c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Today’s mail brings four opportunities to sign up for credit cards. One, sad to say, comes by way of a prominent university, which I had thought above such things.

Some will say,”Only four?”For bank-card offers, like spam e-mail, get sent to any temptable person whose address can be obtained. College students get card offers by the carload, because they are making first-time financial decisions and have big eyes for gear and clothing.

What follows is a modern form of bondage. People spend money they don’t have and then discover, when bills bearing 21 percent interest charges come due, that they are still strapped. Some borrow more _”debt consolidation,”they call it _ so now they have one large wound, rather than many small cuts.

Soon the telephone is ringing at dinner hour and Saturday morning, and strangers using your first name are invading the one private place most people have left. Over time, the”friendly reminder”gives way to harsh insistence, then moral condemnation, then threats to keep calling.

Because consumer debt is unsecured, card-issuing banks have no leverage except to inflict misery on people whose indebtedness they churned in the first place.

Credit ratings start to erode. Essential loans like first mortgages and car loans become unobtainable. But amazingly, credit card offers continue to arrive, joined now by seductively worded offerings for home equity loans.

People who would never dream of going underground to mine coal are discovering how coal operators got people to do their mining: by extending easy credit at the company store.

Luring the unwise and financially strapped into credit-card debt isn’t all that banks do, of course. They also do much that is necessary and deserving of respect. A healthy banking system is essential to our economy. Not all banks chase the easy score of Visa and MasterCard.

But I think the lure of easy money is corrupting the banking industry in the same way it is corrupting their customers. Consumer debt is like a drug _ an easy high for the user, an easy buck for the seller, and deadly in the end for both.

It isn’t enough to say that in a free market economy banks can do whatever is legal and customers don’t have to accept or use these cards. That is all true; we have only ourselves to blame when we spend what we don’t have.

But in my experience, the sly are always smarter than I am, not necessarily in raw brain power, but in their determination and techniques. Car salesmen outwit me every time. It troubles me to see pillars of our economy behaving like sly salesmen, using smooth talk to turn us against our best interests.

A healthy society, you see, is built not only on freedom, but on mutual respect, on trustworthiness, on an unspoken covenant not to pounce when our neighbor falls. A healthy society requires compassion and restraint, rather than exploitation.

If banks want to be seen as leading lights in their communities, worthy of templelike buildings and lofty salaries, they must treat their neighbors with respect.

We all lose when banks deplete credibility and moral capital accumulated over many years, and become known simply as predators. Who will trust them then? Who will want to work for them? Who will care about paying their bills?

The grim irony is that the lenders’ day in misery will come when the current boom economy fades, as it inevitably will, and no amount of Saturday-morning harassment can spur prompt payment of the consumer debt that is fueling much of the boom.

As bank stocks tumble, I hope we will remember to view this credit-card morass as a cautionary tale about what happens when people turn generations of accumulated respect into short-term gain at the expense of trusting, if unwise, neighbors.

Banks aren’t alone in depleting their moral capital. Every time a parent abuses a child, a clergyperson molests a parishioner, a teacher cheats a class, a businessperson fiddles on expenses, a government official lies, or signing up for anything on the Internet produces a deluge of spam, one more chunk of accrued respect gets expended, to be replaced by suspicion.

DEA END EHRICH