Modern Theology

       On the same day Apple released its new super I-Pads this week it was given a free pass for its practice of outsourcing millions of jobs.  None other than California’s  Democrat  Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome (former mayor of San Francisco) proclaimed on his website that the new California Economic Agenda does not intend “to recreate the past and restore the jobs lost to global competition.” [http://www.ltg.ca.gov/s_aneconomicandcompetitivnessagenda.html[

         

        In a magisterial article also out this week, Harvard’s professor of political economy, Benjamin M. Friedman, laments the growing jobs gap but utters not a single word about deterring or correcting Silicon Valley’s massive export of jobs to China. [see “Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise: The Jobs,” The New York Review of Books, 11/7/20013] 

      

        Inevitability is the theme here; meaning corporate success and its consequence are in the same category as an act of god, like lightening or hurricanes.  It’s an inexact analogy since there always are alternatives to corporate lightening, but obeisance is the thing.  When decisions were made in the private sector fifty years ago that would doom Detroit, Cleveland and swaths of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles as U. S. capitalists decided they could make more money in overseas manufacturing, it was the worshipful obedience to such decisions that closed the deal and destroyed whole cities.  Memories are soon lost, as in the old quip about the difference between de jure and de facto segregation: de facto meant nobody did it. It was just modern theology at work.

       

       This adds up to the huge importance of the current prosecutions of corporate fraud and setting in place tough regulations under the Dodd-Frank law.  The dramatis persona embodies a great sameness.  Big money can make you look the other way, especially if it’s the gods at work. 

       

        Such dollars without sense show parallel dramas. Over the last fifty years it’s possible to watch a whole generation of glittering universities rise and brilliant scholars write their juried journal articles but still discover that the high school dropout rate in many urban school districts hovers around 40 to 50 percent today, just as it did in 1963.  Articles written back then always mentioned the family environment of low income people whose limited vocabulary limits their children’s.  Articles written today repeat the observation.  Fifty years of familiar stories about kids getting on drugs, committing crimes, heading to prison. It was also fifty years without decent incomes for millions of families, who if they had time and money to grow their vocabularies they could have advanced themselves.

        This week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports unemployment offers a continuing picture of the deepening disaster for millions of our sisters and brothers:  “Despite 43 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007.”       

       

        The Times' Catherine Rampell writes that “the labor market lost, rather than gained, momentum over the summer, leaving us with less than a desirable cushion just as the government was shuttered in response to political shenanigans,” citing Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial about the new data from the BLS.  [NY Times 10/22]  Even before the recent shutdown the federal government had the lowest number of civilian employees on its payrolls since 1966, according to their delayed September jobs report.”    The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington reported:

*  The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking is still 4.8 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession.  By that measure, over 21 million 

people are unemployed or underemployed….

* ….there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007. 

 * Nearly two-fifths (36.9 percent) of the 11.3 million people who are unemployed — 4.1 million people — have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.  These long-term unemployed represent 2.7 percent of the labor force.  Before this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.  [Oct 22 CBPP web]

         This is huge and very bad news. Or is it just the gods disposing?

              

                          

The Rising

Fresh evidence that religious language can be murdered in broad daylight came Wednesday morning when the Republican Caucus sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn sung when the British Parliament ended the Atlantic slave trade. While the Tea Party crash this week has dressed itself in garments of martyrdom, mainstream Republicans continue to see nothing wrong with gerrymandering congressional districts and creating voter registration barriers—all designed to block access of Blacks, Latinos and other low income people across the country to their voting rights.

As this strange second Civil War continues people continue to use religious ideas to support the “truths” they prefer:  In the past, Africans were said to be biologically inferior and therefore slavery was a divinely inspired kindness to them. Capitalists, lucky enough to accumulate vast wealth used  it to polish an image as icons of divine blessing.

While almost no one really believes such stuff any longer, the irresistible temptation to use faith language to lay claims to truth helps conceal the huge power play unfolding as “the owners” not "the believers," take charge. They're the owners of the Shale oil system and its pipe and shipping lines; the corporate powers that own our politicians; the financiers who hold your mortgage and credit debt. 

