I found that final point-that our borrowing would eventually be ruinous, if not for us then for our descendants-especially compelling. We Americans are feasting with borrowed money. 22:7), though the powerlessness may not be visible until later.
Borrowing for short-term needs risks long-term decline and even enslavement (Neh.
Borrowing is emblematic of national weakness that invites subservience to creditors (Deut. But when it speaks of borrowing, the Bible is negative, and not just when addressing individuals. It’s “immoral and unwise,” he argued, even citing my mom’s favorite debt proverb:Ĭertainly, the Bible regularly calls for generous lending and debt forgiveness. If you’d asked me then, I’d have described that debt just as ethicist David P. The US national debt was around $15 trillion in 2012, one year after the debt ceiling drama of 2011. Like many evangelicals, that attitude easily mapped onto my politics. Having no debt felt right and responsible. With a few exceptions like mortgages and some business loans, I associated accumulation of debt with poor stewardship and lack of self-discipline. I dislike the feeling of obligation and limitation debt can entail (Prov.
I have all the skepticism of complex financial systems you’d expect in someone who finished college during the Great Recession.
But declining to take on debt also made sense to me at a personal level. “The borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. We’d earned scholarships and gone to cheaper schools, hosted a cookout for our wedding reception, and squirreled away cash to buy used cars. We both came from families with a typical evangelical wariness of debt, and so we’d gotten all the way through college and marriage without a single loan payment between us. When my husband and I wanted to buy our first house in 2012, we ran into a problem: Neither of us had a credit history.
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