The Exceptional American

February 9, 2012 by 3 Comments

In the United States, we the people cling to the idea that cherished values such as freedom and opportunity are somehow distinctively American. The accidental philosopher Yogi Berra expressed this sentiment beautifully in the late 1950s when he heard that the mayor of Dublin (as in Ireland, not Ohio) was Jewish. “Only in America!” he declared.

In many ways the role that religious faith plays in American politics is exceptional too. Unlike their counterparts in most Western democracies, American presidents continue to routinely invoke the deity in their addresses to the nation. Of course leaders of theocracies do the same, but the U.S. presidential invokers of faith also preside over a government that is religiously neutral. That is a rare juxtaposition.

In the American tradition, though, there’s an exception within the exceptionalism on this count. If you look at religiously tinged oratory by presidents at key times in our history, you’ll see that nearly all of them have tried, subtly or unsubtly, to cast their causes in the singular light of divine favor. All except, notably, Abraham Lincoln.

Instead of assuming the God-is-on-our-side posture, Lincoln proclaims in his Second Inaugural Address near the end of the Civil War, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Instead of presuming to know the whole truth about the crisis at hand, Lincoln lays claim only to the partial truth that “God gives us to see …”

Lincoln is different.

God Talkers in Chief

I recently had occasion to dig through a well-chosen collection of ten major presidential speeches projecting religious themes, courtesy of Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and Boston College Magazine (which asked me to report on a student-led “God Talk” seminar sponsored by the center). The Boisi staff, including associate director Erik Owens and doctoral candidate in political science Brenna Strauss, selected the items, which are available here.

One set of those texts relates to the theme of “National Crisis and War” and features oratory by FDR, Reagan, Eisenhower, and George W. Bush in addition to Lincoln.

In one entry, Roosevelt delivers a radio message from the White House to a nation still somewhat unalarmed by the Nazi threat. It’s May 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor. He warns that the Nazis worship no god other than Hitler and that our freedom of worship is at stake: “What place has religion which preaches the dignity of the human being, of the majesty of the human soul, in a world where moral standards are measured by treachery and bribery and Fifth Columnists? Will our children, too, wander off, goose-stepping in search of new gods?”

Similarly, primal religious emotions are painted on our struggles with foes in other commander-in-chief messages. These include Eisenhower’s First Inaugural Address in 1953 (he sees “the watchfulness of a Divine Providence” over America at the height of the Cold War), Reagan’s 1983 “Evil Empire” speech and Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, which introduced “Axis of Evil” into the lexicon.

Lincoln’s Ineffable God

And then there’s Lincoln, who was born 203 years ago on February 12. He’s the warrior-in-chief against the Confederacy, but there’s no Divine Providence watching preferentially over the Union, in his Second Inaugural (March 4, 1865), which is, as many have described, theologically intense. There’s no casting of political nets around God as Lincoln speaks of North and South:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Lincoln holds out the possibility that North and South alike might continue to pay, and rightly so, for America’s original sin—slavery.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

He concludes:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln’s 703-word Second Inaugural is by far the oldest item in Boisi’s “National Crisis and War” packet, and yet, it’s the most modern in its outlook. Theologically, it is freighted with uncertainty, ambiguity, and a sense of moral tragedy (even our deepest convictions cannot capture the truth), but as he probes the divine nature with soberness and humility, Lincoln arrives at a clear-eyed affirmation of religious faith and American purpose. Yes, Lincoln is different. Lincoln is now. …read more

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When So Little is at Stake

February 2, 2012 by 10 Comments

Recalling those who had reasons to resent, and didn't.

There’s no doubt that the cultural and ideological fissures in American politics have become more apparent in recent years with the election of Barack Obama, the rise of the Tea Party, and the pushback from Occupy Wall Street. Still, it’s tempting at times to look at our political leaders and say what is often said of academia—that the battles are so vicious because so little is at stake.

The Florida primary showcased a particularly nasty fight between two politicians who have little that separates them in policy substance: Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. They resent and resemble each other. For instance, both men supported health insurance mandates before they didn’t. And both of course have serious gripes with Obama (who, incidentally, adopted the originally Republican idea of insurance mandates as part of his healthcare reform package).

When aiming at Obama, the Romney-Gingrich fusillades can seem strangely out of proportion even to their obvious differences with him.

Take Romney’s claim that Obama wants to “turn America into a European-style entitlement society,” while he, Romney, would “ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.” The choice in November, if Romney finally carries the GOP flag, would actually be between two politicians who desperately want to position themselves as “reasonable centrists” in the general election, as John Harwood of the New York Times has pointed out. Put another way, the election would pit a Republican in favor of keeping the Bush tax cuts against a Democrat who would return to Clinton-era tax rates. That adds up to a difference of roughly four percentage points in the top marginal rate. It’s not what separates a socialist strongman from a friend of the free.

