The Future of Money

Working paper 6
Money is a wonderful thing. It could claim to be the most creative human
invention of all. But it is worth considering what a strange and fragile
phenomenon it is. Money is not indestructible. It can be broken. National
currencies disappear. No one use the ducat or Reichsmark anymore. The global
economy could be broken too. Now might be a good moment to remind
ourselves of this and pondering that makes money function so that we do not
reach that stage.
We have an open economy. We can make the briefest transaction, or enter the
most complex economic relationship, with complete strangers. We can source
goods and services from the far side of the world from people we will never
meet. It is global. That there is this open and global economy may appear
natural and obvious. Most of us have never experienced anything except this
open economy. We have But we should not take it entirely for granted.
We have an open economy because we have money. Money means that we
are not dependent on barter. We don’t have to find that precise individual who
happens to have the goods we want while wanting the very goods we want to
sell. We do not have to find that one individual. Money enables us to enter
exchanges with persons who do not have precisely what we want. It means
that there does not have to be an absolute identity of goods, needs and time.
Money allows us to identify a future time when such a meeting of desire and
fulfilment will take place. We trust that desires and fulfilment will come
together in the future, but we don't have to be precise about when. Money
denominates the trust which enables us to sustain longer and more complex
gaps between promise and delivery. This means that we can come into
economic relationship with more and more people, enjoy goods and services
that come from far afield, and so be members not only of our own immediate
local economy but an open economy with a far vaster range of people whom
we don't know. Money means that our economic relationships are not
restricted to people we know and our own locality. The open economy
depends on the existence of money.
Money is a fiduciary instrument. It is a belief held in common by a society,
given definition by particular forms. It is the glue that holds us together and
allows us to transact with one another, in particular with strangers. It enables
us to be confident that even those people whom we will never see again, feel

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the weight of social obligation, made explicit by legal obligation by the law of
contract, and will pay us what they owe.
But that belief can wobble. When it does, we lose faith in these fiduciary
instruments. If our faith in its various forms vanishes, money vanishes too. If
too much money disappears and goes out of existence, the open economy will
start to contract.
Money is a contract between a government and its people. The promise is that
the value of money will remain reliable. The value or credibility of that
economy has to do with our estimation of the value of the goods and services
expected from that economy, and so is an estimation of the future dynamism
of that population. Our view of any economy is about all its prospects, that is
the likelihood of most promises being met. Contracts are simply promises, very
deliberately and publicly made so that everyone will hold us to them.
Since all currencies are tugged around by the policy of governments none are
ultimately secure stores of value. The value of any currency is determined by
the bidding war between governments. Each government wants to be seen as
secure, and at the same time it wants to make its economy more competitive.
It does so by running inflation in order to devalue their pensions and other
obligations, that is, by quietly defaulting on a number of promises.
Trust enable an economy. It is a shared but unspoken understanding that we
will deliver on our promises and contracts however inconvenient that is.
Fiduciary has to do with fides, faith. In fact this whole economic analysis is
about the concepts that come to us from these two Latin words – credo and
fides. From credo comes credit, but also credible, and credulous and
incredulity.
A whole people can simply withdraw their belief and then real money will
simply disappear. People who stop believing in state-issued money will hoard
whatever foreign currency or items of value, will refuse to trade. When this
stage is reached there is not much that any government can do about it. It is a
vote of no confidence in their government. A government can forfeit the
confidence of their people entirely if it dashes the expectations of its people
enough. If it does this, they will no longer trust the money it issues. That
money holds its value only if the stock of money remains more or less steady.
But if, in order to meet its own liabilities, a government issues money without
limit, ballooning the money supply, everyone will lose confidence in that
currency. That nation will do anything to avoid holding the money issued by its

