropriately and seeing it go up rapidly and being glad about it, but had no sense that undergirding this surge in wealth was something that was deeply problematic.

Wallis: I think there are two issues here. One is the lectionary text for today, which I think God must have provided directly, is about Jesus overturning the money changers in the temple. So that is what we will talk about in the sermon. But if you saw, Jon Stewart did that on Comedy Central just this week. (Laughter and applause) And it really was. If you listen to what he said, he was overturning the money changers temple in his debate with Jim Cramer for Mad Money and so that’s…

Lloyd: Say just a word about that so people can know what that was.

Wallis: Well, I say more in the sermon, but he took on Jim Cramer, this crazy Mad Money guy at CNBC for, you know, just sort of not really alerting us to this sort of, you know, poker game in the back room of Wall Street.

Whether taking your 401(k)s and they’re turning it into a gambling casino, and people like Cramer were complicit. I would say at that level there are really money changers that need to be dealt with. But, you know what? I want to say we all know that no Christians had maxed out on their credit cards, right? (Laughter)

Because I remember in this town, here in Washington, I had a house in what used to be a war zone in Columbia Heights. The cabs wouldn’t even bring your family in. Nobody wanted to be there. Then the subway came, and the bubble came, and all of our houses in this town got very valuable. People would actually stalk you and call you and say “You know what? Take the equity in your house and buy another house, and then take the equity in that house and buy another house…” and flip, flip, flip, flip, and that is the same thing they were doing on Wall Street.

So this temptation for easy money… at Davos I talked about Gandhi’s seven deadly social sins. Which I think is diagnostic for our period now. If you recall them, they are politics without principal, and we have seen some of that. And here are the main two for us: wealth without work; commerce without morality. And pleasure without conscience; education without character; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. So here this notion of easy money, or even a prosperity gospel on our church side, really, I think is complicit in the backroom card game going on in Wall Street. So it is an issue for them and it is an issue for all of us.

Lloyd: One of your themes, and I think it has been echoed recently by people such as Gordon Brown, is this notion of the importance of a common good. What seems to have vanished from a lot of society in the last decade or so, maybe longer than that, is a sense that what happens in the market place, what happens in the broader policy decisions that drive an economy, needs to have in mind a common good and not simply profit alone. Is that something that you see critical at this moment?

Wallis: I think it is so central we could even start talking about, Sam, like the greed culture.

The greed culture and the greed economy are not just wrong; they’ve failed. They failed us. So can we talk about a common good culture or a common good economy? That is a conversation I would like to have.

I met this young state legislator from West Virginia, recently, a Christian guy. His father was a miner. So, he told me how in the mines, in his dad’s generation, they would take in to the mines, they would always take a canary with them, because the canary has a very vulnerable respiratory system, and when the air gets toxic the canary begins to choke and wheeze and cough, and when that happens you know you all better get out quickly.

The canary is the first one to feel how toxic the environment is. People like you and I have been talking about the poor for a long time, and maybe this is why.

Maybe the poor are like the canary. When they begin to choke and cough and sputter, it means we are all breathing more toxic air now and the common good is threatened. So they become a sign of our health more generally. So it may be that we have been ignoring these things for so long things have gotten toxic and now spun out of control.

So how do you talk about the common good being our own good? That’s really a new … that’s different than the poor, the other who we should care about. It’s the common good being our own good.

Lloyd: That we all have a stake—

Wallis: Absolutely.

Lloyd: —in a good that works for everybody. Where do we go with this? We could spend a lot of time analyzing the greed and the short-sidedness and maybe obliviousness, a whole set of things that got us here.

But here we are, gathered as a faith community here to think about what the responses should be. Where do we begin thinking about that both personally and publicly in responding creatively to this huge crisis?

Wallis: This is where it gets kind of exciting because maybe on three levels: first we do a more value, moral analysis of what’s happened, which we have just been doing. But second, we say how does our theological tradition speak to this? Our theology is full of wisdom about wealth, about accumulation, about credit, about how much is enough. When you spend more money than you have, on things you don’t need, it creates a problem.

