Will Faith Communities Respond to the Scandal of Inequality?
“The
median income of Santa Clara County families [Silicon Valley] fell by 3.2
percent in inflation-adjusted dollars last year -- more than twice the national
decline -- to its lowest point in more than 11 years, according to U.S. Census
figures.”
“…census
data confirm widening income inequality in Silicon Valley traceable to a
decline in the well-being of poor and middle-class families.
“Life In The Valley Economy—Saving the Middle Class
Lessons
from Silicon Valley 2012”
Working
Partnerships USA, October 2012
In 1919, following the
end of the First World War, the renowned Sociologist Max Weber said in a lecture on Politics as a Profession that a
nation-state’s power lies in its “capacity to lay claim to the monopoly of
legitimate physical violence.”
The new Steven Spielberg-Tony
Kushner film, “Lincoln,” shows this profession at work, and makes it clear that
during that era it was the power of the state, the government, that permitted inequality
both racial and economic.
The operative idea here
is legitimacy. “Lincoln” reminds us that in the struggle over slavery, the
United States asserted its violent power to enforce and legitimate the enslavement
of four million African-Americans. As later history shows the U. S. then let this power be used to enforce and
legitimate inaction after adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. During that period
the state either tolerated or enforced a
hundred year reign of terror over Black people, permitting wide-spread mob
violence, the lynching of Black people for entertainment, the denial of their right to
vote, and a rigid coast-to-coast but often unwritten code of racial
segregation.
Just so and very similarly,
the state today tolerates, enforces and subsidizes the prevailing policies of
an economy that continues to unevenly reward its workers, keeping millions bent
over in stoop labor or at hard labor in labor intensive shipping
warehouses while suffering a bottom tier
pay scale that offers them little future.
A N Y Times series
running this week reviewed the history of tax abatements given by local governments
in the U. S. that divert resources away from public needs while improving the bottom lines of corporations. Local, regional and federal governments invest as much as $80 billion a
year in subsidies to these corporations, thereby draining resources away from creating
better schools, quality housing, and better health care for all citizens.
The Times identified 48
companies that have received more than $100 million in state grants just since
2007. Some 5,000 other companies received more than $1 million in recent years.
All of this rests on the
same ideas that were rife in the age of Lincoln and present still today in public discourse: the inherent righteousness
of success, dominance and survival of the fittest, notions of genetic
inferiority, rigid divisions of labor that condemn many groups, not only
Latinos but many others, to backbreaking labor with little or no access to a
viable future for their children. This was state policy and its state policy
today.
In the super-affluent Silicon
Valley—a place thought by many people to be the new center of the universe—a report
by the organized labor consortium, Working Partnerships, quoted in the text box
above, documents the accelerating income decline of the middle and lower class
communities in the Valley while life soars for the upper twenty percent.
The hardest bridge for faith communities is the crossing from
the comfortable metaphorical riverside of intensely personal liturgies, a place
where judgment is suspended and acts of contrition, thanksgiving, and redemption
are celebrated----over to the other side of the river where judgment and risk-taking
may be required; a place where people, their religious leaders and others accept
vulnerability and the challenge of social reform as a vocation.
The truth of growing
inequality may bring the global economic community to its knees one more time in
2013 because, for example, in the report cited in this blog last week from the Pulling
Apart
In California …
the incomes of the
richest twenty percent of households were 9.5 times bigger than the incomes of the
poorest households in the late 2000s; and
the incomes of the richest five percent of
households were 16.2 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that
same period.
In New York…
the incomes of
the richest twenty percent of households were 9.2 times bigger than the incomes of the
poorest households in the late 2000s; and
the incomes of the richest five percent of
households were 15.6 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that
same period.
In Iowa…
the incomes of
the richest twenty percent of households were 5.6 times bigger than the incomes of the
poorest households in the late 2000s; and
the incomes of the richest five percent of
households were 8.7 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that
same period.
In
Lincoln’s era many clergy and laity resisted such civic obscenities and put on
the garments of radical abolitionists. Their choice of a vocation as “public
intellectuals” is a rarity in our own age, and that is why the times are so dangerous: public debate in our civil society is mostly
severed from its roots in the “city set upon a hill.” The faith community is mostly camped on the safe
side of the river, where they can be soothed by the rites of private faith.
So far, this means the dominance and control
of a government ruled by the wealth of a few. In the age of Lincoln there is a long list of
familiar names of those who chose not to remain safe, but instead struggled to shape the power of the state to support justice: the martyred Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper
publisher, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Revivalist and college President (Oberlin)
Charles Finney, the freedman Frederick Douglas, the feminist
leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Many others joined in or were led: William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman
Melville, William Ellery Channing, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, etc. The list
goes on.
These all pushed and
hounded Lincoln who partly for reasons of his own cautious temperament and
because he, probably correctly, believed he could not be elected if he embraced
the radical abolitionsts, did finally
share their vision and achieve their ultimate dream: first the Emancipation
Proclamation and two years later the
Thirteenth Amendment.
Had it not been for the
radical clergy of that era, had it not been for the radical clergy in both
Black and White congregations during the Civil Rights era of Martin Luther
King, Jr., had it not been for the likes of Bishop Tutu in South Africa ----had
it not been for this multitude of voices the freedom movement of both centuries
would not, could not, have occurred.
Are such leaders among
us today in the churches, temples and synagogues? Will they cry out in their
own time against the new and crippling scandal of growing inequality? Time will tell.
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