Financial institutions have only one god, Mammon, whom they worship with a single-mindedness that puts most religious orders to shame. So when the banks start adding religious homilies to their official correspondence, the end of the world is clearly nigh.
An Absa email was my first exposure to a bank wearing its faith on its electronic sleeve. At the end of the message was the injunction: “When there is nothing left but God, that is when you will find out that God is all you need.”
Unnerving stuff, especially when appended to a letter demanding payment of an enormous sum. Sinister words, I fretted. Did it mean that Absa was intent on reducing me to penury so that I would embrace a deity?
And would the next email from them ramp up the pressure? Ther’s Proverbs 22:7: “The rich ruleth over the poor and the borrower is servant to the lender.” Or Proverbs 22:26-27: “Do not be one who strikes hands in pledge. If thou has nothing to pay, thy bed shall be taken from under thee.”
The new Consumer Protection Act probably meant my bed was safe, I mused, but preaching to clients must be commercially unwise in a society that is so religiously diverse. Certainly it is inappropriate in a constitutionally secular state.
Fortunately Absa soon acknowledged that it was mistaken about the debt, so I never discovered whether their versification would extend to Judges 15:15, threatening to smite me with the jawbone of an ass.
Some weeks later this apparently isolated incident took on new significance upon meeting a businessman who was fuming about Standard Bank. His strenuous objections to bank emails adorned with Islamic exhortations: “From Allah we come and to him we return” — had gone unanswered all along the management food chain from branch level to head office executives.
That’s when it dawned on me that this must all be a banking public relations exercise. At last they were doing something to exorcise the incendiary Biblical example of Jesus upending the tables of the moneylenders, and those sharp injunctions against usury in the Qu’ran that are so damaging to the accounting bottom line.
The mind boggled at the organisational and ethical implications.
There would have to be banking committees comprised of wise men from all faiths, bickering over how much space to give to Islam versus Christianity, Scientology versus the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Old Testament versus the New, and the King James Version against the Living Bible.
Then there are the Jews. Though not a proselytising religion, they might very well demand equal time with Islam. Conversely, there would be the issue of whether Islamic scripture could be transmitted on the same computer servers as Jewish scripture — a kind of electronic halal versus kosher debate.
What a nightmare it would be to reconcile legal requirements for equity with the warring passions of true believers. For example, would messages from atheists denying the existence of a deity have to be balanced with messages from fundamentalist militants calling for the death of non-believers?
Should the apocalyptics warning of the imminent end of the world — most recently scheduled for December 21 2012, in case you want to start finalising your affairs — be subject to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out provision? After all, how many chances does one give a crowd who have over the past couple of centuries hazarded some 220 incorrect dates for the Rapture?
Sadly, the theory came tumbling.
Standard Bank responded smartly to my query, saying that “no quotes of a religious political or philosophical nature are permitted” on emails. Absa replied that it “embraces and promotes diversity” and that deviation from its corporate identity with “customised” images or quotations was “a serious breach” of policy. Both, if necessary, would take disciplinary action.
The question now is whether such disciplinary action encompasses execution of the offender’s firstborn or a mere lashing, stoning and mutilation of the miscreant?
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