The New Evangelical Moral Minority

If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better.

.. Moore was respectful, but he seemed puzzled by Land’s eagerness to defend Palin. “Dr. Land thinks that Governor Palin’s resignation was a shrewd move,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.” Later in the show, after Land had hung up, Moore offered a broader critique. “We, as evangelical Christians, are really, really prone, it seems to me, to become so enthused with political figures that we just automatically impute to them almost superheroic status,” he said. “Put not your trust in princes,” he added—Psalm 146:3. “Or in princesses, either.”

 .. For a long time, Southern Baptists had not only a faith but a cause. They saw God’s greatness reflected in the inherent goodness of the American South—and, more recently, in America itself.
.. And in the Obama era Land’s status as an old-fashioned culture warrior came to seem, to some members of the church, like a liability. In 2012, after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African-American, Land said on his own radio show that activists were seizing on the case “to gin up the black vote for an African-American President.” When he was criticized, he suggested that Zimmerman had behaved rationally; a black man, he said, was “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.”
.. his radio show was cancelled, and, under pressure, he resigned from the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which he had led since 1988.
.. admonishing Southern Baptists to think first—and often—about their own sins. The denomination was formed, in 1845, by white Southerners who split off from a national Baptist movement that was growing increasingly intolerant of slavery. Moore sees in his theological ancestors a cowardly and catastrophic willingness to ignore the uncomfortable. “If you call people to repentance for drunkenness, or for adultery, or for any number of personal sins, but you don’t say anything about slaveholding or about lynching,” he says, “you’re just baptizing the status quo.”
.. both view abortion as the defining atrocity of our age.
..Trump responded, inevitably, on Twitter, calling Moore a “nasty guy with no heart!” On CNN, hours later, Anderson Cooper asked Moore to continue the dialogue, and Moore flashed a crickety smile. “It’s one of the few things that I can agree with Donald Trump on,” he said. “I am a nasty guy with no heart—we sing worse things about ourselves in our hymns, on Sunday mornings.” He added, “That’s the reason why I need forgiveness from God, through Jesus Christ.” He had found a way to mock an insult with a prayer.
.. the so-called “Trump effect”: in October, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals agreed that an elected official who “commits an immoral act” in private could nevertheless behave ethically in public; five years earlier, only thirty per cent agreed with the statement.
..Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church, in Dallas, a flagship S.B.C. congregation, was probably speaking for many if not most Southern Baptists when he suggested that Trump was justified in responding to Moore’s “vitriolic attacks.” In Jeffress’s view, Trump is precisely the kind of protector whom Christians should support; he has said that, when it comes to defending America from Islamic terrorism and other threats, “I want the meanest, toughest son-of-a-you-know-what I can find.”
.. Moore thinks that the idea of a moral majority is wrong, and was probably wrong when it was created: he suspects that earnest, orthodox Christians have always been outnumbered. Like any believer, he wants his church to grow, but he doesn’t seem particularly threatened by the thought that it might not.
.. He says that Christians in America must learn to think of themselves as a marginal community, struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile secular culture. In such a context, Muslims might seem less like enemies and more like allies in the fight for religious freedom.
.. Southern Baptists. After centuries of regional dominance, the denomination has been shrinking: last year, the church reported fewer than three hundred thousand baptisms, the lowest number in more than half a century, and a decline of about a third since the peak, in 1972
.. At the annual meeting, he said, “Brothers and sisters, when you have a government that says we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the theological beliefs of that house of worship, then there are going to be Southern Baptist churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country who are not going to be able to build.”

How a Pillar of German Banking Lost Its Way

For most of its 146 years, Deutsche Bank was the embodiment of German values: reliable and safe. Now, the once-proud institution is facing the abyss. SPIEGEL tells the story of how Deutsche’s 1990s rush to join the world banking elite paved the way for its own downfall.

.. the collapse of Deutsche Bank is the result of years, decades, of failed leadership, culminating in the complete loss of control of the company by top managers during the period between 1994 and 2012.

It is a story about how Hilmar Kopper, Rolf E. Breuer and Josef Ackermann, the leaders of Deutsche Bank during those fateful years, essentially turned over the bank to a hastily assembled group of Anglo-American investment bankers before Anshu Jain, the prince of these traders, rose to the top and spent three more years sailing the bank full-speed-ahead into the shoals.

