While the financial fallout of the mortgage meltdown has been well documented, the moral dimensions have not been widely discussed, religion experts say. They say they are particularly troubled on a moral level by the explosion of subprime mortgages, which allowed lower-income people with weak credit to buy homes based on attractive teaser interest rates that now are resetting to levels they cannot afford.

Subprime lending is not unethical under Judeo-Christian tradition -- and it can serve a good societal purpose by allowing those who have been down on their luck to get access to capital, said David Miller, executive director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School.

He and others, though, said that subprime lenders have a duty to charge fair interest and that they also have a moral responsibility not to extend credit to those they know cannot pay it back.

"One of the interesting questions that should be asked of subprime mortgage lenders, is, 'would you take this loan out on your own home?" said Gary Moore, a financial adviser in Sarasota, Florida, who writes about religion and investing.

"That's the Golden Rule. But I bet there's not 1 in 100 that did. If more of them just thought about that for a minute, it would have prevented a lot of this."

At the same time, religion experts say that many home-buyers may have acted immorally by living beyond their means and that borrowers are required to try to make good on their debts. They cite a verse in the Book of Psalms that says: "The wicked borrows and does not pay back."

On Chicago's South Side, the Rev. Reginald Williams Jr. at the Trinity United Church of Christ says he has been dismayed by what he sees as the immorality of the housing market's excesses. The church, a primarily black congregation, has a long-standing housing ministry that provides education and advocacy for people at risk of foreclosure,

Lenders who preyed on low-income minorities for high-interest mortgages came up with "a slick way to make money and to really enslave people," said Williams, an associate pastor. "The immorality is further magnified when it's particularly geared at a certain race."

Lessons about debt and financial struggles are found throughout the Bible. There is a biblical prohibition on charging interest on loans -- the making money by lending money -- although today most Jews and Christians view the charging of some interest as acceptable.

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In Islamic finance, there is an official prohibition on interest-based borrowing and lending. That has helped investment funds that adhere to Islamic principles to largely avoid the subprime meltdown because they do not hold traditional banking stocks.

The subprime crisis is likely interpreted differently across the spectrum of Muslim thought, said John Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. He said some conservative Muslims might argue that the mess shows that an "interest-based system is not only immoral but doesn't work."

In the Bible, there is also mention of loan forgiveness, something particularly timely as the government has brokered a plan with mortgage lenders to give relief to struggling homeowners who took out adjustable rate subprime loans that are set to go up sharply.

In biblical times "every seventh year, you were supposed to forgive any money that hasn't been repaid to you," said Moore, the financial adviser, referring to a passage in Deuteronomy.

There is also a biblical concept of the Jubilee year, in which every 50 years all property should be returned to its original owners. The idea, he said, is to give those who have struggled a fresh start and not be bound forever by their debts.