The early church fathers talked about economics all the time. So, Sam, I wonder if we ought to create a Sunday school curriculum for adults on economics. Every Sunday morning, we adults go to Sunday school about what the Bible says about these topics. That would be fascinating.

And then thirdly, pastorally; pastors and lay people: I think we have a chance to create some new patterns and even institutions. A lot of churches have a capacity to create some new things that could be models for new institutions in a post-crisis economy. For example, I know a lot of churches that could create credit unions, you know, for their members and for those in their community who need help. Or other cooperative patterns in housing and job creation.

I think the churches, if we respond by not just hunkering down and hiding our heads hoping for the best, but say this is the chance to provide leadership. How do we do the preaching that we need, the teaching, the spiritual formation on economics that our tradition allows us to do? And then how do we create some new alternative patterns that this society could look to and say now that is a good idea? We could do that, too.

Lloyd: Give us just a quick primer in biblical economics. Not Keynesian economics or Galbraithian economics or Freidman economics–but biblical economics.

Wallis: You know, when I was talking to the Davos people, in a previous year, I was asked to speak to a workshop topic, “Should we despair of our disparities?” And so I said, well, I know the hot topic in Davos of course is biblical archeology. And they all laughed.

I said, here is what we learned: the biblical archeologists dig down to the ruins of ancient Israel. They find periods of time when the artifacts, the relics, show a relative shared prosperity. Not sameness, but no huge houses and small shacks. There is a relative kind of sharing of the prosperity.

During those times, there were no profits. No Amos, no Isaiah, no Jeremiah. When they dig down, let’s say in the eighth century, and they find the artifacts show great gulfs and chasms, that is when the prophets rise up to thunder the judgment and justice of God.

Two thousand verses of the Bible are about this topic: the poor, wealth, poverty, the gaps, god’s, Hark God’s care for those who are afflicted.

So, there is all kinds of wisdom there about how inequality on the scale we have right now, where CEO pay has gone from thirty times average worker pay thirty years ago to now 415 times average worker pay.

That inequality, I would say, is a sin of biblical proportions. And until we start talking biblically about it, we are not going to really get very far.

Lloyd: So a biblical vision assumes a kind of covenant that reaches across, rich to poor, all committed to a common life where everyone is engaged, everyone is part of the game, everyone has a contribution to make. But there is some accountability for each other. Something like that?

Wallis: And relationships are important, because we say that all the time in our tradition. And they are. Used to be a time when bankers knew their community and vice versa. You know the old Jimmy Stewart movie of the credit union in It’s a Wonderful Life? Now they package these mortgages and bundle them and ship them off. No one even knows where a mortgage is anymore.

The covenant between employer and employee has been broken. I grew up in Detroit. My dad worked for Detroit Edison. Everybody’s dad at that point had a job that could support a family. One income could support a family. Ford, Chrysler, GM, Edison; you had health insurance, you had benefits. They all were World War II vets coming home. They all got FHA housing, we all lived in three-bedroom houses in the same neighborhood, went to church and you had sort of lower middle class, middle class, upper middle, all in the same church, right? And if you wanted a job in your dad’s company you had one. Unionization was twice what it is today.

My dad was in management, but he was always the negotiator with the unions on the contracts because he thought we ought to have a cooperative relationship, that unions were important and without them they wouldn’t be treated fairly but he didn’t like all that they said. And I would hear about these negotiations; but it really was friends who were trying to figure out a cooperative relationship.

I go to Detroit now and it breaks my heart. It is a city that is way into the depression that we are slowly moving into ourselves. So I think that there are principles about relationships, about covenants, about mutual obligations, about shared prosperity, about the common good, and about these social sins that are really crucial to our getting out of the crisis.

