Shades of ’63, in Birmingham, Alabama

January 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Some recent news from Birmingham, Alabama, made me think, What is it about black kids that makes some people want to spray them violently?

NPR’s All Things Considered reported that police assigned to inner-city schools there have been pepper-spraying high school students who get a little out of hand. The prototype for the story was a 17-year-old girl who, one day last winter, was crying in the hallway because some boys had been calling her names. An officer arrived, told her to calm down and handcuffed her—not the surest way to ease distress. And then, “I got maced. My eyes was burning. My face was burning. Like, I couldn’t breathe. And then like, afterwards, I threw up,” she told NPR. This girl was pregnant at the time.

You’d think Birmingham would be especially wary of using weaponry on African American schoolchildren.

In May 1963 the city attracted world attention when thousands of Negro children flooded its downtown to march with Martin Luther King Jr., in nonviolent demonstrations for civil rights. Police attacked with clubs and dogs and—infamously—high-powered fire hoses that slammed the little ones across the pavement. But the spraying didn’t stop the marching. “In Birmingham, the Negro principal of Parker High School desperately locked the gates from the outside to preserve a semblance of order, but students trampled the chain-link fence to join the demonstrations,” Taylor Branch wrote in his magnificent trilogy America in the King Years.

In Place of Hoses

Today, students who face the Birmingham police at their schools are not exactly practicing civil disobedience. They’re usually engaging in routine misbehavior like cursing, talking too loudly, and violating dress codes by wearing, for example, baggy pants.

In other words, they’re doing the kinds of things that might normally earn a trip to the principal’s office. But at certain high schools in Birmingham, they’re being punished not just with detention but also with chemical weapons. The incidents—reportedly more than 100 of them over the past five years—have taken place primarily at a handful of city high schools with predominantly African American student populations.

President George W. Bush spoke of the “soft racism” of low expectations. He was speaking of academic standards in inner-city schools, but just how low are the expectations of those who feel that the disciplinary toolkit in those schools must include inflammatory agents?

Some students are resisting once again. The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven Birmingham students who have been sprayed, alleging that the city’s school system and police department have “created a police state” within the schools. Black students are also speaking up in places like the Washington, D.C., area, where—according to a Washington Post analysis—they are up to five times more likely than white students to be suspended. Lawyers for the Birmingham students say they could find no other school district in the United States where students are being repeatedly punished with mace.

That they are fighting an apparent injustice would be unsurprising to King, whose birthday we observe this coming Monday. “Many children took it upon themselves to participate in demonstrations even in defiance of their parents and school officials,” writes theological ethicist Rufus Burrow in his handy volume Martin Luther King Jr. for Armchair Theologians, referring to the Civil Rights era. “Such behavior only confirmed for King that children not only had a major stake in the struggle against racial injustice but also had a strong awareness of what was going on. They wanted to participate and would do so in defiance of any adults.”

In the Birmingham of 2012, the adults include African American school administrators: they’ve invited the police into the schools to help keep order. That makes this case less than black and white, morally speaking. Still, it is hard to picture unruly white students in suburban districts being routinely shot with canisters of mace. It’s hard to see this clash entirely apart from the narrative of racial inequity in America, apart from the unfinished work of what King often described as “the beloved community.” …read more

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What You Won’t Hear from the Santorum Choir

January 5, 2012 by 5 Comments

Throughout this political season, social conservatives have grappled to make their case that concerns about marriage and family are relevant to America’s economic woes. And now, Rick Santorum’s virtual victory in the Iowa caucuses has provided them with a quick onramp to election-year discussions of bread-and-butter issues.

At almost every turn of his improbable bid for the GOP presidential nomination, Santorum has knitted the pro-family perspective to worries over economic wellbeing. For instance, at the October 11 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire, Santorum declared: “The biggest problem with poverty in America … is the breakdown of the American family…. We need to have a policy that supports families, that encourages marriage.”

On that stage at Dartmouth College, the former Pennsylvania senator served up stats indicating that two-parent families are far less likely to slip into poverty than those headed by a single parent. His figures were a little off, according to the fact-checking organization PolitiFact. But Santorum, social conservatism’s new standard-bearer, uttered the truth—or should I say, virtually half of it.

Ample studies have shown that family implosion is often a ticket to poverty and economic insecurity. These findings go well with the moral and religious understanding that social solidarity, including that basic unit of solidarity, the family, is essential to human flourishing. On this, the social conservatives are basically right.

What they don’t acknowledge is that the reverse is at least as true. Prolonged economic insecurity makes it much harder to hold a family together or even start one.