Gingrich’s clashes with Obama might be more profound ideologically. But could these possibly justify his assertion that he, Gingrich, honors the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence while Obama supports neither? As Speaker of the House during the ’90s, Gingrich did more than any other political figure to envenom the public discourse. He helped make it safe for politicians to habitually attack the decency and good faith of their adversaries.

No small amount of that incendiary rhetoric has rubbed off on the left. Many liberals have lapsed into the habit of condemning Republican “lies.” Very often, these alleged prevarications are really just matters of opinion, like the GOP claim that the rich already pay too much in taxes. To call them lies is itself a distortion.

When Things were Rotten

Plainly, there’s a lot to fight over in 2012. But there was far more at stake a half-century ago when Martin Luther King and the civil rights marchers, walkers, and sitters showed another way of relating to the opposition. You might say they had some serious differences with the segregationists. They were living in what was, for African Americans, a state of terror in the Deep South. But they steered a way to mutual understanding even as they took to the streets.

During the movement’s early years, King went to such lengths as to answer his hate mail respectfully—thanking his correspondents for writing, and proceeding to reasonably state his differences with these unreasonable points of view. (There was less time for that as the freedom campaigns intensified and the hate writers became more prolific.) During the few times he lost his cool with a segregationist or, some years later, with a supporter of the Vietnam War, King would reproach himself for hours, as his biographers (including Stephen Oates) have described. And then he’d pick up a phone and apologize.

Unlike today when political dialogue is often clogged with conversation stoppers like “lies” and “dishonesty,” King and his supporters found ways to keep the conversation going. They engaged in rational argument, as King did in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (in which he asked his white-clergy critics to forgive him “if I have said anything that overstates the truth,” and begged God to forgive him if he had understated the truth). He tried to open channels of discussion because of his belief that hearts could change, but also because, as a trained theologian, he could “see that some truth, however minuscule … may exist in quite opposite ideas and viewpoints,” as the social ethicist Rufus Burrow Jr. has noted.

In other words, everyone has a piece of the truth—not the most likely message of a Super PAC ad.

Yes, King denounced and confronted: history told him that oppressed people seldom gain their freedom by dropping hints. But he and his fellow campaigners made it clear enough that the prize they eyed was not just their own freedom. It was friendship and community with white America, what King often referred to, in rich theological tones, as “the beloved community.”

During this Black History Month, it’s worth recalling how civil rights activists often spoke large-heartedly about people who set off bombs in their churches or tacitly condoned the terror. It shouldn’t be too hard to practice a similar forbearance today with political rivals who would like to raise (or lower) taxes by a few percentage points. …read more

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Inspecting the “Anti-Religious Bigotry of Elites”

January 26, 2012 by 3 Comments

Richard Dawkins: "Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

It’s easy to pick apart claims by some presidential contenders that America is facing an assault from within by adamant secularists, by the elite purveyors of “anti-religious bigotry,” as Newt Gingrich pronounced in his victory speech after the South Carolina primary.

The accusation is often aimed at President Obama, who is, according to former contender Rick Perry, waging a “war on religion,” and who is, according to cooler heads, a theologically serious and sober Protestant. And let’s not overlook a supremely elite institution: the 538-member U.S. Congress, in which there is, by most tallies, one person who goes so far as to label himself a nonbeliever. He is Democratic California representative Pete Stark.

But it’s also worth noting that anti-religious elites do exist and their eschewal of all things spiritual may run deeper than even Gingrich suggested.

One of the most unequivocal among them is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He not only constantly upbraids the faithful but also serves up an entertainingly bleak and nihilistic view of human existence and the cosmos. Dawkins writes that there is, at bottom, in the universe, “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” He forgot to say, Have a nice day!

As a New Yorker by birth and attitude, I feel more at peace with Woody Allen’s old quip that there is in fact meaning in the universe—except for certain parts of New Jersey. (And it was a mere quip. Allen the film director would seem to drift more toward Dawkins’s almost cartoonish view of the cosmic condition.)

Beyond Matter and Motion

The Gingrich forces would be right if all they were saying is that there’s a recently influential cadre of hard-core atheists, who have turned out some lively, readable books like The God Delusion (Dawkins), The End of Faith (Sam Harris), and God is Not Great (by the late great Christopher Hitchens). There does seem to be a brassy challenge to religion and theology issuing from these precincts. The result in recent years has been, for the first time in a long while in the United States, a real debate about faith. Not necessarily about religious conservatives or radical Islam or this or that religious movement, but about faith as such—whether there’s a God, whether there’s a transcendent reality, whether there’s anything in the universe besides matter and motion.

