On 22 July 2009 a group of religious leaders and trade unionists from the organisation London Citizens walked to the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland in London. Religious leaders from the group representing the three major Abrahamic faiths sought to present the chairman of RBS, Sir Phillip Hampton, with copies of the Torah, the Qur’an and the Bible. This marked the beginning of a campaign intending to change the way that banks within the UK do business by bringing back a law as old as our financial system itself.

The purpose of this campaign is to lobby for the re-introduction of laws that would prohibit the practice of usury within the UK financial industry. The concept of usury is one that has fallen out of fashion in British society. Yet it contains a very powerful idea: that lenders should not charge unfair levels of interest against borrowers and that to do so is not simply financially unwise but morally wrong.

In many societies across the world restrictions against the amount of interest that a lender could charge have been common. Up until the 16th century the practice of usury had been illegal in Britain, a position rooted in the nation’s Christian culture.

For Christians before the 16th century the consensus of the church was that usury was a mortal sin. This was not simply charging an unfair amount of interest against customers but, rather, charging any interest on loans at all. It was seemingly prohibited by the Old Testament (see for instance Leviticus 25: 35-37 and Psalm 15:5) and by Jesus who told his followers that they should “lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:35)

Christian theologians such as Jerome, Ambrose and Martin Luther roundly condemned usury, effectively prohibiting Christians from the practice and leaving the dirty business to Jews, for whom it was one of the few permitted ways of making money, not to mention another source of anti-Semitic prejudice.

Yet it eventually became clear that lending money with interest would allow for huge economic growth and as the hunger for capital in western society steadily increased, the Church sought to reconsider the entire theological basis of the prohibition of usury. The reformer John Calvin was key in this. He believed that what was important about the prohibition of usury in the Old Testament was not the prohibition itself but the reason behind it. To him the real concern was protecting the poor against high interest rates which could lead to their exploitation. At the time Calvin, like the London Citizens group today, believed that this could be dealt with by fixing interest rates at communally acceptable levels.

Modern Britain seems to have lost sight of this goal. There is no statutory limit to the level of interest that lenders can charge borrowers. As a consequence banks within the UK, such as RBS, are able to charge extortionate levels of interest to people who are very often the most vulnerable within society. It is for this reason that the London Citizens group is seeking to have the British government introduce a cap on the maximum amount of interest that can be charged by banks against borrowers, such as already exists in Italy and Germany.

Those opposed to the campaign point out that this sort of restriction would hurt the banks and cause them to seek to make money in other ways which could lead to greater exploitation of the vulnerable and that this sort of moralising has no place in the harsh world of economics. But the argument is not persuasive. The cause for which London Citizens is fighting is a just one, and one we should all support.

Mark Baillie is an intern with Theos and a student of Law with Politics at Queens University, Belfast.