Minding the Gaps

Look at the recent patterns of family breakup in the United States.

Divorce rates have tapered off, but that is because of a steep drop in divorce among the college-educated middle class. Family breakup is in fact plaguing poor and working-class communities, creating what some researchers have dubbed a “divorce gap” along socioeconomic lines. In his 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin pointed out, “The tensions in the marriages of the non-college-educated reflect, in part, the declining job prospects that husbands face.” Cherlin and other researchers were reaching this conclusion before the Great Recession.

A study released by the Pew Research Center last month highlighted also a marriage gap along those same lines of income and education. People with less education and economic prospects are increasingly less likely to get married in the first place.

In other words, you really can’t talk seriously about family breakdown without dealing with issues like wages, access to higher education, and economic inequality. It’s also hard to argue credibly that single-parent families are the cause of rising poverty. Indeed, as experts point out, those rates have spiked in recent years even as the numbers of single-headed households have held steady. The real problem at the moment is with something called the job market.

All that could be noted from a moral as well as empirical vantage. According to most theological ethicists, people need material things like affordable healthcare, adequate housing, and jobs that provide a decent income. Many would say people have a right to such goods, because these are basic props of human dignity—of life in community, in families.

But you probably won’t hear that from the social conservatives as they take their onramp to New Hampshire and South Carolina. …read more

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When Hope Dies Last

December 22, 2011 by 2 Comments

Studs Terkel, an American original, devoted the last of his great reportage to the people throughout history “who had hope,” as he explained in a 2003 interview. “They did stuff they shouldn’t have done. They discommoded themselves. They could have led nice lives.” Terkel paid tribute to those people—who are called “activists”—in his final oral-history book published that year, Hope Dies Last: Keeping Faith in Troubled Times.

This was a prolific year for activists. With a bow toward the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Time magazine styled them collectively as the “Protestor,” who was anointed Person of the Year.

What’s an activist? “Someone who does an act,” Terkel, who died in 2008, said in the interview conducted by Missy Daniel for PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (it was carried also in The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World). “In a democratic society, you’re supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate.”

Of course someone could act in a way that energizes people for the greater good or just polarizes them. An activist could defend the privileges of the already privileged or speak up for those on the margins of society. Activism could mean standing exclusively with people who look and think like you, or venturing onto different turf.

In my mind, the most creative and meaningful activism today is taking place below the social radar, in the spirited locales of faith-based community organizing. Tom Roberts, my friend and former editor at Religion News Service, occupied some of that space as a reporter while producing his insightful and indispensable book The Emerging Catholic Church: A Community’s Search for Itself, issued this past fall by Orbis. The book is primarily about the new forms of this hierarchical faith that are emerging from below, from the parishes and communities where Roberts did his remarkable reporting. On that ground he frequently crossed paths with social justice activists and followed some down their own trails.

Roberts on the Emerging Activist

In a chapter titled “Travels on the Margins,” Roberts, who is editor-at-large of the National Catholic Reporter, profiled activists such as Sarah Nolan. In her case, it was the Society of Jesus that constructed a road to social agitation. She discovered justice issues as a student at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution; after graduating she drew further links between faith and activism while helping women in El Salvador organize soy cooperatives in 2001-2002, as part of a Jesuit program. From there Nolan returned to her home in southern New Mexico and formed a regional affiliate of PICO (which stands for People Improving Communities Through Organizing), a nationwide interfaith network of congregation-based community organizations.

Now married with a small child, Nolan helps people in the region make common cause with uncommon allies—liberal Catholics with conservative evangelicals, Anglos with Latinos and African Americans, and so forth. The causes include poverty, homelessness, and—in one of the dicier tasks of solidarity—immigration.

Roberts writes:

And then there is the occasional surprise, like the rabbi at the local reform synagogue who said his biggest concern was the need to work on immigration, even though his congregation is mostly retired, white, and not from New Mexico. The rabbi explained by recalling Jewish history and its multiple exoduses. He said he viewed the immigration centers as “modern-day concentration camps.” His problem was that he didn’t know any immigrants, and that’s where Nolan came in. “There’s this desire to be in relationship with people who are directly affected by the problem so that they can not only get to know people who are going through this problem, but so they can also have a path for their theology “ [Nolan said] and apply it to the realities that people are going through.

It’s hard to tell just how many faith-based community activists are out there, because nobody seems to be counting. But PICO alone claims more than 1,000 member institutions (churches, predominantly) that, in turn, have one million members in 150 cities and 17 states.

