NASHVILLE — The Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has joined other faith groups in calling for payday lending reform. The call came in a Feb. 11 letter to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.
ERLC joins the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, National Baptist Convention, Center for Public Justice, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Ecumenical Poverty Initiative, PICO National Network and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to form the Faith for Just Lending coalition.
Representing 92 million Americans, the coalition said payday lending businesses prey on the poor and bank on the likelihood the borrower will not be able to pay the loan off on time, resulting in mounting debt with rates as high as 400 percent.
The coalition is calling for a balance between the market need for credit and the need for consumer protection.
Messengers to the 2014 SBC annual meeting approved a resolution that denounced predatory payday lending and called on the adoption of government policies to end the practice. And messengers to the Alabama Baptist State Convention annual meeting in November 2014 also passed a resolution condemning the excessive interest rates charged by payday and title loan companies.
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