Room for the rich in kingdom of heaven, say bankers

Barclays chief executive John Varley stood at the lectern in St Martin-in-the-Fields on London's Trafalgar Square and told the packed church that "profit is not satanic".

The head of Britain's second-biggest bank said banks are the "backbone" of the economy. Rewarding high-performing bankers with more pay doesn't conflict with Christian values, said Varley, who was paid £1.08 million last year.

"Is Christianity and banking compatible? Yes," he said after the speech in the church. "And is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes."

Varley joins Goldman Sachs International adviser Brian Griffiths and Lazard International chairman Ken Costa as London bankers who've gone into churches in recent weeks and invoked Christianity to defend a banking system that critics say has created wealth and inequality.

"The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest," Goldman's Griffiths said last month in St Paul's Cathedral. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all."

City bonuses may rise to £6 billion ($13.7 billion) this year, according to the Centre for Economics & Business Research, even after Britain's economy contracted for six consecutive quarters, driving unemployment to a 14-year high of 7.9 per cent. The gap between Britain's rich and poor reached its widest in five decades last year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Bankers are trying to defuse anger at a financial crisis that triggered a state bailout of lenders. "People are very, very angry at the gross iniquity of rewards in society," Liberal Democrat Vince Cable said.

Bankers became too obsessed with short-term gains in a financial crisis that is a "profoundly moral issue", Lazard's Costa said last month.

Varley, whose lecture was organised by the Christian Association of Business Executives, said banking's core business of moving money around to fund people, companies and countries lifted millions out of poverty.

Richard Chartres, the bishop of St Paul's, said he welcomed bankers to debate in church, even though Jesus had thrown money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem, according to the Bible.

"The money changers were actually selling sacrifices," Chartres said. "It is the idea that you can buy off God.

"They have a duty to be extravagantly generous," Chartres said of the bankers, "because to those to whom much has been given much will be required."

- BLOOMBERG