Stuart Jeffries and Stephen Moss of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited addressed who would welcome a recession and who would be hurt by one. They interviewed several religious leaders and got an interesting variety of responses on the Church(es) position on the potential for a recession.

As Lent begins, the church would have us stress simplicity and abstemiousness, purgation and renewal. Might clerics see a recession as an opportunity for people to stop worshipping at the shrine of money and start thinking about what really matters? “There is no wealth but life,” as Ruskin put it.

“A recession calls into question our assumption that we can have it all and that we can have it now,” says Hazel Buckley, a Franciscan sister. “We need to embrace the ‘ethic of enough’, which involves a decision to have only what we need, not all that we want. Leaner times can help us make this distinction. The period of Lent is a good opportunity to pare back the excesses in our life and to be content and grateful for what we already have.”

“We don’t want a recession,” says Victor Hulbert, communications director of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, “but if one is coming let’s try to turn it to our advantage. It might make us focus more on the things that really matter - on our families and communities. Recession could make us more selfish, because we have less and become more grasping, or it could make us pull together more. When you visit other parts of the world, you see people who have far fewer material goods than we do yet somehow manage to have a greater degree of happiness.”

The Rev Stephen Lowe, the Bishop of Hulme, who speaks for the Anglican Church on urban life and faith, is less sanguine. “I’d be all for hair shirts if I thought everyone was going to wear them,” he says. “But I suspect some hair shirts would have nice silk linings. The way the world is set up at the moment, purging is never going to work, because those at the top will always be able to protect themselves. If we’re going to have a purging, let’s have an equality of purging.”

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, is also unconvinced of the purifying powers of a recession. “The prophet prayed for protection against poverty,” he says. “He grew up in poverty and said that if you were struggling to put bread on the table you might not have much time to concentrate on remembering God or on issues of the faith.” Bunglawala says the Qur’an recognizes that all human beings will be tested financially and that they will face ups and downs, but poverty is as undesirable as excessive wealth. “The prophet preached moderation in all things,” he says.

For those who prefer service to Mammon, the market tables are a mix of overturned and steadily gaining. The article reported economic pundits to be in high demand: “bright days for the dismal science.” Environmentalists interviewed expressed through a rather Biblical metaphor that there’s “something to be said for a fast as well as a feast,” that a recession might make individuals more aware of waste and shortages, but that “No one wants a recession because it’s most damaging to the poorest, who aren’t the people causing the most damage.”

The debt industry is reported as “sure to be in profit over the next few years.” Thirty thousand homes were repossessed in the UK last year, expected to rise to 45,000 in 2008. Similarly, U.S. foreclosure rates were up 75% from 2006. Also, pawn brokers, bookies, and drinking establishments have a favorable outlook in the face of recession.

Business seems split theoretically over an impending recession. The article quotes the president of the Adam Smith Institute as noting how a recession might “speed up the process of business evolution…companies…curb costs and learn new habits. So there can be good side-effects…”

One interviewee has me sealing my new commitment to several of my peers to stick with trains as my sole mode of transportation while in Europe. Ryanair’s head told reporters, “We would welcome a good, deep, bloody recession in this country…It would be bloody good for the industry. It would help see off the environmental nonsense that has become so popular among the chattering classes.”

Chattering classes? Hmmm. Are those something like monks or more like idealists with poor conversation boundaries?