Great news! Religious conservatives awaken to fact that financial vice is a serious moral issue that ought to be of deep concern to Christians:

Kentucky’s largest religious denomination joined Tuesday in a growing call for regulations on payday lenders, saying such loans cost the annual equivalent of nearly 400 percent in interest and amount to “usury” decried in the Bible.

At its annual meeting, the Kentucky Baptist Convention adopted a resolution without dissent calling for state and local regulations that would cap interest on short-term loans at 36 percent.

It’s the first public statement in recent memory by the state affiliate of the Southern Baptist Convention on regulating financial institutions, and it puts it on the same page with several other religiously affiliated organizations that comment more regularly on economic issues.

Thanks, Baptists. More, please.

Dale Ahlquist writes from a Catholic perspective about usury being “another sin we don’t want to hear about.” Excerpt:

And what do we have to show for our ignoring this teaching of the Church?  A $12.86 trillion consumer debt.  More than 20 percent of home mortgages that exceed the value of the property.  A government that keeps spending money that it does not have.  A borrowing mentality that never considers how it is going to pay anything back.  Economic collapse.  As Chesterton warns, echoing the popes and the saints before him, usury devours and destroys: “It is a gigantic heap of debt, like a heap of dirt. It is a heap of debts hoarded until they have gone bad.  It is now a heap of bad debts which a little more bad debt will send toppling into the mire.”