Activists like Nolan are helping low-income people assert their legitimate rights to minimum social goods such as healthcare and housing. At the same time they’re enlarging the tent by including others, such as affluent members of congregations. They’re able to do so because all these faith traditions have theologies that demand concern for the weak and vulnerable, and because, as Terkel insisted, “Hope dies last.” …read more

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A Little to the Left

December 15, 2011 by 1 Comment

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a liberal Protestant stalwart who could spot self-righteousness a mile away—and in himself—recalled visiting his mentor Reinhold Niebuhr in 1966. Niebuhr, who had taught social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, was in poor health and spending his last years at his summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As Coffin entered the room, the great theologian smiled from his bed and said, “Ah, Bill, I heard a speech of yours the other day on the radio. You reminded me of my youth—all that humor, conscience, and demagoguery.”

That visit is recounted in Coffin’s 1977 memoir Once to Every Man. The story came to mind as the youngish bands of Occupy protestors hit the streets earlier in the fall, and again in recent weeks as police broke up their encampments in city after city. What’s next for these dauntless activists who have already introduced a new politics in the United States? What will they do with their anger, passion, and conscience? Might there be a little more humor and a tad less demagoguery?

In reflecting on these and other questions, they and the rest of us may find some wisdom in the words of Bill Coffin, who assumed the mantle of leader among left-leaning Protestants after the assassination of his friend, Martin Luther King, and who died in 2006. This year, Dartmouth College Press felicitously reissued Coffin’s 1999 book The Heart is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality. What follows are some nuggets from that slim and veracious volume.

Love and Anger …

• I like St. Augustine’s observation: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”

• But in all this talk of anger, there is a caveat to be entered. We have to hate evil, else we’re sentimental. But if we hate evil more than we love the good, we become good haters, and of those the world already has too many. However deep, our anger must always and only measure our love.

• Socrates was mistaken. It’s not the unexamined life that is not worth living; it’s the uncommitted life.

The Bible and Us …

• I read the Bible because the Bible reads me. I see myself reflected in Adam’s excuses, in Saul’s envy of David, in promise-making, promise-breaking Peter.

• [The Bible] is a signpost not a hitching post. It points beyond itself, saying, “Pay attention to God, not me.”

• It is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one.

• Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word—to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.

Might and Right …

• True patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s eternal lover’s quarrel with the entire world.

• The United States doesn’t have to lead the world; it has first to join it. Then, with greater humility, it can play a wiser leadership role.

• About the use of force I think we should be ambivalent—the dilemmas are real. All we can say for sure is that while force may be necessary, what is wrong—always wrong—is the desire to use it.

The Spiritual and the Knowable …

• Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well.

• All of us tend to hold certainty dearer than truth. We want to learn only what we already know; we want to become only what we already are.

• We forget that both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge are deeply rooted in the soil of mystery. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all. …read more

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The Inequality Debate: Channeling Adam Smith and the Bible

December 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

Ron Sider

A version of the following piece is scheduled to appear in next week’s edition of The Christian Century.

Which view of economic inequality has greater merit? The one espoused by Adam Smith, the father figure of capitalism? Or the teaching that unfolds from the Bible’s pleadings for justice and righteousness?

It’s a trick question. In fact, these two perspectives are broadly the same. Smith, like the biblical writers, was opposed to gross income inequality. For both, how people are faring relative to others in society is not simply a question of envy. It’s a matter of human dignity and social well-being.

There’s another outlook on inequality that has many adherents. Let’s call it the We Got Stuff school of thought. It says, correctly, that almost everyone in the U.S. has things not even the rich had at one time—microwaves, color televisions. And even our down-and-out have a standard of living that eludes most people in destitute nations. That’s what matters, according to this way of thinking. Widening gaps between rich and poor here in the States are beside the point.

One global spokesperson for the Smith-and-scripture position is Pope Benedict XVI. In Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”), his 2009 encyclical letter, the pope inveighed against “the scandal of glaring inequalities.” On October 24 of this year, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace highlighted the “urgent need of a true world political authority” to address those disparities within as well as between nations. Its 6,500-word document, “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority,” called for regulations to curtail the “inequalities and distortions of capitalist development.”

As for the We Got Stuff school, this summer the Heritage Foundation issued Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today? Following political scientist James Q. Wilson, Heritage senior scholars Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield declared that the poor today live better than the rich did a century ago, and they enjoy conveniences that the middle class couldn’t afford in the recent past.