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government. We have to offer one another more and more of that money, and
we all become less and less willing to accept payment in that currency.
We can all push the state to this point at which we realise that the currency
issued by our government is losing value so fast that a million units of that
currency is worth less to us than a single bag of groceries.
Money is the promises of a government treated as the medium that allows any
two individuals to complete an exchange. But in recent decades we have
pressuring governments to issue more and more promises and take on more
and more liabilities. We have all made our case that we are due a slightly larger
proportion of the national product, and no government has succeeded in
restraining the various national communities from raising their claims to it. We
have increased the number of claims on the nation’s future effort to the extent
that that they cannot all be met. Though the music is still playing, those
dancing have noticed that there are many more dancers than there are chairs
for them to sit down on should the music stop. The more we fear that claims
excessively outnumber assets, the more likely the music is to stop. If there are
two players for every one chair, one will lose and be out of the game – no
more economic participation for them – but the economy as a whole would
remain viable. But if there are ten dancers for every chair, and nine are out of
the game at once, this would represent such a rapid shrinking of the economy,
such a rapid decline in the number of potential customers, that even those
with chairs to sit on would feel a dramatic drop in economic activity and
standard of living. There are more claims on them than there are assets. But
how many more?
We measure everything against money, but what can we measure money
against? Money is our measure of value and our store of value. For most of the
time it is reliable so we feel no need to look for other means of measuring or
storing value. We work and earn, and we save money and accumulate savings.
It appears that though we are standing on the escalator, looking up, and the
escalator appears to be moving up, we are not so sure whether we are really
moving up. Though we accumulate money, we seem to have less purchasing
power than we thought. Why is this?
We wonder whether governments and their central banks can be trusted not
to devalue the currency. If they do so they will, by creating inflation,
disenfranchise the prudent and the savers in favour of the imprudent, who
have not saved or taken responsibility for themselves. Is the state bound to
take the side of the irresponsible and feckless, to the disadvantage of anyone
who by saving hopes to provide of themselves?

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Holding gold is one way to register our disquiet about the fact that the state
has issued vastly more promises than it can keep. The price of gold reflects
people’s scepticism about the ability of any government to keep its promises,
not to make more promises than it can honour and not to attempt to
manipulate the currency in order to reduce the burden of meeting those
liabilities. Can we re-boot money? Can we give it a more explicit relationship
to the state of the real economy and real assets in it?
The State
Perhaps the state is no longer capable of providing everything it has promised
to us. Maybe it cannot continue to give the all-important impression that
promises can be met. We have pushed it to become our universal provider and
backstop. Though it looks omni-competent and all-powerful, the state has
become grotesquely over-extended and vulnerable. It has become vulnerable
in the way in which Argentina or the old Soviet Union were at the beginning of
nineteen nineties.
Governments cannot create new money faster than we can lose confidence in
it. Since money is nothing but confidence, we can fail to adopt it as meaningful
and valuable. We may lose confidence in it. Governments - to restore
confidence, but all their action may have the reverse effect. The more steps
they take the more those steps will appear desperate and give us the signal
that things have deteriorated even more than we feared. They will issue new
lines of credit that appear to give us all new opportunities for economic
growth. But governments cannot control our anxieties; our decline in our
confidence may become quicken and the slope become steeper. Governments
cannot pull us out the dive, because the dive is our conviction that everything
the government does is simply designed to fool the gullible for a little longer so
that the cynical have more time to improve their position in preparation for
the great shake-out. But we may all realise that we have all long stopped
hoping that things will in fact improve and no longer believe that there are
enough idiots around to sustain even the illusion of a turn around. We ran out
of dynamic economic agents a whole ago. We have gained time by fleecing the
naïve. Now that even the naïve realise that they have been played for fools we
cannot find new idiots to sacrifice.
At the bottom of all economics issues is the vexed relationship of money to
debt. Money is the medium in which any two people can freely and without
coercion come together into an economic relationship. But debt is the
relationship in which one is obligated to the other in a relationship that is not
reciprocal or equal. The presumption of equality and mutuality on which trade

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rests is based on a deeper logic of one-sided relationship in which one party is
held by the other. This brings us to the interesting the question of what
distinctive thing Christians bring to the discussion.
The origins of money are properly in the authority of any sovereign people to
mandate their government to provide the means by which they can carry on
commerce. Governments may provide these means, because their people
authorise them to do so. Governments don't need to borrow money from
banks in order to provide these means.
So here is one answer to question of what Christians bring to the question of
money. We bring the insight that, governments may provide money as the
means by which people may trade with one another. It is within the power of
any people or nation to instruct their government to issue money, and it is
then within the power of that government to do so. Of course it is equally
within the authority of any government to decide that it does not need to
become involved in the issue of money or enforcement of a single legal tender.
It can decide that any bank or corporations may issue its own currency and the
values of such currencies will be found by the market, just as it is for any
commodity.
Money as Sovereignty
Far back in the Western past, and deep in the Western psyche, is a very
particular view of human beings. It has given us the sense that we are no good,
and that we deserve to be punished for our inadequacies. We are under an
obligation to someone. They are the master and this unspecified and unending
obligation makes us their servants. At the bottom of the Western mindset is
the inevitability of domination. Other people are inadequate and have to be
controlled, and that it is up to us to control them. This was given expression by
the Roman and legal system, which Europe inherited. The Roman pagan view
has determined the deep logic of the modern view, or rather, the modern view
is the continuation of the Roman pagan view. It is part of our human nature to
be Sin and deficiency is part of human nature.
The Christian view challenges this. The Christian view says that sin is unnatural,
not part of our nature. It is a failure to discover our true nature, which exists
ahead of us, safeguarded for us by Christ for us to discover. Christianity does
not affirm this belief that mankind is intrinsically deficient and in need, and
therefore intrinsically obligated to whoever can supply that deficiency.

