It’s popular right now, mostly for those who would put themselves on the economic left, to chide the idea of thrift. Frugality appears to some as little more than a case of victim-blaming against people oppressed by a bad finance regime—an economic case of sour grapes. Dave Ramsey advising people not to go to restaurants or take that vacation they can’t afford is not helping people so much as justifying “the System” and its inequities and injustices. Or so the thinking goes. Trendy notions like “abundance” and “luxury socialism” combine the ideals of both consumerism and social justice: everyone deserves to live extravagantly, and they should. Christian thinking on the economic left tends to agree. 

If there is criticism of debt, it is directed against creditors and lenders, but usually not those who have gotten into debt. In his essay “Thrift,” published in his 2017 collection The Hidden and the Manifest, David Bentley Hart argues that a culture of thrift can detract from spiritual practices such as fasting, feasting, and generosity. Hart’s critique is a prime example of the Christian case against the fuddy-duddy mores of the Protestant work ethic, that great boring philosophy of penny-pinching. Or take Eugene McCarraher, who wrought his hatred of American-style thriftiness to herculean proportions in his 2019 work, The Enchantments of Mammon, an 816-page odyssey of historical diatribe against American possession by demons of thrift, hard work, capital, and individualism. No one, not the Mormon socialists or the New England Puritans or even the lower-middle-class petty bourgeoisie, makes it out these pages without the accusation that they were not Christians but capitalists. Against these apostates, McCarraher commends various religious rebels, anarchists, layabouts, and whoever else would choose the carnivalesque over capital. 

My objection to this trend is somewhat personal. In these popular jeremiads against thrift, I fear a tradition of Protestant prudence, one in which I was raised, is given short shrift. But some of those fusty Protestant mores were in fact meant as charity. For example, most of us know that elderly relative or hard-pressed friend who will never take money when it’s offered. Try as McCarraher or Hart might, they cannot explain such refusals only as cases of rugged individualism alongside its companion sin of pride. Such refusals might also be the only means of charity for those who cannot otherwise afford to give to others, thus passing on the gift to those who are even more in need than they are. 

Or we risk ignoring simple principles of common wisdom that are now neglected by most. Until adulthood, I had no idea that others were not raised with the advice to pay off their full credit-card balance at the end of each month, as long as they can. This should be proverbial. It is easy to do in all but harsh circumstances (as there surely are among the impoverished). But few do it even in normal, “middle-class” circumstances: Recent data show 50 to 60 percent of middle-income households now have credit-card debt—the most among the tax brackets. So this wisdom is now a point of privilege, one I have only by virtue of being raised by boring Baptists, and one that many of the upper classes are all too happy to use for themselves while they preach against it in public. For the sake of the poor, this should not be so, and certainly not because various intellectuals have denigrated frugality. 

The Biblical Case for Frugality 

But a revision of these insights demands a change of mind about frugality as such. Only a compelling understanding of the love present in frugality can open our eyes to a more charitable vision of the frugality that is such a great part of the American, and Protestant, tradition. 

Lest I feel pride before setting out to defend frugality, I must confess a weakness for doing so: my wife and I are saving up to buy a house. Like most everyone else, we’d prefer not to go into debt and get a mortgage. But of course, we can hardly imagine buying our first house with money we already have. We’ve been frugal, but not that frugal. So, we will almost certainly go into debt to buy a house, and since we are Americans in the present age, we should not think that’s extraordinary or wrong. On most days, we don’t. 

One fact makes a great problem for that ordinary thinking, however—at least for a Christian or anyone else who takes the Bible seriously. In his Letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul wrote, “Be in debt to no man, except to love one another.” When I read the Bible, I try to follow one of Wendell Berry’s words of wisdom: “He didn’t really mean it” is rarely good reading. And here Paul is telling me to be in debt to no one, except to love them. So I must begin with Scripture’s accusation against what I view as the normal way of living my life. 

When putting together parts of human life as different from each other as “debt” and “love”—the one concrete, earthy and everyday and pecuniary, the other spiritual, numinous, too heavenly to put a price on—it is tempting to think metaphorically. What better way to combine two different words? But in our day at least, “metaphorically” often slips very quickly into meaning “not really.” And at that, we trade the most concrete part of the metaphor for the spiritual. The concrete is clearer, harder to ignore. We can only resist it by thinking it less concrete, more “spiritual”—meaning to us more abstract and fungible, up to the reader’s choice to take or leave. I doubt Paul meant it this way. Instead, he probably expected his readers not to go into debt. 

Debt is familiar to most of us. According to recent statistics, credit-card debt keeps soaring, now averaging $6,500 per American, while mortgage rates keep rising with housing prices and interest rates. The average American now has a $252,000 mortgage. Especially in the latter case, it seems impossible to avoid debt. Who besides BlackRock and the boomers can afford to buy a house with cash? 

