For Londoners, St Paul’s Cathedral represents survival in adversity. It was born amid plague and fire; and the most iconic image of London’s darkest hour is the cathedral’s famous dome wreathed in the smoke of a German air raid. And yet it stands: and so Gordon Brown took himself there Tuesday, to try and outline something that will help the City of London, the city that invented international finance, survive this latest crisis. And, as he did in the slightly less secular surroundings of the US Congress earlier this month, he claimed that markets failed us because morality did. So, recently, have Sarkozy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Deepak Chopra among others.

Markets and morals. Whether there’s even a link is one of the great dividing lines between those who reflexively disbelieve the economics that gave us free markets and those who don’t. Those who don’t will point out that economics is value-free, a mere toolbox. Those who do would claim that nothing is value-free, that economics privileges soulless, amoral, “calculating man”. On the side that believes that: street protesters, several religious leaders, sociologists, and yesterday’s Gordon Brown. On the other side: most economists, most Americans and most policymakers, including the Gordon Brown who served as a pro-market Chancellor for a decade.

Why do people feel so strongly that this is a moral issue? Yes, debt and organised morality — well, all right, religion — aren’t strangers to each other. The Quran has a few words to say on usury. The first thing Jesus did in Jerusalem was clear out the money-lenders. But why has it become the central issue today? Is it because, like some articles in The Wall Street Journal have claimed, the economics of the crisis is so complex that business journalists are happier blaming everything on bad people? Or is there something about the financial industry that makes it easier for the religious to worry, for the mob to hoist their pitchforks?

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