The faith community has only a few years left to
demonstrate that its life and message is not about the rhetoric of good
intentions, but contains critically important moral perspective applicable to
the nightmarish facts accumulating on the ground beneath our feet; nightmares
like the corruption of democracy through control of wealth by a few; or Drone
attacks that slaughter the innocent; or the mass destruction of creation by our
gluttonous fossil fuel appetites.
Today's news features the argument that J. P. Morgan's $13
billion fine for mortgage irregularities (a polite way of saying fraud) is
actually a good deal for them. They are said to still have on hand that
much again. What a relief that must be, especially since the exploding growth of
Wall Street profits (including J. P.'s) continue to strengthen the financial
community’s capacity to simply buy the political system.
Former mayor of Philadelphia and governor
of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendel, is now working at the private equity firm,
Element Partners, holding investments in the natural gas industry whose
ambitions, The American Prospect, reports (Nov./Dec. 2013) include 100,000 fracking
wells for Pennsylvania alone. The tangled launch of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)
has become a window into just such corruptions, playing into the hands of the
private health care industry including big pharma, the mega insurers and the
health tech equipment companies.
The evidence is that the practice of religiously expressed
or nobly articulated exhortation actually erect a comfort zone behind which
people can hide as ancient peoples once did, cowering behind their city’s walls
as an enemy advanced upon them. But what if the “Trojan Horse” is already
inside the gate as seems the case today?
Religious language requires concrete ethical articulation.
There are beginning to be important examples of this: in the Shale rebellion in
Pennsylvania and the Moral Mondays Movement that started in North Carolina and
is now appearing elsewhere across the country. Faith groups are often leading
or facilitating and participating in these movements. This movement to resist
or to occupy is the leasding edge of what must become a new non-violent
revolution
There is a seductively strong connection between good
intentions and the sentiments of religious language when application
proportionate to the scale of the problems around us is missing. Consider
the Congressional hearings in recent weeks that cross-examined NSA officials
about the secretive role it played through gross internet invasions of privacy
from Angela Merkel down to everyone else. The same hearings made clear
the existence of para-governments resident in both federal and corporate
agencies that are able either to secretly serve elected officials or undermine
them.
Sunday School lessons today must acquire that scale to he
heard and respected by the powerful. Consider Floyd Norris’ discussion below of
pervasive bank fraud in setting interest rates. (Norris is Chief
Financial columnist of the NY Times; October 31, 1913). Excerpts:
LIBOR— the
London interbank offered rate — is supposed to represent the costs that each
bank would face if it received an unsecured deposit from another bank. Each
day, banks report Libor rates for maturities ranging from overnight to 12
months, in numerous currencies. The announced Libor rates are based on averages
of bank submissions. In Europe, there is a similar Euribor. Banks cheated on
both.
“Don’t worry mate — there’s bigger crooks in the
market than us guys!” wrote an official of Rabobank, the large Dutch lender,
after he agreed to a request from one of the bank’s traders in 2007 to submit a
phony rate for Libor rates in yen.
Even without fraud, Gary Gensler, the
chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech
at Harvard, that Libor rates “are basically more akin to fiction than fact.” “In the U.S.,” Mr. Gensler said in his speech, “Libor is the reference
rate for 70 percent of the futures market and more than half of the swaps
market. It is the reference rate for more than $10 trillion in loans.”
The
danger signals require a new vocation of deeper reflection and action. A
first step in the case of faith
communities is to modify their saturation in the study of scriptural texts so
that texts serve as a light shining on contemporary issues, no generalities or
abstractions please; a new process should turn Sunday School into critical
thinking seminars for young and old. Religious language is not the same
thing as ethical thinking about the search for the fairest tax policy, the
wisest environmental regulations or the best health care policy. Progressively inclined folks active in
churches, mosques and synagogues —and all others who link love and justice
together—can easily feel overwhelmed by this predicament.
By creating a “think
tank” process inside weekly congregational life, the weekend Sabbath lessons
can become critical thinking exercises. Every region in the country
has university-level faculty who could help resource a new wave of think tanks,
a bit like the old travelling Chautauqua’s that brought learning to remote
local communities a hundred years ago. Let the new lessons begin.