Lloyd: Somewhere you commented lately in addressing that fairness question in the bailout. A lot of complaints about people who managed banks in destructive ways or benefitted from some of this are still getting high levels of compensation, the unfairness piece that goes into this. And you used the image of a church potluck as a way to address it. Tell us about that.

Wallis: When my staff was thinking about this image of how we all grew up with church potlucks and you know somebody always brings this roast chicken dinner. You know every time they bring way more than they can eat. You are always hoping they are going to come. Someone else picks up a loaf of white bread on the way to the potluck and throws it on the table. And somebody brings that casserole, the same casserole every time that nobody wants to eat. (Laughter)

But somehow people bring what they have, what they can, and everybody walks away filled and everybody is okay.

Church potlucks aren’t fair. Think about it. They are not really fair in the usual sense of “we each get what we deserve.” But when we all throw in what we have, somehow the economy of the church potluck seems to work. So there are all kinds of metaphors from our tradition that are remarkably applicable now to this crisis.

Lloyd: Yeah. As we think about it…I want to go to questions from the audience in just a moment…but as we think about the two levels where the work is really happening—at the larger policy level, where the economists are clearly still trying to work out what the wisest way forward is; but on the ground we who are still reeling from the reality of this and trying to get our own footing and work out both spiritually how we walk through this, but also practically what steps should we as people of faith be thinking about or taking. Can you give us three or four things that we ought particularly to be thinking about and trying to do as people of faith right now?

Wallis: Well, one thing is, I think that we often share our lives in many ways: our spiritual lives, or prayer lives, our family issues, our kids, our marriages. But often we don’t really share much about our economic lives.

So we are in a situation now where the poor are going to be our next-door neighbor. They are going to be our fellow parishioner on the same pew. And the worst thing would be to feel like this is something we can’t talk about, that we can’t really share our economic fears and vulnerabilities and choices and decision-making. That would open up a whole new sense of fellowship in our small groups and in our Sunday schools and our church bodies. And then to ask not just how do we survive this, but how can this crisis become an opportunity for the people of God to clarify their mission? How can we really show who we are, to whom we belong, and how we care for each other and the common good through this?

I am not kidding about this adult Sunday school classes. I think it would be a wonderful thing to almost create a curriculum for churches on thinking in a more Christian way or faith way about money. We haven’t been thinking about money in a faith way. And then how do we offer the prophetic critique that overturns the moneychangers’ tables when necessary, but also how do we create new institutions, new ways of handling jobs, housing, health care, even credit? How do we create new ways of operating that maybe could show something to a society?

Now, that is an interesting new experiment. So, the main thing is, though, how do we see this as an opportunity for faith and not just a moment to survive?

Lloyd: Let’s go to questions from the audience. Deryl.

Deryl Davis: We have some here to start with. If audience members would start passing your questions to the center aisle, we will be coming down to collect them.

Jim, you mentioned fellowship. Here is a question regarding that: How can different religious traditions come together to support each other in this time of economic crisis? Might this bring Christians, Jews, Muslims, and many others closer together?

Wallis: Crisis also provides a chance to further split and polarize and get more sectarian or do as the questioner suggested, pull together.

President Obama has this faith advisory council. He has given us four priorities. And the fourth one is interfaith dialogue. But already in our conversation it is moving to interfaith action: what we can do together as people of faith to respond to…

The crisis affects all of us. There is no sort of special affect for any particular faith group. So it would be a powerful thing if we could begin to talk together about how each of our traditions speaks to the crisis and how that creates not just common language and talk but actually some common action.

Lloyd: Before you go, Deryl, I want to underline something you were saying there that I think we as people of faith need to pay attention to and that is the general sense that in times of financial, serious financial difficulties as a nation anywhere, one would think that would draw people closer together and become mutually supportive.

But it also, more often than not, becomes a time when people become more resentful, even treat each other badly, even develop very ugly ways of behaving with each other. Is that a concern you have in his time that as America becomes poorer it will become more resentful and more critical of the vulnerable or simply to start attacking each other in one way or another?