Still, the “New Atheists,” as Dawkins and the gang are dubbed, have been more provocative than they’ve been proliferative.

Many casual observers point to the growing numbers of Americans who don’t identify with any faith tradition; these Americans now comprise about 16 percent of the adult population, according to the most authoritative surveys. But a little over a third of these people affirm that they’re religious even though they’re religiously unaffiliated, and most of the others could be classified as “spiritual but not religious.” Most say they pray regularly or from time to time, as reported in studies such as the Pew Forum’s 2010 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. These aren’t the shock troops of the New Atheism.

What’s left is a trifling four percent of Americans who see themselves as atheists or agnostics, according to Pew. Maybe they’re the elites who are allegedly subverting our culture, purging religion from public schools and cracking down on religious freedom. But my guess is that not even most of these people would belong to the ranks of religion haters. Besides, the anti-secular warriors are firing mostly in other directions, at Obama and the Democrats, at the schoolteachers and journalists, and others. There are multitudes of believers in all of those directions.

Popular Reruns

Gingrich and others have some real grievances.

They have an argument to make about public school policies that at times go overboard in limiting religious expression. They can point to federal edicts like the Obama administration’s recent move to insist that Catholic colleges, for example, include free contraception services in their healthcare plans for employees. These, however, aren’t skirmishes in the final battle between good and evil. These involve legitimate questions about how to negotiate lines between church and state, between faith and society, between personal conscience and public policy.

Most people know this, but there’s an appreciative audience for the depictions of “war on religion” and “the growing anti-religious bigotry of elites.” We could expect to see those cartoons replayed for much of the presidential primary season. …read more

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The Mormon Difference, and Romney’s Other Church

January 21, 2012 by 2 Comments

Thomas Jefferson once vowed that he would never “bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.” During this election season, pollsters have repeatedly inquired into the religious opinions of voters, especially evangelical ones, to find out just how many of them are genuflecting specifically at the altar of intolerance toward Mormons, who include in their fold the Republican presidential frontrunner. The polling and analyses could use a little redemption.

The pivotal question in those surveys is whether Mormons should be considered Christians. And the casual assumption, among too many pollsters and pundits, has been that people who say “no” are probably disposed against Mormonism as well as a former Mormon bishop named Mitt Romney. (In the Mormon Church, a bishop is the leader of a local congregation.)

The approach undoubtedly ferrets out some bigots, but it’s a crude device. I’m not sure what I’d say if I were rung up for such a survey. In my mind I’d probably start enumerating the breaking points between Mormon and Christian theologies. But my answer would be off the subject of who I think is qualified to lead the United States.

This question of whether Mormonism is Christian or a different religion really needs to be spun off from the question of religious intolerance.

Bill Tammeus, in his always perceptive Faith Matters blog, spoke wisely when he wrote last week, referring to the Mormon/Christian matter: “I suspect there will always be this kind of divide about Mormonism in America. What there should not be is fear of and prejudice against Mormons because of their religious beliefs—even if a majority of Americans would describe some of those beliefs as unbelievable.”

Tammeus was commenting on the latest survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that one-third of all American adults don’t look upon their Mormon neighbors as Christians, and another 17 percent aren’t sure if they’re Christians. My guess is that the ranks of the religiously intolerant are thinner than that. And, as other polls have indicated, scarcely few of those adults would be so theologically vigilant as to slight the Mormon Romney in a matchup with the Protestant Christian Barack Obama.

The Theological Divide

One theological perspective often described as a deal-breaker between Mormonism and Christianity has to do with God and Jesus. Mormons do not consider Jesus to partake in the same being as God; Jesus is seen as physically separate from the Godhead. In other words, Mormonism doesn’t really uphold the Christian Trinity, the “Three in One.”

As a Christian who would prefer to see a tad more daylight between God and Christ, in popular faith discourse if not theological commentaries, I wouldn’t be inclined to enlist in a jihad against Mormonism on this point of difference. Still, it is an essential difference that could lead someone without a bigoted bone in his body to conclude that Mormonism isn’t Christian.

Then there’s the lesser cosmic distance that Mormons place between God and humans. According to authoritative accounts of the Mormon faith, the divine and the human are of the same species. God is himself a flesh-and-blood man with a wife in heaven. (Jesus was his literal son.) Many Christian scholars, liberal and conservative, cannot square this doctrine with their sense of the chasm between the Creator and the creature.

True, the Mormon view could make it harder to contemplate the utter transcendence of God, the One who is beyond our ken, beyond human grasp. Then again, a lot of Christians, too, don’t seem to fully appreciate the Otherness and ineffability of God. I’m thinking, for example, of Christians who speak as though they know with certainty what God thinks about Obama-care, and what God had for lunch today. They and others would appear to be worshiping the Most Effable One.