Using Census Bureau data from 2005, Rector and Sheffield scanned the home of the average family living below the federal poverty line. They found that, for example, “In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave.” Also spotted were washing machines, ceiling fans, cordless phones, and coffee makers. They commented, “Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill as well as to put food on the table. ”

We don’t Live in Botswana

Rector and Sheffield are right that we shouldn’t take our society’s material progress for granted. But the trouble with this line of reasoning is that Americans today don’t live in the 1890s or another bygone era. And they generally don’t reside in the bush of Botswana or some other impoverished land, either.

As is customary for humans, Americans inhabit a particular space and time. They are embedded creatures; they live in communities and need access to the resources that will help them participate fully in those communities. This calls for some basics such as a decent-paying job, health insurance and retirement security. At present it also often means having stuff like cell phones, computers and reliable cars.

The biblical social ethic reflects this sense of particularity. The Jewish prophets and Jesus were not bowled over by the fact that the poor of their times lived large compared to the cavemen. They spoke precisely against the marginalization of economically disadvantaged people within their social contexts.

Ronald J. Sider, a theologian and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, offers a compelling analysis of this biblical tradition in Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America ( 2007). For example, in the Hebrew Scriptures the poor are cast as on the verge of “falling out of the community,” as Sider puts it. He quotes Leviticus 25:35-36: “If members of your community become poor in that their power slips with you, you shall make them strong … that they may live with you.” That’s Sider’s emphasis on “with you,” which underscores the inescapably relative quality of economic wellness..

Lest a Few Oppress the Many

Behind this ethos is a levelheaded account of human nature. “Precisely because of what scripture tells us about sin and power, biblical people must always oppose great extremes of power,” Sider writes. “In a fallen world, powerful people will almost always take advantage of weak neighbors. And money, especially in a market economy, is power. Therefore, great extremes of poverty and wealth threaten justice and democracy.”

In this connection Sider invokes John Calvin, who, in commenting on the biblical call for debt forgiveness every seven years (during the “sabbatical year”), wrote:

In as much as God had given them the use of the franchise, the best way to preserve their liberty was by maintaining a condition of rough equality [mediocrem statum], lest a few persons of immense wealth oppress the general body. Since, therefore, the rich if they had been permitted constantly to increase their wealth, would have tyrannized over the rest, God put a restraint on immoderate power by means of this law.

Or we could take it instead from Adam Smith and his doctrine of “necessaries.” As Smith explains in The Wealth of Nations, these human needs include not just the rudimentary supports of life but “whatever the customs of the country render it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without.” Smith’s examples are linen shirts and leather shoes. While ancient Greeks and Romans could live comfortably without them, custom has rendered each “a necessary of life in England,” he wrote in 1776. “A creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty….”

Notice that neither Smith nor the Bible argues against the existence of any economic inequality. That’s life, this side of eternity. What they warn against are gaping divides in which people grapple to keep from “falling out of community.” Millions of Americans—the unemployed, the working poor, the uninsured and many others—have been falling for quite some time. That some of them may be doing so with cordless phones in their hands is not much consolation. …read more

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Body and Soul, in the Checkout Line

December 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

The latest anti-consumerist campaign

Last week, on the second day of Advent, a message arrived in my inbox from the headmaster of the Catholic prep school that my daughter attends. It was addressed to parents—a reminder, appropriately, of the importance of accenting the spiritual and the liturgical during a season otherwise given to shopping. But what reeled me in was the headmaster’s instant acknowledgment that complaining about the commercialization of Christmas is “a cliché.” It’s hard to do that, he admitted, without seeming “preachy or strident.”

A year ago, I encountered a similar self-consciousness in a discussion circle made up of graduate students at Boston College. Roughly a dozen of them turn out once a month for a spirited student-led conversation about faith and society. Last year, four days after Black Friday and one day after Cyber Monday, they came together at the graduate student union building to consider consumerism.

Squeezing into billowy sofas and chairs around a coffee table blanketed with pizza boxes, the students listened as one of their own, a young man sporting several earrings, made an ambiguous statement. “Advent is about waiting for a gift to come rather than seeking [acquisition] on Cyber Monday,” he said at the start of his presentation, adding—“although there were some sweet DVD deals yesterday.” Members of the circle, helping themselves to portions of pizza with seemingly every known topping, chuckled at the intended irony.