Wallis: I read something yesterday that a group had put something out on the Web that the cause of this economic crisis was illegal immigrants. (Laughter)

Lloyd: Yeah.

Wallis: And that is an example of what we are talking about.

Lloyd: That’s the danger.

Wallis: The fact that there is no factual basis for that doesn’t matter, it spreads like wildfire. How do you blame somebody else is always the easy thing to do. How to look at ourselves and our own part in this and our habits? We’ve got some bad habits that have to be changed.

And I think this is where leadership comes in. Because our worst angels or our demons are going to do what you are saying. They are going to blame, scapegoat, point the finger.

And if the faith community says, no, no, no, we are not going to do that. We are going to say, “One of the things this has taught us about our patterns, and our habits and our values and how can we see this moment?” If we don’t change from this, the Davos question, if we don’t change ourselves and our habits and our values and our structures, and the crisis ends at some point, the worst thing you should not let your leaders tell you…

Don’t let them say, I will bring us back to business as usual. Business as usual is what got us here. We are going to repeat the same mistakes if we just go back to it. So, how will this change our decision making, our priorities, our ways of thinking, our bottom lines, if you will?

Quarterly profit loss metrics have led us here. How do we have multiple stakeholders in even our business decisions? Multiple metrics about what’s important. So, this is a chance to rethink things and not just blame other people.

But that will be our worst instinct and the faith community will say no, we are not going to go there instead we are going to take this to a different level.

Otherwise, the pain and the suffering of this crisis will have been in vain. If we can find some redemptive way forward, then I think that pain and suffering, as horrible as it is, will in fact, could be redemptive for us.

Davis: This person speaks to an earlier time, saying that this questioner’s grandfather was a successful business owner and a staunch conservative and Christian, and he believed it was immoral to earn too much profit. The question is what happened to this principle?

Wallis: Well, when you go from the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay from thirty to one thirty years ago…and by the way, in Japan and Germany, it is still about 28, 29, thirty to one. Only in America here has it become, last I heard, 415 to one.

My dad was a manager. He was a business person. And I know he would have been appalled by that chasm.

I am a CEO. We have to make… Everybody who’s in the nonprofit world or the faith world is struggling right now. I know you are here. We are at Sojourners, with things like payroll and staff and health coverage. These are real issues.

And CEOs often have to be risk takers and their job isn’t over at five o’clock. They stay up all night long about making payroll and staff cuts.

Those are real issues, but is anybody worth 415 times more than somebody else?

So I think it has become really…My dad who was a middle-American, middle-class Republican, would have been offended by that chasm, and we are no longer offended by it. So the employee/employer relationship is not based on the covenants Sam was talking about. It’s really whatever you can get away with now

And then that bad behavior does trickle down. Wealth doesn’t seem to trickle down very well. But bad behavior does trickle down. So somehow Donald Trump has a reality show, and we all want to be kind of like Donald Trump. If ever a sign of a bad omen, there you go, right there.

Davis: This person asks how you would advise the new president and administration to reform the credit card industry so that credit and banking once again are more services for the consumer rather than making greed the primary commodity.

Wallis: Well, we could spend all morning on that one. And there are economists here, I’m sure, that could answer better than I. But the average credit card debt in this country is astounding. When you look at young people especially flooded by these credit card promotions. Gratefully they begin to slow down a bit.

But we really have lost a sense of… My parents taught us kids, you live within your means; you are as generous as you can be, and you don’t spend money you don’t have for things you don’t need. And I think we really have lost…

My parents came out of the depression and they were the last generation now to do that. But it did teach them things that I think we have sort of lost. The question is…none of us here, very few of us here went through the depression. So will we learn some things in this crisis that will change us?

The impact of the crisis on the culture has yet to be seen. In some ways… I should be careful here. I want this to end as soon as it can. But if it ends too easily or too quickly and we go back to things as usual without changing the culture that led to it, we will have lost an opportunity.

