Debt is the new fat, someone said recently. Which led me to reflect that, not so long ago, fat was the new cigarette-smoking, and before that, cigarette-smoking was the new alcohol-drinking, and before that, alcohol-drinking was the new whoremongering. And whoremongering is the new debt; and so we go in circles. What all these things have in common is that at one time or another each has been considered the very worst sin of all but has then gone through a period of being thought, if not totally harmless, at least fashionable. I left out hallucinogenic drugs, though they fit in there too.

We seem to be entering a period in which debt has passed through its most recent harmless and fashionable period, and is reverting to being sinful. There are even debt TV shows, which have a familiar religious-revival ring to them. There are accounts of shopaholic binges during which you don't know what came over you and everything was a blur, with tearful confessions by those who've spent themselves into quivering insomniac jellies of hopeless indebtedness, and have resulted to lying, cheating, stealing, and kiting cheques between bank accounts as a result. There are testimonials by families and loved ones whose lives have been destroyed by the debtor's harmful behaviour. There are compassionate but severe admonitions by the television host, who here plays the part of priest or revivalist.

There's a moment of seeing the light, followed by repentance and a promise never to do it again. There's a penance imposed - snip, snip go the scissors on the credit cards - followed by a strict curb-on-spending regimen; and finally, if all goes well, the debts are paid down, the sins are forgiven, absolution is granted, and a new day dawns, in which a sadder but more solvent man you rise the morrow morn.

Once upon a time, people took the utmost precautions to avoid going into debt in the first place. There were various once upon a times - as I've said, debt goes in and out of fashion, and today's admired free-spending gentleman is tomorrow's despised deadbeat. But the time I have in mind was the Great Depression, which my parents lived through as a young married couple.

My mother had four envelopes, into which she put the money from my father's pay cheque every month. These envelopes were labelled “Rent”, “Groceries”, “Other Necessities”, and “Recreation”. Recreation meant the movies. The first three envelopes had priority, and if there was nothing left for the fourth envelope, there were no movies, and my parents went for a walk instead.

My mother kept an account book for 50 years. I notice that in the early years of their marriage - the late 1930s, the early 1940s - they sometimes went into debt ($15 here, $15 there) or took out small loans from the bank ($15 here, $15 there). Not such small sums, either, come to think of it, when the bread bill for the entire month was $1.20 and the milk bill was $6. The debts are always paid back within weeks, or a few months at the latest. Once in a while an odd item appears - “Book”, $2.80; “Luxury foods”, 40c. I wonder what the luxury foods were? I suspect they were chocolates - my mother told me that if they happened to come by any chocolates, they would cut each one in two so they could both sample all the flavours. This was called “living within your means”, and judging from the debt TV shows, it's a lost art.

I first connected the ideas of debt and sin in a church - specifically the United Church Sunday School, to which I insisted on going despite the trepidations of my parents, who were worried that I might get religiously addled too early in life. But I was religiously addled already, since in my part of Canada at the time there were two taxpayer-funded school systems, the Catholic and the public. I was in the public one, which was interpreted then to mean Protestant, so we did a certain amount of praying and Bible-reading right in the classroom, presided over by a portrait of the King and Queen of England and Canada in crowns and medals and jewellery, watching us benevolently from the back of the room.

Since we had religion in the classroom, my Sunday school caper was an add-on. As usual, I was propelled by curiosity: wouldn't I find out more about religious knowledge in a Sunday school than I could in an ordinary school? Not likely, as it turned out - the most interesting parts of the Bible, those dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy's kids, and the cutting up of concubines' bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a-war were studiously avoided, though I did spend a lot of time colouring in angels and sheep and robes, and singing hymns about letting my little candle shine in my own small, dark corner.

It will no doubt astonish you to learn that I won a prize for memorising Bible verses, but such was the case. Among the things we memorised was the Lord's Prayer, which contained the line “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” However, my brother sang in an Anglican boys' choir, and the Anglicans had a different way of saying the same line: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.” The word “debt” - blunt and to the point - was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice-drinking United Church, and “trespasses” was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and a more ornate theology. But did these two words mean the same thing really? I didn't see how they could. “Trespassing” was stepping on other people's property, especially if there was a No Trespassing sign, and “debt” was when you owed money. But somebody must have thought they were interchangeable. One thing was clear even to my religiously addled child mind, however: neither debts nor trespasses were desirable things to have.