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The world is divided into those who are in debt and those they are in debt to.
It is divided between those who are under an obligation and thus under
coercion. The Christian gospel opposes this very deep and basic assumption.
Modernity says that there has to be debt in order that money exist and in
order that we trade with one another. Our mutually-beneficial trade takes
place on the back of the relationship in which someone is in debt and so under
obligation. Our relationship as equals is only made possible but a relationship
of a more fundamental inequality. They have to be sacrificed so that the rest of
us can continue to enjoy all the equal and uncoerced relationships of trade. Let
us have a look at this anomaly.
Money exists because someone is in debt to someone else. We all know that
money is created by the fiat, the say-so, of government. And when it does so,
the government is acting on our behalf. Government is the expression of the
sovereignty of a people, that is, our own God-given ability and authority to
manage ourselves. We authorise our government to issue coins and banknotes
just as we authorise it to uphold the law for us. We give it our consent to act
representatively for us all and provide the fundamentals by which we can
interact with one another, principally by upholding justice, which sustains the
environment in which we can construct our own many forms of interaction
with one another.
But many of us have also recently discovered that the overwhelming majority
of money is not in fact created by government fiat but is the product of
fractional reserve banking. We borrow money from a bank and yet we do not
in fact borrow existing money. As it bank credits us with the sum we ask for,
new money is brought into existence by the bank. That money exists because
the say-so of the bank brings it into existence at that moment. It exists, but its
existence is tied to our obligation to that bank. We have to ‘repay’ it, and we
have to pay interest on it. The borrower can then pay that money to other for
their services, and they can pay others in turn, a whole stream of economic
transactions between buyers and seller takes place as that money circulates
through the economy and sustains the economy it circulates through. But that
money which allows so many transactions to take place, and which brings so
many people together as buyers and sellers, is nonetheless inseparably
connected to the obligation of that borrower to that lender. All that money,
and all those transactions, depend on this one person to person obligation.
Though it is has enables so many persons to enter so many free and
constructive relationships, at bottom money rests on debt which represents
the liability this particular individual person. All our free exchanges are
underwritten by this relationship of obligation and coercion. The borrower may

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not be able to pay off this loan and escape this unilateral relationship, so he
may finally be crushed by this obligation, but none of the many who have
benefitted from the existence of the money created by his debt are in
obligation to him. They do not even have to acknowledge that he was crushed
for their benefit. The logic is as violent as which the ancient Christians pointed
out. Just as Tertullian pointed out that the whole ancient imperial system
worked on the basis of the sacrifice of a few for the many, most obviously
when a few powerless souls were thrown into the – Some slaves are bound to
die beneath the wheels of juggernaut. It is at all. He is as vulnerable, as any of
the powerless who lives were sacrificed by that this underwrite, at least The
person who has taken on this debt is the unwitting host of all the many buyers
and sellers brought together by the money that their debt has brought into
being. Their loan is their promise to pay obligation to work. Our money is the
product of their mortgage of their future labour to the bank, its depositors,
shareholders and executives. The borrower’s future tears and blood give us the
tokens by which a vast number of other people do business with one another.
When he finally succeeds in paying back that loan, that money does not return
to sit in a bank vault. It disappears. It only exists for as long as that debt exists.
If all debts were paid, there would be no money at all, other than the very tiny
proportion (three percent) issued by the government in the form of coins and
banknotes.
The result is of course that the lower orders are under obligation to, and so in
debt to, their rulers. There are two classes of humankind – those who must be
ruled, and those who rule them. The lower orders are always under obligation
to their superiors. But this not an assumption of the ancient world or of brutal
societies. It is also right here, embodied by our monetary system. The exercise
of naked power of the master over the servant is now exercised in the form of
the lender and the borrower. One-way obligation, and the domination of one
party by another, is the whole mode by which we trade with one another.
There is always coercion and duress. Economics is way that the systemic
inequality of ancient politics continues.
The other aspect of this is in the sufficiency of money, the form of wages, to
reflect and pay off relationship. An employee’s labour is adequately paid for by
the money paid to them as wages. They must be paid wages, but wages is all
that is required. They are fully paid off in that form. They can never expect to
come into any more concrete form of ownership. He or she can never, by any
act, accrue any share in the capital of the firm or acquire any influence on the
management or direction of the firm. It never in any legal sense becomes
‘their’ firm. Work never turns into ownership, but only ever turns into the