Many thoughtful people feel a need to almost apologize or assume a somewhat ironic pose when warning of material excess, especially at Christmas time. This is not just understandable. It’s refreshing, given how the discussion of consumerism seems to perennially devolve into handwringing and dour pontification. The headmaster and the grad students realize that people are tuning out the crankier critiques of consumerism. And that’s partly because people are consumers, although that’s not all they are. Most of us hunt for values, in both the retail and moral senses of that word.

The Gnostic Temptation

Theologically speaking, the human person is a composite of body and soul—of the material and the spiritual. An alternative theology is encapsulated in Gnosticism, which sees the material world, instead, as evil or illusory; only the spiritual universe is real. Hence, the Gnostics, who proliferated in the first few centuries after Christ, believed that Jesus was somehow a purely incorporeal being. The Word was never made flesh.

Today, much anti-consumerist rhetoric seems to slouch toward Gnosticism. This school of mysticism has its secular adherents: Many of them apparently congregate around AdBusters, a Canadian-based anti-consumerist movement founded in 1989. This year, the organization is running a campaign, #OccupyXmas, in which activists hold Santa sit-ins at shopping malls and bid customers to scissor their credit cards. Some anti-consumerists are reportedly filling up carts with items and then leaving them at the checkout line.

“Christmas has been hijacked for us,” Adbusters magazine editor Kalle Lasn recently told the Toronto Star, explaining the call for such antics. “It’s become this ugly, soulless, consumer fest.” #OccupyXmas was launched on Black Friday this year, on the magazine’s 20th annual Buy Nothing Day.

If the material world is to be deeply distrusted, then all this makes undeniable sense. And it becomes useless to ask questions like how to better integrate our bodies and souls, our buying and our being—because the immaterial is all that counts. But on some level, these are the questions many people ask. How do I consume without being consumed by the desire for more stuff? What sorts of things bring real value into my life?

A Consumerist Test

One of the best ethical guides through the consumer jungle was and remains John Kavanaugh’s 1981 classic Following Christ in a Consumer Society (updated in 1991). Kavanaugh, a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and columnist for America magazine, is no apologist of consumerism. He worries, rightly, that consumerist values have undercut other values of life, such as family, friendship, intimacy, nature, simplicity, and service to others.

“If we have to spend more time working, more time buying, more time relating to our products, that’s good for capitalism, but it’s not necessarily good for the quality of our relationships,” he told me a few years ago.

All the same, Kavanaugh echoes the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding that material goods are, well, good. Especially when they’re used thoughtfully and with moral purpose. With that in mind, Kavanaugh says the real test of a consumer acquisition is whether it deepens our relationships. For example, a Wii in the living room or a swimming pool in the back yard can enhance human life by drawing together families and neighbors.

Here we have a non-dualistic view of spirit and matter, and it’s of a piece with the distinctive theology of the Christmas season: the Incarnation. By that doctrinal light, Jesus was not, as the Gnostics would have it, a discarnate being.

William S. Stafford puts it nicely in an article running in the current issue of Sewanee Theological Review, titled “Advent’s Mad Rush and the One Thing Needful.” Stafford, an Episcopal priest, based the article on a sermon he delivered two Advents ago, in which he declared: “We are here to await the coming of a person in whom material concreteness and divine mystery are one and the same.” Sounds like a pretty good description of human as well as divine nature. …read more

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On Being Respond-able

November 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Gratitude is a feeling, but even more, it’s a response. That’s how the late William Sloane Coffin limned it in an interview he gave to my friend and colleague Bob Abernethy—adapted as an essay for our 2007 book The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World. Here’s a portion of those remarks.

I’m convinced that gratitude is the most important religious emotion. Duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt. When you’re grateful for the undeserved beauty of a cloudless sky, you’re praying. You’re saying, “Thank you, Lord,” praying all the time about the beauty of nature, the beauty of the deeds some people do. In World War II, occasionally a soldier fell on a grenade there was no time to throw back. Well, you could be absolutely appalled by their deaths, but you could be struck by the beauty of selfless courage.

I feel grateful all the time, so my prayers of thanksgiving are very full. I don’t tell God what to do, but thinking about other people and trying to think what God would think about them is a way of directing my thoughts to other people. I pray for world peace, but not, “Grant us peace in our time, O Lord.” God must say, “Oh, come off it. What are you going to do for peace, for heaven’s sake?”

A lot of people think their prayers aren’t answered. They are answered; the answer is no, and they haven’t heard it. I don’t think you have to be self-conscious about your prayer life. You can just live in wonder and gratitude and with a sense of wanting to respond—responsible means “respond-able,” able to respond. If you’re able to respond to the beauty of nature, you’ll be an environmentalist. If you’re able to respond to human beings’ basic right to peace, you’ll be a peacenik. It’s a matter of being full of wonder, thanksgiving, and praying for strength to respond to all the wonder and beauty there is in human life.

