I think people generally harbor a certain degree of cynicism about the moral rectitude of their religious leaders. This is probably a good thing because pastors and rabbis and imams are just as likely to sin as anyone else, but they take a bigger hit for hypocrisy when they do. You wouldn’t want to run your pastor out of town on a rail everytime they failed to practice what they preach. In the case of Christianity, religious leaders have a built in excuse since they preach that we are all sinners and that we are all worthy of forgiveness and redemption.
Each religion and subreligion has a little narrative they tell about the shortcomings of their leaders. In poor black congregations it is kind of a running joke that the pastor drives a Cadillac while his congregants struggle to make their tithe. This isn’t always the case, obviously, but it happens often enough to make the joke salient. There is a certain element of tolerance (even expectation) of greed and potential corruption behind these stories. Political leaders have often made behind the scenes arrangements with black pastors as they seek the support of the church members. What’s sad is to see Wells Fargo playing that game:
Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
Now, I can tell you from my time working out of the North Philadelphia office of ACORN that ACORN does the majority of its work trying to either educate people about predatory lenders like Wells Fargo or helping people avoid foreclosure once they’ve fallen victim to one of these lenders. In addition to that, they’re constantly lobbying to have the laws changed so it isn’t legal to prey on the vulnerable. They also teach people how to budget their money and to utilize it wisely.
It’s true that ACORN does voter registration, but they do it to empower their communities to fight back against a system that considers it legal to create one predatory system after another (pay day lenders, ghetto loans, income tax rebate advances, the lottery, etc.). That is why I take it so personally when the Republicans single out ACORN for ridicule with unfounded accusations. If you’ve ever seen an elderly black grandmother show up desperate in an ACORN office because some unscrupulous suit convinced her to switch to a mortgage she can’t afford, you would never forget it. Maybe people need to put a face to the misery outfits like Wells Fargo create. As they laugh at their exploitation of ‘mud people’, organizations like ACORN do their best to remedy the damage.
Dick Durbin said that the banks own Washington. The people that work for ACORN already knew that.
[h/t to Atrios]