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wages and salaries that enable ownership over other entities acquired through
the market. No cooperation, mutuality, partnership or distributed forms of
ownership.
This deep and ultimately assumption about the fundamentally one-sided
character of human relationships is pagan. But this does not mean it is far
away and long ago. It is here, and live, and determines the logic of our
economic interaction.
We have money, the medium of interaction, only because this medium is
extracted from someone under duress. But this is not a merely moral
consideration, but a economic and pragmatic one. very If we demand that
governments continue to load themselves with obligations we are increasing
the likelihood that the government that issues our currency will buckle. Money
may break and the process that brought about the global economy will go into
reverse. Which would be a pity.
It does not help when Christians suffer an inferiority complex. When Christians
are afraid to represent these basic insights in public, they are of no use to the
culture around them. Though few in the City or media may welcome the
Christian input, they are all in trouble without it. But Christians also defer to
the sensibilities of the group around them. But at the back of this anxiety is our
own conceit that allows us to believe that there is nothing for us to learn from
Christians who have undergone similar experiences before us. The particular
Christian contribution is always to bring precisely that intellectual and spiritual
contribution that they have received from the generations of Christians who
went through similar spiritual and intellectual challenge and social and
economic upheaval, in this country.
Intellectually Christians have the stronger argument. This is so however much
individual Christians may decide to avoid making that argument, and or even
learning what those arguments are, and retreat into some abashed form of
private religious sentimentality. Christianity is responsible for Western
civilisation. All the questions which we now ask have arisen within our own
particular culture. You don't find people from other cultures and other
religions asking these questions; such cultures have never enabled or allowed
the curiosity which allows such possibilities to arise. Western civilisation and
curiosity and open-minded is the result of this continents’ long relationship
with the gospel. Christianity is responsible for all the freedom that allows us to
ask the questions that we are now able to ask. All the doubt and , and has
arisen in the first place only because a culture of enquiry and curiosity has

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arisen here, where the gospel has made such questions possible for the first
time.
We take it that the open economy will continue. But perhaps we shouldn’t
take this entirely for granted. We should also make the efforts that will help
open economy to be passed on to next generation. We should not allow the
financial markets to assume an excessive power over our economies and we
should not ask the state to do too much.
It takes a great deal to re-establish it once it has been felt that governments
and corporations are intending to continuing their efforts to make fools of us.
It requires re-booting. The contract between people and their institutions,
governments, and people and the most powerful corporations has to be
periodically re-stated and given new respect. Can governments re-assert
themselves so that actually issue money, by fiat, that is, by the authority that
are mandated to exchange on behalf of the sovereign nation, as we assumed?
And can they then exercise such self-control that they do not take on unlimited
new obligations that has the effect of devaluing the money they issue? Must
money be connected to debt at source? Can we dis-connect money from debt?
Can we have a truly fiat money?
Government is something that a people does for its own benefit, that is, for
the benefit of everyone and so for the nation as a whole. Issue of money is a
state monopoly. We entrust some monopolies to the state. But should we
entrust the monopoly of the creation of money to the state? Why not let banks
and other corporations issue their own money, and allow the value of these
currencies be decided by the market?
Christians in Finance
There is a difficulty in talking to Christians who work in the finance industry,
particularly in the City. Though they can acknowledge many of these as
individual issues, they cannot allow themselves to comprehend or
acknowledge that these are all related. The issue of the financial services
relates to the relationship of debt and money, which relates to our dignity and
sovereignty as persons and members of a united national community.
Though they may not be directly in the trading room they consider themselves
too busy to consider for any length of time the claims of the gospel on the
unity of their business dealings. They only know that they have to be visible to
one another all the time and so cannot be away from their desks for long. They
fear that if they are absent their colleague will begin to suspect their
commitment. They work in a gang culture that requires an incessant