It is also a story of how these bank heads, along with numerous other members of the management and supervisory boards, stood aside as Jain and the many other new investment banking heroes modified the staid German financial institution to serve their own purposes — essentially looting it and robbing it of its very soul — without leaving behind a better, stronger bank.

.. Every detail in the sequence of its decline is controversial, partially because the financial world still considers it normal that nobody take responsibility for anything but themselves

.. Their leadership failures were not primarily the result of professional incompetence, since the people involved were and are extremely well educated, often proven professionals with significant amounts of experience. The source of their mistakes lies elsewhere, in cultural factors and psychological disposition.

.. It looks as though Deutsche Bank managers wanted to free themselves from Germany’s reputation for provincialism — and went so overboard the consequences can still be felt today.

.. In a June 1994 meeting at the Deutsche Bank branch in Madrid, Hilmar Kopper, then Deutsche Bank chairman of the board, resolved together with a handful of senior managers to transform the Frankfurt-based concern into a globally operating investment bank. The move was intended to propel the bank upwards, but after a few good years, the slide began — one which continues to this day.

.. In the wake of 1980s “Reaganomics” — named for the US President Ronald Reagan — and the anti-socialist doctrine of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism flourished. For its adherents, neoliberalism was considered a well-founded theory. But its opponents saw it as an erroneous belief in the self-regulating powers of the markets. Nevertheless, neoliberalism entered the mainstream and in Germany too, politicians were eager to deregulate and weaken state oversight.

.. In 1988, Deutsche Bank was the largest player in the German economy. It held large stakes in many, if not all, large corporations in the country: a quarter to a third of Daimler shares; co-owner of Karstadt and Südzucker; a stakeholder in Metallgesellschaft; a major shareholder of the construction firm Holzmann, the Hortmann Group and the porcelain producer Hutschenreuther. The list could go on. The bank’s senior managers and directors also sat on the boards of 400 companies around the country. Without the bank, nothing worked, and standing in opposition to the financial institution was fruitless. Deutsche Bank was Germany, Germany Inc., a small state within the state. Indeed, it was so powerful that many considered it at the time to be a danger to democracy.

.. The bank’s German clients were increasingly discovering the enterprising nature of international financial institutions and Deutsche had to be careful not to be left behind.

.. Those who valued good manners, timeliness and order — and who held the correct, center-right political views — tended to have good careers at the bank.

.. His coworkers admired Mitchell’s competitive nature, his directness and his chutzpah. He was, people said, “aggressive in a positive way,” always wanting to make bets and compete with others.

Kopper hired him and Mitchell brought along 50 of his best coworkers. It was a spectacular move, unheard of for Deutsche Bank, but one that would soon become standard in international banking. Investment bankers know no loyalty. They move in packs to the best hunting grounds — to where the most money can be made.

.. He was, in short, charged with transforming Deutsche Bank into an investment bank.

.. Because he personified the cultural break senior bank managers wanted, Mitchell was polarizing from day one. His direct employees swore eternal loyalty, but those who were not in close contact with him both hated and envied him from a distance.

.. he replied: “I’m God.” Another striking quote attributed to him: “If you don’t have $100 million by the time you’re 40, you’re a failure.”

.. Mitchell and his people felt differently, and saw themselves as “Indians,” as “mercenaries,” as “conquistadors.” They called their boss a “shark” or the “terminator.”

.. And, unnoticeably at first, they also gradually brought disrepute to the entire finance industry and Deutsche Bank, in particular.

.. That is when it started: Disdain began sneaking into the vocabulary of the traders. They treated clients like idiots who could be sold garbage as gold.

.. On Dec. 22, 2000, Edson Mitchell died in a plane crash on his way to celebrate Christmas with his family in Maine. He was just 47 years old.

.. Jain was completely at home in the alphabet soup of derivative abbreviations — CDO, CDS, ABS, RMBS — and his numbers made him to one of the best traders of the era. Deutsche Bank had him to thank for a growing balance sheet and huge profits — and a rise in renown and glamor. The London trading division that Jain led was responsible for a considerable portion of the company’s entire profit.

.. The Basel-based Bank for International Settlements, often referred to as the central bank of central banks, warned against the new tools being used to spread risk. But Jain was unconcerned, as were Financial Times reporters.

.. the former stars of the Deutsche Bank empire, they were no longer valued. Their loan portfolios, still as full as ever, were mocked as antiquated.