Between the 1940s and now, the search engine has providentially come into being, and I've recently been trolling around on the web, looking for an explanation of the discrepancy between the two translations of these Lord's Prayer lines. If you do this yourself you'll find that “debts” was used by John Wycliffe in his 1395 translation and “trespasses” in Tyndale's 1526 version. “Trespasses” reappears in the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer, though the King James 1611 translation of the Bible reverts to “debts”. The Latin Vulgate uses the word for “debts”. But it's interesting to note that in Aramaic, the Semitic language that was spoken by Jesus, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. So you could translate this word as “Forgive us our debts/sins,” or even “our sinful debts”; though no translator has chosen to do this yet.

If you keep searching on the web, you'll come upon quite a few sermonlike blog postings. What their authors generally end up saying is that the debts and/or trespasses mentioned in the Lord's Prayer are spiritual debts and/or trespasses. They are, in fact, sins: God will forgive the sins we've committed in proportion as we ourselves forgive those sins committed against us.

We are warned by the sermonising bloggers against making the naive mistake of believing that the debts in question are actual money debts. Here is an excerpt from a blog posting from Reverend Jennie C. Olbrych of the lovely old Saint James Santee Episcopal Church near McClellanville, North Carolina. I know it's lovely and old because there's a picture of it on the website - and this posting hits all the nails on the head, one after the other.

“Here I am reminded of the Lord's prayer,” says Reverend Olbrych, “... and remember that financial debt is sometimes a metaphor for sin - forgive us our sin, trespasses, debts as we forgive those who sin, trespass, or are indebted to us... Owing a lot of money is fairly typical these days - $2.5 trillion in consumer debt as of June this year... The average household owes close to $12,000 in credit card debt. If you are a homeowner, you will know that signing a home mortgage or big note is sobering... overwhelming if you think about it too much... In another church I served, I had a couple come for some pastoral counselling... they were fighting like mad... and somewhere along the way I asked them how much debt they were carrying - it was close to $75,000 in credit card debt... their annual income was somewhere around $50,000. They were overcome by debt and could not hope to pay it off... Think how relieved they would have been if someone from MasterCard, the person who had been harassing them previously, called out of the blue and said... we're going to write off that debt. Or, if someone called and said... the bank is going to forgive your home mortgage... or your student loan debts... or your business debt... we're going to forgive it... you'd probably be thinking ... this is too good to be true, no way this is legal... it's probably a mistake at the bank... and you'd probably wait and then check your balance... and then the statement arrives in the mail... or better, yet, the deed... free and clear... what a celebration that would be! Wouldn't you be praising American Express or Visa, or the bank to the high heavens... because debt really is a form of slavery -

“Now, some of you who are practical folks no doubt would be saying - well, that's a nice idea but that can't work practically because the whole system would fall apart... if everybody's mortgages were forgiven, the banking system would collapse... someone has to pay... and you are right to think this...

“To become debt free is a wonderful thing - but more wonderful is to become debt free in a spiritual sense...”

Here, in one nicely compact bouquet of meanings, we have: financial debt as a metaphor for sin; the horror and the burden of being in debt; the joy we would experience if all our debts of the financial kind were suddenly to be written off; the impos- sibility of that actually happening in the world of practical affairs, because “the whole system would fall apart”; and the notion that debt is a form of slavery. If we connect the end to the beginning, we get an even neater equation: financial debt is not only a metaphor for sin, it is a sin. It's a debt/sin, as in the original Aramaic.

Modern-day preachers stop well short of saying that the truly virtuous thing would be for creditors to simply burn their record books, but there's good reason for believing Jesus meant that we should forgive financial debts as well as sins of other kinds. Not only did he use a word that to him meant both, but he was well aware of Mosaic law, by which a sabbatical year had to be proclaimed every seven years in which all debts should be cancelled. “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release,” says Deuteronomy 15: 1 and 2. “Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother, because it is the Lord's release.”

Why, you might ask, would anyone ever lend anything to anyone else under these circumstances? Probably because the lendings and borrowings took place within small communities. You didn't have to wipe out the debts owed to you by foreigners - only those within the group, where relations with the next-door neighbours were cradle-to-grave and tightly knit, and he who was the lender one year might find himself the borrower the next. My mother, who grew up in a small community in Nova Scotia, used to say: “In a village everyone knows your business.” A good reputation was very important in such places, and nobody wanted to be known as a person who did not repay, or they might not get a cup of flour or an egg the next time they needed one. So you'd ultimately be repaid somehow for a for- given debt, even if it wasn't with money. During the Great Depression, for instance, few in rural Nova Scotia had cash to spare, but my grandfather - the local doctor - got paid anyway, in chickens and wood. They certainly did get sick of chicken, said my mother, but at least they were never cold.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood is published by Bloomsbury on October 16