Bob Abernethy’s original PBS interview with Coffin can be read in full here. …read more

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Return of the Meek and the Militant

November 17, 2011 by 2 Comments

Publication of Interfaith Worker Justice

Last week, Ohio’s public employee unions were resurrected by the voters, who turned back a state law that had torpedoed collective bargaining rights for members of those unions. There and in many other states, public sector unions have been glaringly under pressure, so much so that it’s easy to forget about their counterparts in the private sector—which are faring much worse. More than a third of public employees in the United States are still unionized, but the figure in the private sector is now running, or limping, at barely seven percent. That marginal share is roughly equal to the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Hindus, or who believe that Elvis is still alive, according to unrelated polling.

The seven-percent figure stands out for a different reason, in the mind of writer and historian Kimball Baker. It is identical to the percentage of private-sector workers who belonged to unions when a doughty group of men began their work in the early 1930s. These were the so-called labor priests—Catholic leaders who gave hope to downtrodden workers during the Great Depression.

“They played a big part in getting [the unionized segment] up to 35 percent in the 1950s and afterward,” Baker, a Presbyterian, told me recently, suggesting that it may be possible for pro-labor activists today to usher in another upsurge of unionism. That may be pure speculation on his part, but far more certain is the history he spotlights in Go to the Worker: America’s Labor Apostles—a history that is recurring now.

Priests with names like Hayes and Carey entered the work lives of a largely immigrant population, as Baker shows in his valuable book published last year by Marquette University Press. They walked with strikers on picket lines and opened “labor schools,” adult education programs in parishes, high schools and colleges that taught the nuts and bolts of collective bargaining as well as the highpoints of Catholic social teaching.

In the world according to the labor priests, taking part in unions and collective bargaining was not simply an exercise of individual rights. It was an act of solidarity, a way for workers to deepen their spiritual lives and give witness to the “mystical body of Christ,” a phrase that appears frequently in Baker’s profiles of leading labor “apostles” (including a few lay men and women from that era).

One of the below-radar trends in religion and politics over the past decade has been the decisive return of such labor “apostles.” Notably, few of them will be found in the Catholic hierarchy, which assembled in Baltimore this week with scarcely anything to say about such epoch challenges as income inequality. (See Francis X. Doyle’s November 14 op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun titled “For U.S. bishops, economic justice isn’t on the agenda.”)

Like the old ones, the new labor disciples act locally. They preach in pulpits, rally seminarians, help organize low-wage workers, and sign up for pro-union campaigns (including the recent mobilizations on behalf of public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states). Unlike the old labor priests, the new activists are a diverse congregation. They draw from among Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims, from the ranks of pastors, theologians, and people in the pews. The nerve center of the new religion-labor movement is Interfaith Worker Justice, a 15-year-old national organization based in Chicago with 70 spirited local affiliates nationwide.

The simple reason for this revival is that the debate over labor has returned to first principles: the right of unions to exist as a countervailing force in society. Many people of faith are choosing existence.

The Fall and Rise

In some pointed ways, religion and labor are a curious match. Christians, for example, sit for sermons about how the meek shall be blessed. Union members strike intimidating poses against workers who cross picket lines. But the two communities have overlapping social values, touching on the dignity of human beings and the work they do.

Religion and labor also have a history together. At times it has been a conflicted one.

The alliance of the past, symbolized by the Catholic labor schools, began to taper off in the 1950s, largely due to success. With the great industrial organizing campaigns behind them, there was simply less for religion and labor to do as a coalition. They went separate ways. Unions turned inward to build their institutions; religious activists gravitated toward new arenas of social action, notably civil rights and community organizing.

There was a tapering off but also a falling out. During the 1960s the Vietnam War was a harbinger of clashes to come, between mainstream labor’s hard-hat foreign policy and the anti-anti-communism of many liberal religious leaders. By the 1980s, churches and unions split further, over Central America.

The prospects of renewed friendship between religion and labor appeared with the passing of the Cold War. An early signal was the 1988-1989 Pittston Coal strike, which galvanized religious leaders nationwide, and which ended with the Virginia mining company withdrawing most of its draconian demands.

In 1996, Kim Bobo, a former anti-hunger activist who was raised a fundamentalist in Ohio, founded Interfaith Worker Justice with $5,000 left to her in her grandmother’s will. Owing largely to this growing network, the religion-labor movement today is arguably deeper and wider than it has ever been in the United States.