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demonstration of loyalty to one another through the rituals; you must be
present at one’s desk and respond promptly to phone or email. Such a manic
level of commitment is required to sustain the rationality that would appear
mad-house in any other context. They owe their loyalty to another master,
their immediate peers, in the world in which every suspects everyone. It is
only when they come out of the City, that they express the relief or self-
disgust, that it becomes possible to admit that these are not honest or healthy
relationships.
We can point out to Christians working in the financial sector that it is for them
to make the argument that banks provide an essential service to the rest of
economy. They have to demonstrate to us that the rise of the financial sector
within the economy as a whole is necessary, and that it is not the rise of an
group that finds it is increasingly able to extract a rent from the economy
simply because the nation has not prevented it from doing so. They have to
show that the nation is still strong enough as a self-political whole to prevent
any group from levying burdens and so becoming either parasitical or for
dividing the nation into those who receive their living directly from the
financial services and those who receive an income, either as salary or benefit,
from the taxes that the government is able to raise from the financial sector,
so that it is found efficient to allow all other forms of industry, manufacturing
in particular, to disappear overseas.
Investment means not merely in industry but in manufacturing industry. For
only manufacturing industry makes things, and requires our bodily labour to do
so. All human flourishing is about the union of mental and bodily labour. Since
we are embodied beings, we cannot sustain ourselves on the fruit of our, or
other people’s, intellectual labour only. We need actual material goods for the
sustenance and support of our material bodies.
To imagine that we can exist and flourish purely from the intellectual products,
without material embodiment, is to imagine that minds and bodies have
separate existences, and that minds require no direct forms of embodiment
within the world. But though our minds and bodies suffer various forms of
disconnection, our salvation brings the reconciliation of our bodies and minds.
Human life is bodily, and its flourishing requires the involvement of the body,
not just in the after-hours consumption and enjoyment, but also in our
employment and the work-hours production of those fruits in the first place.
For this reason, the labour that produces material goods is itself good, and has
a positive contribution to national life, even apart from the utility of those
individual goods. The nation as whole benefits from the practices and culture

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of manufacturing industry. Can our banks make the case that they support, not
undermine, manufacturing industry within the nation?
But what if this is not the case? What if the financial sector has not grown
because it is good, but just because financiers were individually able to profit
from this dismantling of industry and get away with it? Then it would be
incumbent for Christians to say that there has been a surrender of sovereignty
to an unaccountable group that has set itself above the nation as whole. There
has been a coup, by one sector against all industries and against the nation as a
whole. A financial elite has wrested power into its own hands, though it is of
course unable to do anything, or anything constructive, with this power.
Christians should rise to this challenge of this question. It is simply insufficient
for Christians who work in this industry to assume that their industry has no
such questions to answer or to indicate their annoyance whenever they are
pressed on this point. Christians do things deliberately. They are bankers
deliberately and with a good conscience. If they cannot make the case, they
should consider taking up another career. When their turn comes to stand
before the judge of all men, they will not want to discover that their life’s work
simply amounted to the exploitative extracting of a rent, that is, imposing
themselves as an economic burden on others. A Christian will not refuse to
face this question or attempt to silence those who do face it. They will want to
examine themselves now and then demonstrate that they work usefully and
with a clean conscience. They will want to demonstrate that the financial
services industry does indeed serve the good, and that means serve the good
which is common, and that means which builds up the common life and
economy of the nation of which we are members. This is the single insight and
fundamental contribution which all Christians have to offer, and which, when
they refuse, they place themselves under judgment.
This is not to say that it is easy for Christians to make that contribution. They
will meet resistance. But the principle barrier perhaps is their own anxiety.
Their attempts to ask about the contribution of the financial services industry
to the wider economy, may meet derision. They may face ostracism within
their industry; sometimes they may risk being shunted to one side, passed over
for promotion, or even being dismissed. Christians however are glad to pay this
price. It is the remuneration due to us. The contempt of others is the badge
that Christians must occasionally wear, for a faith without boldness is no faith
at all. To put publicly to colleagues in the industry the question of the
economic contribution of banks is the fundamental act of witness of any
Christian who works in finance.

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Some will look for ways to duck this confrontation. Their job depends on
establishing rock steady levels of trust with colleagues and clients. Work in the
City requires a cultic degree of loyalty and commitment at every level, to your
team, your firm and your particular sector.
Perhaps some Christians who work in the City have work lives and Christian
lives that are entirely separated. They decide to serve the market utterly for a
time, until they decide to get out of the City. They live by the fiction is it
indeed possible to serve two masters for a while; we can be members of
opposing armies, double-agents, betraying both communities to whom we
profess loyalty. They do not believe that they are captives to a power that
holds them effectively separated from Christ.