The profound reason to hope the faith community will help is because its origins lie in the battle against just such demonic powers—by definition powers that claim to be doing everything for your own good. The modern gods no longer want your virgin daughter sacrificed on their altar, they want you to learn to submit to their inequality regime, to accept without resistance your extended family’s worsening and unequal status today. 

A first step toward resistance will require people of faith to abandon their neutrality. This means de-schooling ancient pastoral fantasies long nurtured in monasteries and seminaries (and at a great remove from a Moses struggling against Pharaoh, or a Jesus leading the common peasants into Jerusalem) people of faith, must practice a non-violent form of love that insists on justice. 

Such a faith is already blowing fresh winds in North Carolina. A huge start toward a non-violent and instructive social justice movement is underway there. A reaction to the Republican’s ruthless blockade of voting rights has led faith leader’s and many others to abandon the neutral center. 

Many thousands are marching on Moral Mondays in North Carolina cities inspired by faith leaders like Rev. William Barbour, an NAACP president and Disciples of Christ Pastor. The large coalition growing there is practicing coalition-building across disparate lines by focusing on the perceived injustices they face. Black and White people of faith have locked arms with LGBT advocates, labor unions, environmentalists, women’s rights leaders, intellectuals from the universities and many others, some of them people Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have called “the Saints without God.”  Not only do they share a commitment to the common good, but hundreds of them have been arrested while engaging in acts of civil disobedience, going to jail for their faith whether holy or secular.

A new spirit is blowing in this wind as people discover that when they embrace both love and justice many people can come together. This is "a rising" that needs to spread. 

The Potential for Democratic Collapse: Can Faith Communities Make a Difference?

   

With the Polar ice pack melting, unusually severe storms increasing and a dysfunctional American democracy, it’s a good time to ask a lot of questions about faith and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Capitalism.  A prime example is the increasingly powerful interests at play in the fossil fuels empire that are releasing both floods of shale drilling and a growing corruption and political recklessness that could sink American democracy.      

As inequality grows such forces are compelling economically vulnerable people to sell partial land rights for fracking and shale drilling.   They are becoming increasingly helpless today and this is a condition that should invite the liberating and prophetic power of the faith traditions. But is that real any longer?  

Compare the last hundred years of faith community activism with today’s faith-based localism.  The “social gospel” in the early 1900s gripped faith-based consciences over terrible factory and mining working conditions, including exploitation of women and child labor.  A Federal Council of Churches was convened with thousands of faith leaders at its founding assembly in 1908. They adopted  an historic fourteen point ethically-based Social Creed that helped propel a progressive movement whose reforms under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson changed the whole landscape of public health protections and worker rights.

 After WW II faith communities gathered in Amsterdam to form a World Council of Churches to rethink and begin to reconstruct a post-Hitler world. Their mission was two-fold: theological in the wake of Nazism’s failed “religious” rationales and the Allies failure to advocate against the Holocaust; and humanitarian as they supported creation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and relocate millions of displaced persons to new secure beginnings.

Again, in the 1950s U. S. faith groups (tardily but finally) created ecumenical agencies and interfaith coalitions for civil rights inspired by many prophetic figures of the times, including Martin Luther King, Jr.  Creating ecumenical agencies for racial justice a National Council of Churches and a national office of religion and race furthered the Civil Rights Movement in local communities where local congregations felt too threatened to raise their voices.  These faith communities played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights act of 1954.

This is no longer real, nearly all lapsed today in favor of a “localism” intended to encourage individual participation rates while avoiding the public square controversies of the civil rights days that broke up many local congregations. 

It’s not an organizational or tactical question any longer. What’s at stake is the power of religious language itself, the power of a mythic moral vision about an exodus to freedom from slavery, about dry bones coming alive, about god born in poverty, about a city with waters of life flowing through it, about everlasting life. Theologian Paul Tillich taught that the symbol (for example, of faith) participated in the reality which it represents.  

What’s at stake as democracy hurtles toward the cliff’s edge is whether the symbolic language of faith is real anymore.  Today, it’s in the hands and voices of the people of faith to answer that question.  More  soon about faith-based roles in the public square.