Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- What’s the difference between Lloyd Blankfein and the Blues Brothers of 1980 cinema fame? Elwood, the felonious musician played by Dan Aykroyd, meant it when he said he and his brother Jake were on a mission from God. Blankfein wants to take his own similar words back.

Just when it seemed Wall Street’s most powerful banker had jumped headfirst into the transatlantic hullabaloo over the Almighty’s place in the Goldman Sachs bonus pool, we get word from atop 85 Broad Street that Goldman’s chief executive officer was only kidding.

Yes, it’s true, Blankfein did tell a reporter for the Sunday Times of London that he’s just a banker “doing God’s work,” a quote the newspaper couldn’t help but use for the headline of its 6,900-word opus about Goldman last weekend. And, no, Blankfein didn’t mean for these words to be taken seriously, according to the bank’s spokesman, Lucas van Praag.

It was “an obviously ironic, throwaway response,” van Praag told me in an e-mail. “Sort of like saying, ‘I’m living the dream’ in response to a question about how you’re doing.”

He went on: “And you can also say that the Sunday Times understood the context perfectly but decided to ‘spin’ it in a cynical attempt to generate more interest in their story and, presumably, to see if their interpretation could be used to generate a reaction that could be used to ‘create’ news.”

Poor Lloyd. Life is so unfair.

A Banker Scorned

Cynical or not, Blankfein’s three-word quote certainly made good copy. Goldman is on pace to pay more than $20 billion in compensation this year. To the chattering classes, you even might say his sound bite was a gift from above. “Great! Then they should be willing to do it for free,” the financial Web site Naked Capitalism intoned.

It should have surprised no one that Blankfein’s little bromide would provoke such scorn. Not after all the canonical claptrap emerging lately from London’s great houses of worship, where titans of finance have been lining up to deliver guest sermons in defense of the global banking system and the vast inequities for which it has been blamed.

On Oct. 20, Goldman Sachs International adviser Brian Griffiths gave the churchgoers at St. Paul’s Cathedral a lesson in self-love. “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is a recognition of self-interest,” Griffiths said, according to Bloomberg News, which noted how his voice echoed around the 365-foot-high domed church’s gold-mosaic walls. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

Case closed! (Never mind that line from the Gospel according to Matthew: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” a biblical term meaning worldly riches.)

God Talk

Last week, it was John Varley’s turn. The CEO of Barclays Plc, Britain’s second-biggest bank, made news by standing at the wooden lectern in St. Martin-in-the-Fields on London’s Trafalgar Square and declaring that “profit is not satanic.”

Such an inept attempt to use Satan as a straw man naturally raises the following question: What the hell is it with all this God talk from the too-big-to-fail club?

Looking back, it probably was inevitable that the public fury over the banking sector’s socialized losses and privatized profits would devolve into a theological mosh pit. Wall Street innovations like credit-default swaps, liquidity puts and dark pools are so complex that the people running the banks can’t fully comprehend them. It’s much simpler for them to explain their bonuses on religious grounds, so that ordinary folks at least can understand what it is they’re saying.

I had half-hoped for some plausible explanation from Goldman defending the validity of Blankfein’s remark. For instance, Blankfein didn’t tell the Times reporter that he spends all his time doing God’s work. He does have a bank to run, after all.

Reasonable Defense

Alternatively, another reasonable defense might have been that the act of ridiculing Goldman itself constitutes doing God’s work -- and that by saying what he did, Blankfein cleverly succeeded in facilitating a fresh round of public mockery.

He didn’t stand by his quip, though. Rather, amid the backlash over a screaming headline by a lowly ink-stained wretch, Blankfein backed down. Those who want to see Goldman and its kind get broken up must be hoping it won’t be the last time.

(Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Jonathan Weil in New York at jweil6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 11, 2009 21:00 EST