But grace that is cheap, is not a bargain. It not only of little value but it may be
destructive for other Christians. Complicity in this double-life is contagious.
Christians may be pushing one another into interiorising their witness, dividing
the life they are given by indivisible Spirit into two, the public existence of
career and the private existence of faith and other personal lifestyle choices,
solely valid out of hours and in retirement. Each of us is policing others, to
prevent any leakage from one sphere to the other, and so enforcing this
defiant decision to be two separate persons. This sort comes out only through
prayer, which is to say, it must be rejected emphatically, ejected out as by
exorcism. Some Christian minsters have made their peace with this pact.

The gospel reconciles and re-unites the two halves of broken man. This grace
comes with a cost, but it is not cheap grace, and is therefore worth having.
Indeed it is worth giving everything for, since it is the source of all value.
Christians who work in finance have to make the argument that banking is as
honourable as medicine, law or any other profession. You have to give reasons
to show that on the whole, banks serve the national economy as a whole. You
have to argue that capital and thus growth of credit is not merely inevitable
but good. This means that you have to convince us that credit is always
essential to business, which is to say that you always need borrow money in
order to start, to expand and to run a business. You have to show not only that
businesses very seldom grow organically, but that this is not a bad thing. You
have to show that we have not simply created a business environment
prejudicial to organic growth, to family businesses and to small and medium
businesses. It looks as though business is increasingly a race to take on the

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borrowing to maintain the level of investment in new technology that will
enable you to grow faster than your rivals. It looks as though business is about
taking on greater levels of borrowing. But to make the argument that the
financial sector serves the economy as a whole, rather than simply distorting it
into the race to take on leverage, you have to show that this is not the case.
The Christian who works in this industry must make the case that the
contribution of the financial sector to the national economy as a whole is
positive. This industry is in service to all others. It serves our common
economic good.
Christians in finance have to make their case with greater conviction than we
have seen so far. They have to show that financial sector is not destructive for
the rest of economy. Banks are doing a good job when they are investing in the
productive capacity in the UK. Bankers cannot claim to be doing a good job if
British investors believe that it is sufficient for them, and for the British
economy, that they invest in Asia. Many are expecting their investments in
Asia to pay their pensions. But in what shape does this leave the economy for
their own children? No nation will survive in any sense on remittances from
overseas. No matter how much growth there is in Asia, banks can only claim
social utility if there do not invest in the British economy. We have to ask
whether banks have been prospering by transferring investment and industry
overseas from the UK. They have prospered by emptying Britain of productive
capacity. It is the British nation as a whole that is the criterion of our economic
activity. The nation is the concept against which the working of banks is to be
judged. The nation is a Christian concept, which comes from understanding
that we are made in the image of God and all share in the dignity and
sovereignty that belongs to that image. Banks therefore It is a question of
what is to the advantage of the UK as a whole. Banks are responsible to the
nation within which they are domiciled.
I have suggested that it is not only the Christian gospel which is a belief system.
it
This belief that that the world is natural hard, non-negotiable – this belief that
the world is not a matter of belief – this is itself a belief. The belief that the
world we experience is divided into these two aspects – that of belief, and that
of fact – this is itself the fundamental belief of our society, and it is the
fundamental belief that makes us all pagans under the skin. It vitiates all
Christian life, and indeed all life. It makes us dualists, who believe – and who
spend our entirely public lives enforcing this belief on one another, not as a
belief, but as our sole form of life. We must be under fate. We must acvk and
revere fate, in the form of the fundamental

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, which we may opt into or out of. So is the amorphous, hard to describe
worldview shared by twenty first century British and others. But it is not simply
a worldview and belief system. It is also a form of life that we are embedded
in, but which may also gain some critical distance from. There is lots that is
valuable about that worldview and belief system. But by pushing too hard in
certain directions we may do it damage, and make life more difficult for
ourselves. Through the gospel we may see ourselves more clearly, and through
its power we may make those changes of direction that are not only good for
us personally but also good for our society and economy. The gospel liberates
us from relationships which are coercive, such as the relationship in which
money is the same as debt, however natural they may presently appear, and
unites us so that we are no longer divided from ourselves in ways that prevent
us acknowledging what is good.

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