Though chiefly an activist organization, Interfaith Worker Justice has also helped renew theological conversations about human work and collective action, publishing a plethora of materials such as homily aids, liturgical resources, and papers and books. This is trickier than it may seem, in a religiously diverse movement.

But the group manages to occupy the common theological ground. “As God worked to create the world, our religious traditions value those who do the world’s work,” it says in a statement of purpose, adding—”We honor our Creator by seeking to assure that laborers, particularly low-wage workers, are able to live decent lives as a product of their labor.” It is left to be seen if any social alliance today will be able to bring about the conditions that do such honor to the divine. …read more

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Quantifying the Unquantifiable

November 10, 2011 by 4 Comments

Diane Ravitch

In Joseph Conrad’s 1903 classic Heart of Darkness, there’s a scene where a physician, “an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat,” measures the skull of the main character, who is embarking on a journey to Africa. The doctor explains that he always does this, out of scientific interest, when examining someone bound for the Dark Continent. Asked if he repeats the head measuring after travelers return, the physician smiles cryptically. “Oh, I never see them,” he says, and adds, “Moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.”

Here was a novelist’s way of exposing the Western values system and its fixation on measurement and quantification. The scene came to mind recently as yet another education reform group issued yet another report lauding the ever-expanding use of standardized tests in American schools. Specifically, the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality highlighted the trend toward evaluating teachers on the basis of “objective evidence.” By which the Council meant student scores collected from the one-size-fits-all tests.

The Obama administration is using the federal purse to reward school systems that tow this line. The administration’s Race to the Top program is a tribute to this notion that understanding a teacher’s gifts or a student’s insights is pretty much a matter of doing the numbers. But is such thinking akin to the antics of Conrad’s head-measuring physician, who made a habit of quantifying the unquantifiable?

Diane Ravitch would say so. She served as an assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, and her most recent book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System. The title evokes Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which ripped apart a political presumption of her time—“urban renewal.”

Ravitch is not opposed to testing as such. The education historian is against high-stakes testing, allowing scores to determine, for example, whether to fire a teacher or even shutter a school. She’s an unlikely skeptic in that regard, having once trumpeted, from her federal post and then from the conservative Hoover Institution, the very reform measures (including charter schools) she now deplores. Ravitch explains that evidence attesting to the benefits of these measures never materialized, and there’s mounting evidence that the reforms are distorting educational priorities.

As she tells it, education policy makers took a wrong turn when they started listening to, of all people, economists. Practitioners of the dismal science are behind the latest research fad, “value-added assessment,” which holds that teacher quality can be measured by test-score gains. The operative assumption is that a teacher’s worth “can be quantified, and those who do the quantification need never enter a classroom or think about how children learn,” Ravitch comments.

A Belief System Unto Itself

To be fair, complaining about economists who find answers in hard data is a bit like complaining about preachers who seek guidance in the Bible. That’s what they do. For most economists today, ultimate value is discerned largely through statistical models. As with all science, truth is reducible to fact. In the hands of many, this becomes a belief system unto itself.

There are other ways of knowing, though. Usually contrasted with the scientific method is the religious path to understanding, which draws on the symbols and imagery of faith as well as on the experience of the sacred. But truth can be gleaned also from poetry, from moral discourse, from all the disciplines of the liberal arts. In education there are rafts of research, storehouses of insight into such matters as how children learn and how teachers get through to them. Little of this lends to simple quantification.

The problem is not with economists and their econometrics. It’s with the incredible notion that all we’ve learned about masterly teaching, how to inspire and illuminate—and much that is yet to be learned—are of little consequence, now that there’s “value-added assessment.” Large swaths of the education policy establishment today appear to be in thrall to this belief.

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the author tells of the best teacher she ever had, Mrs. Ruby Ratliff, who taught English to seniors at Ravitch’s high school in Houston a half-century ago. Mrs. Ratliff exposed students to the great writers of the English language. Through the stories and verses, she also imparted lessons about character and discipline that spoke to young minds and hearts. The teacher had her students write long essays, and used her red pen freely.

I believe Mrs. Ratliff was a great teacher, but I don’t think she would have been considered “great” if she had been judged by the kind of hard data that is used now. How would the experts have measured what we learned? We never took a multiple-choice test. We wrote essays and took written tests in which we had to explain our answers, not check a box or fill in a bubble.

