On divestment, investment and usury

The Presbyterian Church voted (in Pittsburgh, no less) yesterday on the issue of whether or not to selectively divest from certain enterprises engaged in (or with interests in) the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories by illegal Israeli settlers. The motion was narrowly defeated by a margin of two abstentions, but the issue managed to attract a significant amount of attention, with the usual questions floating around about whether BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) against Israel is or is not a productive strategy, whether or not it is anti-Semitic, and so on and so forth.

I note (and I was not the first to do so - my father actually pointed it out to me when I spoke with him about the vote) that one deeper issue has been left out; that of what the Church is doing in the first place investing in for-profit companies for the purpose of making money on interest. And this goes both for the for-profit investment in companies like Caterpillar, Motorola and HP which profit from the Israeli occupation, and for the so-called ‘positive investments’ in Palestinian enterprises which have been favoured by the Presbyterian Church’s resolution.

Let me be clear, I am not opposed to churches investing or lending to people who direly need it. But the existential purpose of that investment or lending ought to be made clear up front. Churches should have definite qualms about lending to poor people (for example, poor farmers and single-family businesses in Palestine) at interest, and the first question they might want to ask would be: is the loan for our benefit or for theirs? If the former, the Church must again re-evaluate its place in the society, and question whether or not it can or should function if it is reduced to the methods (and thus status) of a for-profit corporation.

Some creative models of lending focus primarily on the welfare of the loan recipient (such as, for example, the Grace Period model mentioned in last month’s Christian Century, which is meant to supplant the growing usurious industry in payday loans), and these might very well be considered ‘positive investments’, if a similar model and standard were explicitly applied to the Palestinian proposal. (I should say now that I don’t know whether or not this is the case. The news stories I have read thus far have not elaborated on the nature of the investments being considered by the Presbyterian Church.)

But entertaining the much more radical discussion of whether or not divestment is a policy which ought to be implemented across the board (not just in Israeli settlements) sounds like a very solid idea, if the Church is to live up to its promises of being an alternative social order offering God’s good news to the poor.