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

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

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

Filed Under: Culture, Poverty, Race, TheoPol Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,

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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“The Beloved Community”: A Pulse Check

September 29, 2011 by 8 Comments

In the spring of 1963, African American children were laying their little bodies on the line in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands of them, as young as six years old, strode out of schoolhouses to join in the marching downtown—several times during one of the most chaotic and brutal episodes of the civil rights movement.

During a surreal scene in May, elusive bands of schoolchildren skittered down streets almost playfully—chased by police with batons and dogs. Eventually they and many other nonviolent resisters were clubbed or smacked down by high-powered fire hoses or just dragged into paddy wagons off to jail. Breaking through the bedlam, through the singing and screaming and blaring of sirens, was what biographer Stephen B. Oates framed as the “haunting voice” of Dr. Martin Luther King:

We must say to our white brothers all over the South who try to keep us down: We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you…. Do to us what you will. Threaten our children and we will still love you…. Bomb our homes and go by our churches early in the morning and bomb them if you please, and we will still love you.

King projected through his megaphone not only a resoluteness, but also a longing for what he limned on other occasions as “the beloved community.” This vision of social communion is usually gleaned from his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, but King invoked the concept as early as 1955. At the time he declared that the purpose of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was nothing less than “reconciliation … redemption … the creation of the beloved community.”

A Movement’s Theology

Before King came along, the theme had kicked around Protestant theology for decades, more or less as a shibboleth of theological optimism. King gave the idea a certain soberness, and as University of Virginia theologian Charles Marsh notes, he infused it with moral urgency.

In his hands, the beloved community became the “realization of divine love in lived social relation,” in Marsh’s words—never fully realized but always an object of human striving. Marsh (his 2005 book is The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today) and other writers have shown how the motif threaded through King’s writings and speeches until the end. It gave the freedom struggle its theological trajectory.

King had rooted the principle partly in what he considered a fact of human existence, that we are social by nature, interdependent with one another. “The solidarity of the human family” were words he frequently spoke in this vein, Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zep observed in their 1974 book Search for the Beloved Community.

He could see the obstacles ahead. While battling legal segregation, King contemplated a future, subtler enemy: “spiritual segregation,” the mistrust and distance between blacks and whites that would continue to forestall a beloved community.

Not even racial harmony would usher in the great community, in his mind (as he made clear in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?). A further requirement was economic justice, a bridging of chasms between rich and poor.

Fast Forward

Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute released the results of an opinion poll casting light on simmering resentments in the body politic.

For instance, a (slim) majority of white Americans polled—51 percent—agreed with the statement, “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Among those who say Fox News is their most trusted source of information, 70 percent held the same view.

What lies behind this myopia might be hard to pinpoint. Economic anxiety? An African American president? Recollections of purely race-based affirmative action? Or simply, the unrealized dream of a beloved community.

King himself seemed to think this community would always be not yet. At times he made it sound like a spiritual construct to be made flesh in the Kingdom of God. He also wielded the phrase when preaching about the endless struggle against evil, in which God ultimately prevails, as Smith and Zepp pointed out.

Less cosmically, King had faith in the human capacity to approximate the beloved community, here and now. He saw the civil rights movement, spanning racial lines, as a microcosm of the ideal.

Detecting a Pulse

Where are the signs of such approximation today?

Earlier this year the New York Times ran an eye-opening series titled “Race Remixed,” which explored interracial marriage and the growing numbers of mixed-race Americans. Surely this is a mark of spiritual integration.

Beyond race, polls for over two decades have shown that lopsided majorities of Americans favor higher minimum wages for the poorest workers. Whatever one might think of the wisdom of such a proposal, the impulse is a moral one. It’s an instance of social solidarity, not economic self-interest. Boosting the bottom wage would give no direct lift to most wage earners.

There are, even in these polarized days, the glimmerings of a true political community, if not a beloved one. …read more

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

A Theology of Embarrassment

September 22, 2011 by 7 Comments

By some worldly measures, the mystic and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel was not very embarrassable. He had fled Poland just six weeks before the Nazi invasion there, and arrived in the United States in 1940 at a time when Jews, including his fellow rabbis, were trying hard to look and sound like other (preferably secular) Americans. Heschel contributed little to the effort.

At the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the professor would show up at 7:00 a.m. morning services donning a prayer shawl and tefillin—two small leather boxes containing scrolls with passages from the Torah (he wrapped one box around an upper arm, the other, around his forehead). During prayers he swayed back and forth while the other professors “sat stiffly, dignified,” his biographer Edward K. Kaplan noted. Heschel sported a yarmulke and grew what eventually turned into a conspicuous white beard with a surfeit of tousled white, wavy hair, as though he were vying for the lead role in a movie about the ancient Hebrew prophets.

Heschel did have, however, a sense of what he termed “ultimate embarrassment.” As he saw it, this is the feeling all people of faith should have, when they stand in awe of a God who is just and righteous, who demands more of them and their world.

I am afraid of people who are never embarrassed at their own pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit, never embarrassed at the profanation of life…. There are slums, disease, and starvation all over the world, and we are building more luxurious hotels in Las Vegas.

These words were penned by Heschel in 1965—the same year he strode with Martin Luther King in the front line of the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. Susannah Heschel, a noted religious-studies scholar at Dartmouth, says her father (who died in 1972) looked upon embarrassment as the beginning of religious faith, but not the end.

“Embarrassment is the impulse that must lead to an awareness of being challenged,” she comments in a superb new collection, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings, which she edited as part of the Modern Spiritual Masters Series published by Orbis Books (a Catholic publisher).

Less Than Mortified

Heschel’s theology of embarrassment resonates politically at a moment when poverty appears to be metastasizing in America. This month the Census Bureau reported that more than 46 million Americans were struggling below the official poverty line of $22, 314 a year for a family of four. At 15.1 percent it is the highest poverty rate since the early 1990s.

Conservatives used the data to proclaim the failure of Obamanomics and trumpet their agenda of unceasing tax-and-regulation-slashing. Liberals reasserted the need for a raft of social-welfare policies including extended unemployment insurance (an existing policy that the Bureau said had kept a few million other Americans out of poverty).

Analysts and partisans responded quickly to the news, but were scarcely mortified. There seemed to be little pause for reflection, little soul-searching about our collective failure over decades to lift all boats, even in the midst of rising economic tides.

One analyst who has scaled the subject with both urgency and humility is Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times correspondent David K. Shipler. During the 1990s boom, Shipler began a long search for understanding. He traveled to African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and all-white towns in rural New Hampshire, to malnutrition clinics in Boston and sweatshops in California, and many points in between.

The result was the best book on poverty I’ve ever read, next to Michael Harrington’s 1962 classic The Other America. Shipler wrote in his 2004 book The Working Poor:

Working poverty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another: not just low wages but low education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just poor housing but also poor parenting, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households.

Such balance (“unwise spending”) might seem less to the point now, as more Americans fall into poverty for reasons completely beyond their control. Just the same, Shipler achieved a tone and spirit that would elevate any conversation about this continuing American scandal. The closing words of his remarkable reportage were, “It’s time to be ashamed.”

Across time and celestial space, one could almost hear Rabbi Heschel intoning those same words. …read more

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