Mrs. Ratcliff would perhaps earn little credit from evaluators today, because her students would learn lessons that are hard to quantify—and because, as Conrad styled it, “the change takes place inside, you know.” …read more

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Remembering the Godmother of American Cities

November 3, 2011 by 1 Comment

Jane Jacobs, 1961

During the 1950s and 1960s, urban planners had a dream: to remake cities in the image of suburbs. They strove to bring about smoother traffic flow with the construction of urban superhighways, less population density with the dismantling of old neighborhoods, and a strict separation of commercial and residential spaces (read: shopping malls and bedroom communities). The preferred method of effecting these changes was bulldozing.

Places like the West End of Boston, a working-class community of Italians and Jews, were razed and replaced by freeways or, in this case, superblocks of high-rise residential towers and barren, concrete plazas. In Boston, after demolition of the West End in 1958–59, city planners contemplated, with no more affection, another crowded district on their turf—the North End. In New York, plans were readied for the decimation of Lower Manhattan, to clear way for a 10-lane expressway.

When did America begin to turn a fresh eye toward neighborhoods like the North End and New York’s Greenwich Village? This isn’t anyone’s guess. In hindsight, the reassessment began 50 years ago, when a little-known writer who was raising three children in Greenwich Village brought forth a magisterial work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The 1961 book by Jane Jacobs was tantamount to a precision bombing of city planning agencies nationwide, as Jacobs laid unflinching siege to the then-reigning wisdom that large swaths of cities needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

City planners abhorred urban density, associating it with congestion and unhealthy conditions; Jacobs believed it was essential, partly because more people meant more “eyes on the street,” making all feel safer. She liked to see a mingling of functions—shopping, living, working, leisure—believing diversity made cities come alive. In that first book of hers, she pronounced Boston’s North End, with its cheek-by-jowl dwellings and shops, and sidewalks full of chatter, “the healthiest neighborhood in the city.”

Taking Down Moses

Jacobs died in 2006 at age 89. Her story is a cautionary tale against the tendency to theologize notions that are, at best, mere assumptions. Urban policy makers had turned ideas and practices—such as getting people off the streets for the sake of traffic flow—into solemn doctrines. The chief evangelist of this belief system was Jacobs’s nemesis, Robert Moses, the premier builder of his time and probably any time in American history.

As an urban activist, Jacobs had three epoch showdowns with Moses, beginning in 1958 when she rallied her West Village neighbors against his plan to run a four-lane highway through the middle of Washington Square Park, and ending in 1969. The last and most hair-raising of these projects was what Moses called the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the 10-lane superhighway that was set to pierce through Little Italy, Chinatown, the Bowery, and the Lower East Side, and completely destroy a district then known vaguely as the area south of Houston Street, now the thriving arts and shopping district Soho. The once-invincible Moses lost each of those battles.

Today, Jacobs is venerated widely as the godmother of urban America, the one who fought off the suburbanization of the city. In New York, her legacy is there to see. Just listing the would-have-been Moses projects—the highway through Washington Square Park, the razing of the West Village (yet another struggle), the dismembering of Lower Manhattan—takes the breath away. In each instance, Jacobs was the main stopper.

And many a neighborhood beyond Manhattan that had an appointment with the wrecking crew was also spared, owing in part to Jacobs. The protracted, grassroots campaign against the Lower Manhattan Expressway helped ignite a nationwide anti-freeway movement that frustrated similar designs in, among other places, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Memphis, New Orleans, Seattle, and San Francisco, as Anthony Flint documents in his 2009 book Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City.

Faith in the City

Jacobs eventually took up broader questions of ethics and morality, mostly in her later writings on economics and the environment. But her insights were never as profound as when she was simply noticing the ways in which apartment dwellers, store owners, truck drivers, schoolchildren, and others interacted on city streets—scenes related in Death and Life as part of “an intricate sidewalk ballet.” Like some of the greatest philosophers and theologians—Aristotle and Aquinas, namely—Jacobs reasoned inductively, drawing her conclusions about the world not from abstract notions but from the data of experience and observation. The prominent sociologist William H. Whyte once remarked that her research apparatus consisted of “the eye and the heart.”

A lapsed Presbyterian who forged close conversational ties with theologians at Boston College, Jacobs put her faith in humans and local communities. If she espoused any doctrine, it was their ability to forge vitality out of their spontaneous everyday interplay.

Most of it is utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need (Death and Life, p. 56, Vintage Books Edition).

Such faith made it possible for Jane Jacobs to attack the ersatz theologies of her time, with respect to urban policy, and to become the mom who saved Manhattan. …read more

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