Feeling spiritually bankrupt after watching Bernie Madoff's sentencing, I took the subway uptown to the Union Theological Seminary, where they teach a class called "Christianity and the U.S. Crisis."
"As a nation, as a culture, as Christians, we have behaved abominably," Serene Jones, the school's president, told me in her office. "We built a Tower of Babel out of greed and false religion and it's collapsed."
Blame Wall Street, the money center banks, the mortgage industry, and the psychos that we've permitted to manage our money, our government and our companies.
"The greed that drove the top is a greed that lives in all of us," Jones said.
While some people say that God is good, others will argue that greed is good.
And there are others still who preach that both are good, like those "prosperity gospel" preachers on TV: Plant a seed (with them, of course) and reap an abundant harvest from the Lord. Amen.
Jones, who heads a progressive, liberal Christian school, doesn't overlook the flaws of faith.
"Religion needs to have rules about keeping itself straight," said Jones. "The biggest crimes of all are the ones that religion commits in its in own name."
But nobody needs religion when the market is going up. It's usually when the market is going down that people pray for damnation.
"May Satan grow a fourth mouth, where Madoff can spend the rest of eternity," I heard Madoff victim Burt Ross cry at the Ponzi-schemer's sentencing. It was a reference to Dante, who envisioned Judas, Brutus and Cassius getting eternally chomped in Satan's existing oral orifices.
The former mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., lost $5 million investing with Madoff. Now he's reduced to clever literary allusions.
"Can we say Madoff was a righteous Jew who served on the boards of Jewish institutions when he sank so low as to steal from (Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor) Elie Wiesel?" said Ross. "A righteous Jew, when in reality, nobody has done more to reinforce the ugly stereotype that all we care about is money?"
What would Jesus do?
"Jesus teaches us that every single person is a child of God and deserving of fundamental respect," said Jones, "and that includes not being lied to, not being harmed, not being deceived or exploited."
Yet if Madoff had considered Ross a "child of God," he might have asked for a meeting with Ross' big, cosmic daddy to line up another "investment." Religion was simply a fraudulent seal of approval.
And the people who believed? They were the ones who were supposed to do the moral heavy lifting. You know, honor the truth, love the neighbors, believe in a better world to come, and worship God, who, given human history, is apparently indifferent to market inequities and freaks like Madoff. All the while, Madoff picked their pockets. And the nation's financial system collapsed because its minions chose to enrich themselves making worthless paper and shoddy loans.
Madoff is going to prison for the rest of his life. So what? He's 71. For most of his days he lived like a god. Deception -- which religious folks consider a moral failing -- seems like a trait of the most highly evolved when you notice who rises to the top of our food chain.
Bankers are still getting bonuses, even while eating our tax dollars. And moral reflection -- you know, like the kind we had after Enron, WorldCom and (name your favorite scandal here) -- doesn't change the market or the human condition.
"The big banks are acting like they just can't wait to get back to doing just what they were doing before," said Union professor Gary Dorrien, who also teaches the "Christianity and the U.S. Crisis' class. "Their bailouts just made them feel better.
"They're lobbying very hard to quash any sort of meaningful regulation of derivatives," he said. "They're not even all that concerned with cleaning up their balance sheets. .. And there's no day of reckoning coming for .. the blatantly unethical behavior, and the way mortgages were pushed out the door, signing up people who can't remotely begin to pay for them."
So where was religion as all of this went down? Mostly just declining.
"We're (located) across from the National Council of Churches, and it's not like they didn't try," Dorrien said. "They have got documents up to here they put out about usury and the like .. It's mostly a litany of failure.
"But now we have millions of people saying, "I'm amazed at what the banks were doing, but look at my own life. I'm in debt up to my eyeballs' .. There is moral reflection about all of that," Dorrien said.
Hundreds of people -- including some from Wall Street -- are attending the class, which also will be highlighted in on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal on July 3.
So we've now got reflection and introspection .. and then?
"We might just build another Tower of Babel," said Jones, "and it will keep collapsing on us."
(Al's Emporium, written by Dow Jones Newswires columnist Al Lewis, offers commentary and analysis on a wide range of business subjects through an unconventional perspective. The column is published each Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. ET. Contact Al at al.lewis@dowjones.com or tellittoal.com)