Still, when I read Paul’s words, and whether I feel very Christian on a given day or not, I must read them seriously, as an apostle’s words demand to be taken. Otherwise they’re just nonsense. Much to my chagrin, the original Greek for “be in debt” means, well, “be in debt.” And while that might have included broader ideas of patronage than we’re familiar with, neither does it exclude the financial sense each of us knows all too well. 

All right, don’t be in debt. But why? 

In answering this question, we must always remember that Paul, as an apostle, wanted the best for us. Apostles generally and Paul particularly get a bad rap. They’re thought to be morose and apocalyptic, crazy when they’re excited and dour when they’re sober, and in neither case much fun to be around. That’s an unfair treatment. The whole point of the apostles’ ministry was to share great news for everyone, to give everyone the joyful and wonderful answers to all their questions, the fulfillments to all their desires. Why else would an apostle suffer as much as Paul did? Although he was no stranger to suffering, Paul exhorted his readers to everything he did with a heart for their ultimate happiness. We don’t read Paul well if we ignore that intention. So, his plea for us to stay out of debt would be, at least as far as he intended, not only good and right but good and right for us. Paul intended to help us be happy. 

Should Saints Have Mortgages? 

It’s easy to think that it’s good for us to not be in debt. Each of us would rather be debt free. But soon our thoughts turn to questions of exceptions, largely because the exceptions have become rules in today’s economy. Aren’t there times when it would be better to go into debt to enjoy a good? To use (if not “have” in the lawful sense) and pay later? I can’t help but keep thinking about buying a house. It does seem prudent enough to live in a house before owning it fully, and it is certainly necessary for all but a few. My family could entertain guests, show the kind of hospitality Paul talks about elsewhere, have a good home for our children—if only we could take out that mortgage. Would it be better for the vast majority of Americans to save, to wait so long, before living in a single-family home? Isn’t there such a thing as good debt, which lets middle-class families build equity off inflating home values while they pay off their deflating debts? Isn’t our widespread housing policy (compared to most countries) the wiser thanks to the mortgage system? 

Paul himself knew how to make exceptions. Although he always had his heart set on happiness, he knew when ultimate happiness must demand temporary suffering and so must conflict with immediate happiness. He likely thought that conflict was the lot of this temporal life. As his writings and sufferings attest, grace does not seem to complete but conflict with nature, at least with his nature. The fate of every martyr and saint. 

So, with this conflict between ultimate and immediate, we have a justification for an exception, for changing the means for the sake of a higher end. But are we justified in indulging in that justification when it comes to debt? Surely not. Compare the two cases. The saint trades immediate happiness for suffering, but for the sake of eternal bliss, and all the while he’s keeping an incredible joy within his immediate suffering—“Rejoice always, and again I say, rejoice!” But the debtor trades temporary suffering for immediate happiness and thus guarantees a costlier, perhaps even ultimate, suffering in the future through bondage to interest rates. The math of these inverse relations implies further that the debtor, amid his temporary happiness, looking forward to his accumulating suffering later, would suffer a strange but all too credible melancholy. For he always has future clouds forming over him. 

Debt, therefore, appears to go just the opposite way from sainthood. That’s not to claim that those who’ve gotten into debt are bad people. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor, and Jesus and the prophets and Paul had plenty to speak against those who got other people into debt. It’s only to claim that, when the terms are voluntary, getting into debt when one could choose otherwise is to opt for a path that will force you to go the other way than what Christianity calls for. (And a worse word of warning to the creditors: putting other people in debt makes you responsible for taking them off the path of Christianity.) Going the way of financial debt will indeed bring cost, even suffering and bondage; so too will martyrdom and sainthood. But how you undergo suffering and bondage, where you put them in your life—those choices will force you into being either a debtor or a saint. 

But why be a saint? Especially if there is no ultimate happiness or suffering to be found after all, as many suspect nowadays. Perhaps there is no heaven. And perhaps there is no further judgment to face after dying with one’s accounts in the red. To that suspicion, Paul could not answer, since his entire faith was based on there being such an ultimacy. He couldn’t even entertain the counterfactual. That’s the risk he had to take, otherwise he didn’t have enough faith to be called a saint and an apostle. But for the rest of us who aren’t saints or apostles, we can indulge the question. Maybe we can’t afford not to ask it. So, let’s at least observe the saint and debtor in their present states, without full regard to what comes next, and simply see how they’re doing. 

The saint takes his suffering straight, no evasions. He’s doing without luxuries right now. But by suffering the present, the saint takes it as it is, no more or less. I could say he gets it tax and interest free, no hidden fees, no demand to pay any more later. Thereby, he has full ownership of his suffering already, here and now. And as any good owner of bad goods can do, he’ll throw it away once his needs for them are done. The saint, as a receiver of his sufferings, is an owner of them. And as an owner, he is free. I can say he freely gets the present. He receives the present, even its present lack, as a present—a gift. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. 