Davis: This question is related to that in a sense. You have written about speaking before and encouraging our former president to talking with the poor, and engaging the poor. What is it that we can learn from the poor, as I assume more people will enter that category in this recession?

Wallis: Well, the poor are going to less and less be the other, some people different than us. That is sort of us helping those who haven’t been as fortunate as we have.

That is disappearing and this notion of, as Sam was saying, the common good and solidarity of the old Catholic social teaching notion that solidarity with is really becoming crucial now. I do think…

Why are the poor so central in Christian, Jewish, Islamic teaching? I think the canary helps us to understand that. Because what happens to the most vulnerable, the prophets say, the prophets always say the test of a society is not in its gross national product, its military fire power, or how its popular culture is envied around the world.

The test of any society is how it treats the most vulnerable among them.

The prophets all say that.

And I have learned lately that is just not admirable, good, right, utopian, there is wisdom there. That the most vulnerable who are least protected will be the ones who suffer the first from things going wrong in the culture in the society. They have no buffers to protect them. So they are just vulnerable. And if we don’t pay attention to that—to the canary—before long all of us are going to be in a difficult situation.

We’ve got friends of our family who are in real trouble economically, and some of them you would have called poor before. They were poor already or they were just on the edge and they had all those new jobs. They had three of them, you know, and their work wasn’t paying. But some of them were making six figures. And now they are in trouble.

So this is hitting people across our socioeconomic class lines. If it teaches us something about fellowship and what small groups ought to be doing for each other, and what congregations could do for the people of God who we share this space with, then it could be redemptive.

Davis: This questioner asks a practical question. Are there faith-based and Christian organizations that are already in place to teach us how to better handle our finances?

Wallis: That’s a good question. When the president signed his new faith-based executive order creating the new office and council, he had a meeting with the council in the Oval Office, and it was a moment of real honesty, because he looked at us directly, straight in the eye, and he said, “We are in crisis. The nation will be turning to you in the faith community”—and there are other nonprofits there as well, secular nonprofits—“turning to the faith and nonprofit community, as we always have in a time of crisis.”

“But,” he said, “You will have less to give because the crisis is impacting you as well, as faith-based organizations, as nonprofits. So you’ll be looked to for more and you’ll have less to give. It will be a time of real challenge for you”—and I also thought, and maybe some new creativity, some new creativity. So I think the nonprofits I talked to…

We are all struggling. We talk to church leaders all the time and everybody is struggling. So you know you are on an Obama transition team talking about big policy issues and then I say one day no I am guessing all of us in this room who run nonprofits had a meeting yesterday or today about staff cuts. Am I right? And they all nodded their heads. This is the elephant now in the room. So how do we teach ourselves how to be better examples of making these choices and decisions? This is going to be a challenge for us.

Davis: This question is, do you believe that our current economic crisis indicates that more of us are actually turning away from increased debt and excessive spending to a more conservative financial position of balanced spending and saving?

Wallis: That’s interesting because there are signs of that. There are signs of people making new choices about bringing down their credit card debt, or about questioning that vacation or much more.

People are losing not just their pension plans and college money but now in Detroit, a lot of people I know in Detroit, their mortgage is now worth more than their house. And they are under water.

And then others are losing their jobs. So I think that is already happening, those new choices.

But it might be good to put them in the context of not just necessity but maybe lifestyle choices, and stewardship, and how much…

How much is enough would be a question of faith for us. You know, because we are being assaulted by people who say what do the advertisers appeal to? They appeal to our greed and to our fear.

And they say, you are not good enough. You know, what you are, what you have, how you look, what your kids have, you are not good enough. If you do this or buy this you’ll be better. And then we do, and the satisfaction lasts for twenty-four hours and then there is another way we are not good enough. That whole cycle, I think, has led us to this point.