What does all this say about Mormons as citizens and contributors to the general good? Nothing I could think of. In a Jeffersonian spirit, I’d wish the questions about Mormon theology weren’t even surfacing in the public square (or, to be specific, in the context of one candidate’s qualifications). But they are. See the New York Times article this past Sunday, “The Theological Differences Behind Evangelical Unease With Romney.”

In the past few days, with the South Carolina primary upon us, attention has turned from Romney’s Mormon faith to another church in which he is an active communicant. It is the Church of the One Percent, which holds, among its many influential doctrines, that fabulously wealthy people like him deserve to pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.

Now that is a belief worthy of intense theological inquiry in the public square. …read more

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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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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

Filed Under: Economics, Politics, Poverty, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,

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

Filed Under: Economics, Politics, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Speaking of the Devil

October 6, 2011 by 3 Comments
Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada"

Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada"

Most people would agree that a political conversation is probably skidding downhill when one participant accuses another of channeling demons. One person who would beg to differ is the political firebrand Ann Coulter, who lives pretty far down that hill and whose latest book is Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.

According to her, liberals and Democrats are literally demonic because they foster a “mob mentality,” which they’ve done since the civil rights movement— “the first mob,” Coulter calls it. Left-leaning activists including environmentalists and unionists are the principal horn-wearers in this book. They are cast as both demonically possessed and as the evil spirits themselves—which raises the metaphysical conundrum of demons possessed by demons.

Of course Coulter is hardly the first to see the Prince of Darkness behind causes unpalatable to her. Many opponents of civil rights conducted a brisk trade in such imagery during the 1960s, and still do—if the deluge of Google results for “Martin Lucifer King” is any guide. Christian antinuclear protesters have proclaimed a mission to “expel the demons” from those who countenance the stockpiling of such weapons.

I’d be happy to leave Satan out of any and all political discussions. But now comes a different tack on the subject by one of my favorite scholars of antiquity, Luke Timothy Johnson, whose probing article in the October 7 edition of Commonweal magazine is titled “Powers and Principalities: The Devil is No Joke.”

Johnson points to a general inclination among reasonable people to see the Devil as an amusing topic—rendered as the man in red tights, for instance, or Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. In contrast, he makes an authoritative case that the New Testament writers and early Christian theologians, not to mention the Greco-Roman world and Jewish thinkers, used the language of demons and evil spirits fluently. And they did so in all seriousness.

A professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, he asks: “Is it possible, then, that the New Testament’s language about the demonic is true in ways that are important for us to relearn? Does the language say what needs saying in a way no other language can?”

Johnson argues soundly that in our time the language of social science has proved inadequate to the task of explaining such unspeakable evil as the Holocaust and the Cambodian killing fields. For such behavior, he writes, “It is important to be able to speak of the Devil.”

A Call for Reticence

Perhaps, but Johnson is quick to acknowledge the downside. He grants that demon language has a checkered history of “misapplication, overextension, and trivialization,” notably among Christians (as evidenced in the polemics against Jews, heretics, and many others). People of faith should exercise “reticence and linguistic discipline” as they seek to rehabilitate Devil talk, he advises.

At the same time he sees ample signs of demonic pull—for example, in the “systems of addiction” that enslave people and destroy families. In addition, Johnson (whose most recent book is Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity) applauds the liberation theologians for speaking of the Evil One when critiquing structures of oppression.

Linguistic purists may shudder at the terms employed in such critical analyses. But racism, sexism, ageism, and homophobia are real, and their capacity to damage and destroy, even as they corrupt those who practice them, is powerful indeed…. The act of liberation begins with naming such systems for what they are: the work of powers and principalities—the Devil’s work—intended to hurt God by harming humans.

Johnson’s cautions and caveats are welcomed, but there’s still cause for wariness. He might see a huge difference between demonizing an oppressive social system (which can be problematic enough), and demonizing one’s political opponents (as Coulter does with aplomb). Unfortunately the distinction can be a quick casualty in the ideological crossfire.

What might help is the sensibility of St. Augustine. The theologian and philosopher understood evil, which is why he believed the use of deadly force against an aggressor could be (in theory) morally justified. But he also wrestled with his internal demons and wrote about them more than 1600 years ago in his Confessions, the first and most celebrated spiritual autobiography.

One lesson from Augustine is that no one should ever fight evil as though it were completely outside of himself or herself. Or, to paraphrase a modern-day conservationist slogan: We have seen the Devil, and he is, all too frequently, us. …read more

Filed Under: Politics, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,
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