The narrow defeat of
divestment last week at the Presbyterian General Assembly by a 333 to 331 vote was
as close as the Romney/Obama contest may be this fall, a comparison that
deserves careful study. The divisions down the middle in the churches over the
Middle East point to parallel fault lines in the whole nation cemented not by
belief systems but by class and culture. A reenactment similar to the
razor-thin presidential vote in Florida in 2000 is not impossible, but the national
scene is more dire now.
Today the nation is gripped by both large-scale
and long-term unemployment. There is a growing painful inequality with millions
of people on the verge of losing their homes. The national instability is an obvious
invitation to opportunistic Pied Pipers.
Reasonable analytic approaches
are not always good predictors of possible outcomes these days. Eight years of Presbyterian committee study
and interfaith dialogue, hundreds of trips to the Middle East, divestment
conferences all over the U. S.—none of
these anticipated the solid 50 percent plus who refused to support divestment. The complicity of Caterpillar, Motorola
Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard in the destructive and often lethal Israeli occupation
of the Palestinian lands did not out-weigh other considerations. While corporate-connected business persons in
the churches often have a chronic antipathy for economic boycotts, another
reason grows from the tension of peoples’ positions in the spectrum of community
respectability. Pastors in many denominations
consistently display their dependence on the good will of local respected
religious and community leaders outside their congregations. The circle of peer pressure can be extreme. Congregants
care about how their pastors are viewed and a mayor or local rabbi can change
where that wind blows.
The Israeli government seems to know this very well. Ignoring a shower of concern from religious and secular groups in England, Europe and the U. S. objecting to Israel’s Occupation and Settlement construction in the West Bank, today’s headlines (July 10th) report that Israeli jurists have declared that scores of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank are legal. (see NY Times 7/10).
Parallels with the coming Fall elections are real. Even though President Obama is highly respected by liberals as a gifted and intellectually able president, he was nevertheless humiliated last Winter by a global oligarchy that pushed him to his knees—forcing him to take a hard-toned war posture toward Iran and suffer Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu addressing a joint session of Congress.
This is an evil omen, and
it’s not just about Israel. It’s about the undertow of new forms of power that can
grow rapidly in the soil of economic hard times.
New oligarchs—an
alliance among private sector oil monarchies, military contractors, Wall Street
investors and fearful congresspersons—put the President in that position. It
was striking that the Jewish community was highly represented at the
Presbyterian Assembly, but Islam, the faith of the Arab peoples, the second
largest religious tradition in the world was totally absent. The truth is that
in many Western minds Islam is understood to be an inferior faith held by an
inferior people.
In this context the imminent
danger is that while the traditional white population in the U. S. is soon to
be out-numbered, before that happens an election victory for the powerfully
organized affluent classes can easily change the rules. This has already begun
in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and in its decision to bar the
potential use of the commerce clause in badly needed legislation. Taken a few more steps, with a few more
rulings, and the undertow of a new and conservative majority can change
democracy into a permanent oligarchy and demography into a new kind of cultural
apartheid system.
Several object lessons applicable
to the nation as a whole can be drawn from the defeat of the Presbyterian
motion for divestment: Faith communities
easily persuade themselves that their role is to “stay out of it”, to be
neutral, to stand in the middle. Implausibly, they imagine themselves walking
in the footsteps of Jesus, the notorious challenger to authority. “God talk,”
whether manipulatively intended or innocently practiced easily replaces the
moral issues at stake. Giving balance to both sides has a pious ring however
inauthentic it may be. That’s why the practices of manipulation and
disinformation are genuinely evil and must be exposed wherever they appear.
Last week’s news adds
up to much more than the Israeli Occupation. It’s more about the cement of
cultural solidarity, racial/class superiority and religious exceptionalism that
puts President Obama and the rest of us at-risk. The sub-texts of this larger
cultural context are the unindicted bankers who profited from mortgage swaps
that ruined the lives of millions of citizens. Today, even now apparently,
bankers may yet be indicted for manipulating trillions of dollars in interest
rate manipulation. Or they may not, because the regulators seem to work for the
bankers.
Our own risk is that we
will discover too late that our options have been poured into cement buckets,
Mafia-style, and the election we thought we had nailed is lost.
[Full disclosure. The writer is a Presbyterian and attended part of the General Assemby last week.]
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