But are we changing? I think we are. Right now we are getting mixed messages, they want to say, save more but spend. Stimulate the economy, but spend. And so we are in this kind of… The administration doesn’t know quite what to do. Should they encourage responsible saving and deferring purchases, or spending? That is why I am going to say in this town…This town has told me for thirty, almost forty years, it is not a good time to help with poverty, not a good time. It is never a good time.

Now is the best time. In this budget that is coming up, there is more for low income people than ever before that I have seen in this town. Money to help poor people directly stimulates the economy. Because money for nutrition and for unemployment insurance and things that really help poor people survive, that gets spent. It is stimulative. So there has never been a time when poverty reduction helped the poor people, was more stimulative. So it is a good time to say all that stuff. For lower income people is not only right it’s going to help work. But I think a lot of other folks are trying to figure out what the balances are.

Lloyd: There is an old story that John D. Rockefeller was once asked, with all of the wealth you have accrued, when will you feel like you’ve got enough? And his answer was, I always need a little bit more.

Doesn’t this moment really raise the question of what constitutes enough and what constitutes abundance? The reality is for all the struggle that, for all of the struggle that so many of us are going through, we are still in that most prosperous billion of the six billion members of the human race and most people in that other five billion would give anything to be struggling with the issues we are struggling with. So there is a kind of a right scaling, right sizing of what is enough and what can we do without and what can we be generous with. Does that sound right to you?

Wallis: It sounds more than right. It sounds like an assignment for faith-based small groups to sit in your living rooms with the people you do Bible study with and pray with, and share lives with and say okay, because that is very fundamental.

How much is enough? And by what metrics are we comparing ourselves? Or more important, you raised the relationship issue. By what relationships are we comparing ourselves? When three billion people, half of God’s children, live on less than two dollars a day, and they are not even really a part of the economy—the global economy—and yet God says pay special attention to them, they become a metric by which we answer the question. How much is enough?

I’ve got a five year old and a ten year old. These are real parenting questions, right? These are issues. How do you teach your kids these values when they are bombarded all the time with, you know, there are ten-year olds who tell my ten-year old that he really needs an iPhone? And I say, well, why? Well because a lot of people really think we need them. So these for me and Joy are not just theoretical issues. These are parenting questions. How do you teach your kids to ask life questions?

Lloyd: One more question.

Davis: This is a follow-up on the fairness element of your conversation earlier, and that is, what is the Christian response to the question of fairness where a lot of people are saying gosh all this money is being spent to bail out people who bought more home than they could afford and things of that nature. How do we respond as Christians to that?

Wallis: There is a lot of anger about the bailouts of Wall Street and why am I not being bailed out. I think there is a lot of legitimacy in those feelings, particularly how the money seems to have been used. So we are now being promised greater transparency and more discipline, more accountability and time will tell on that.

But I think the real question is whether we can change the behavior of a nation. We clearly need new social regulations. When you listen to the Madoff stuff, how did Chase Manhattan not know this much money was coming through them? There are some pretty big questions here that somebody has to answer.

But if the crisis is a social crisis it needs new social regulations. I think we will find them. We’ll get them. But if it is also a spiritual crisis then we need new self-regulation? And what does that look like?

So I think there are legitimate policy angers of focusing more on those at the top than those who are in trouble, and that is beginning to shift a bit and I am glad for that. But I think we dare not just blame Wall Street. I am very critical of Wall Street, but Main Street has a part in this too.

And Sam, even Faith Street has a part in this too. What we haven’t done, haven’t said, how we become conformed. Romans 12: don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

How can this crisis transform the people of God to overturn the money-changing tables, but also show how, in this new temple we call the church, can our economic patterns reflect the economy of God, which is very different?

Lloyd: This has been a great conversation. I hope you all will join us next week as we turn to talk about clean energy and climate change as religious issues with Mike Tidwell from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Coffee is available now just following the service on the west end out the first set of doors and to your left. But by all means join us in just a few moments at 11:15 for our morning 11:15 service, with our preacher Rev. Wallis. Please join me in thanking Jim for being with us today. (applause)