I have often said that the only group of people with the weight of numbers, as well as the quantity of cultural and financial capital, necessary to reform the American (and therefore the global) system is American Christians.

As far as I can see, however, they are ineffective because their minds and hearts are less enamoured by the Scriptures and more captive to being either Republican or Democrat.

Republican Christians are obsessed with such matters as "What is constitutionally American", while Democrat Christians are obsessed with worthy but peripheral matters such as human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, inner-city education, global poverty, racial justice, nuclear weapons, immigration, health care, the status of women and girls, conflict resolution in the Middle East, and creation care.

As a result, "Christian" voices are being heard and "people of faith are mobilizing" (as a Democrat Christian website says) on all sorts of things.

Except the key issues of our time:
- manipulation of markets while preaching "free markets";
- manipulation of currency values;
- financial system volatility and instability, from which the system is rescued when
unavoidable in ways that benefit the richest while hammering the poorest;
- privatisation of global resources including air and water while socialising the costs;
- a world trade system skewed towards those elites who are prepared to be most
conscienceless in exploiting human beings and violating the environment.

So what should "American Christians" do?:

1. Take seriously the fact that the most "free" markets are actually far less free than they should be

2. Read their Bibles to see what God says about tampering with what should be standard such as weights and measures (and money is meant to be, among other things, a measure of value)

3. Go to the trouble of understanding what the Bible teaches about usury - and why it teaches that (it is not so very complicated - for a start, read the stuff by me on the subject, freely available on the Internet by simply Googling "guptara usury" without the quote marks)

4. Study the writings of Amos and the other prophets to internalise what God says and feels about such injustices (these injustices are actually the source of most though not all of the other injustices that Democrat Christians get so worked up about).

5. Work out the relationship between a renewed heart and what that means for public policy in a globalised economy with a globalising society and polity (plenty of good resources available on the Internet, starting with those from the Jubilee Centre in Cambridge, England, UK (http://www.jubilee-centre.org). However, most of the resources there are from the viewpoint of a national economy and polity. For more global issues, I'm afraid you will have to either go to my website (www.prabhu.guptara.net) or read my global-issues Blog at www.prabhuguptara.blogspot.com