But the debtor won’t take that bargain. The debtor gets a temporary fix. He already has what he wants. But that fix ensures a greater lack later—strangely, by getting something, he is eventually breeding more of nothing. He exchanges the present sufferings for present ease, and in so doing sells himself to a future he can control less and less at the account of each percent of interest. He has no ownership, neither of his present happiness nor of his future suffering, and certainly not his future happiness. So he is unfree. And there is no gift for him, only a loan. Now what was suggested earlier makes good sense: within his present the debtor is unhappy. 

Simply put, not being in debt is good for us, even when it costs us. With the saint as our model, we see that he who is without debt is free to own, even his present sufferings. This could be the most profound meaning of the word “ownership.” Staying out of debt, even when it hurts, forcing one to submit to lower standards to maintain oneself, is a way of ensuring the fullness of one’s ownmost. It is a fullness, a freedom to be oneself, for oneself and by oneself. 

The Debt of Love 

Now, before pride of independence can try to sneak its way into the virtue of frugality, the final clause of Paul’s plea comes in: “except to love one another.” While freedom and independence are good and important for everyone, the saint Paul reminds us they are not the last things. We should be free of debt, but not just so we can be free for ourselves. Paul offers a radical idea for the true reason why we should be debt free: so we can love one another. 

The symmetry, or opposition, between debt and love is both deep and difficult. Love is a debt, one that is worthy of costing the freedom that comes from financial independence. And financial bondage is so bad because its debt keeps us from the one worthy bondage, love. In this math, there is no remainder. You will either be in debt to another through money, or you will be in debt to another through love. The choice is not whether but which. 

Love is a debt. But it is the kind that does not weigh down the debtor in slavery. Rather, it frees the debtor to owe herself to the indebted, and it gratifies the indebted in such grace that she cannot but give back her love in return. Love puts the two in each other’s debt, freeing them for a servitude that only frees them all the more with each act of service. The interest that accumulates with love pays both parties, until it begins paying others as well, putting them too in love’s debt. 

Love is a debt that creates, adds more to being. Whereas financial debt is a transaction that is, I think, rightly defined as satanic. For it only increases in nothing, in lack, until the lack is satisfied and there is no magic credit to fill it. (Despite what modern monetary theories would like to think.) 

Think of all the mortgages, credit-card debts, loan payments, car notes, farm notes, second mortgages, student loans, payday loans, international aid loans, third mortgages. In every one of these transactions there are at least two lives that are being kept from love thereby. They could have been getting into love’s debt with each other. Instead, one of them is getting into the other’s debt, the other getting the one into his bondage. If this age suffers from a lack of love, it may well owe that to the now-constant state of debt that occupies each citizen, on either side of the relation. 

We hear a lot of talk about debt forgiveness—mostly from those who aren’t owed their debts. Governments have tried to grant pardon, without success. Charities and non-profits and churches have stepped in. They too have not broken the cycles. Why? I think it is because the pain of debt, its lack and tendency toward nothing, can only be rectified by the parties involved in the transaction of debt. Only the lender can truly forgive the debt—forgive himself just as much for letting the bondage to him happen—and only the debtor can be truly forgiven. There is a relationship of bondage between them where there ought to be one of love. And only the parties themselves can put love back where it belongs. 

Freedom is a state in which everything belongs where it is. Forgiveness is freeing things to be where they should have been. Love’s debt, as a replacement of monetary debt, both keeps things in their place and allows new places to grow. 

In this age, then, it might be worth thinking long and hard about going into debt. Forgiveness is costly. It costs love. But that is not the hardest problem. Debt replaces love, and forgiveness must work very hard to pay back all the love between debtor and lender that was lost between them. Better still would be to love in the first place. We already owe it to each other anyway. In this sense, then, frugality can be seen as an attempt, however fragile and liable to vice it certainly is, to love others instead of going in debt to them. Or rather, to quit wasting time and to go ahead and get into love’s debt, which is already owed as the cost of being human. The poor grandmother who won’t take donations would prefer love—and maybe that’s because she has learned through the years more of what it is to be human than we intellectuals have with our critical theories. Maybe those who would still like to help her should consider joining her for breakfast. 

As for me, I still want to get a loan to buy a house. I still think a house with a mortgage would make for a more loving home than a debt-free rental. That is, I still want to compromise, to exchange a little displeasure for a little expediency. But what suffering will await me later? Even worse, what love, what present, am I putting off, missing out on, by going into debt? I don’t know. But the apostle’s math worries me. 

So I must conclude this worry with a comfort. Since I will likely go into debt someday over a house, I pray, with a little more feeling now, Father, “forgive us our debts.” There is only One who can truly forgive the debts of others, because he is Love, and Love forgives debts. Love forgives debts by putting a new and better debt in their place. And that Love lets me end this reflection with, “as we forgive our debtors”—that is, as we go into the only debt worth having, to love one another.