Evil in Chattanooga

Last week’s thunderous defeat of the UAW by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga auto plant goes to the role Protestant culture often plays in nullifying moral questions. Jung and Tillich described it as creating a state of “dreaming innocence.”  Their analysis of the nature of true evil—brought to the fore by their experience with Nazism and Sovietism—pointed to the use of religion to induce in people an imaginary innocence, blinding their ability to see evil by playing off their sense of being overwhelmed, of being powerless.

This requires mythicizing and re-writing history.  The weekly labor columnist at the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, describes how that was done in Chattanooga.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South. (The website established by the Center for Worker Freedom is emblazoned with a logo reading “Liberating Labor, One Worker at a Time”—quite the slogan for a group that equated its anti-union struggle with a battle to defeat the army that actually freed Chattanooga’s slaves in 1863.)

Meyerson describes the role Walter Reuther’s UAW actually played in the emergence of social liberalism:

…no institution played a larger role in the construction of postwar American liberalism than the UAW. Under Reuther’s leadership, the union provided funds to civil rights activists who conducted the Montgomery bus boycott, paid for the buses and sound system at the 1963 March on Washington, detailed staff and dollars to the efforts to build municipal employee unions and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, donated resources to the fledgling efforts of Students for a Democratic Society and the National Organization for Women, and helped fund the first Earth Day.

Fundamentalist Christian Evangelicalism lives off the bitter sense of belonging to an underclass, so prevalent in Appalachia and deeper south locations like Chattanooga.  It makes one cling to racial identity and the dream of innocence in a world one is unable consciously to acknowledge actually bends him to this low estate. In the virtually empty slogans of this form of Christian parlance, God both loves you, redeems you and protects you from the very agency the Gospel proclaimed to be yours. Meyers continues on the important theme of self-management and self-governance:

For all of labor’s troubles organizing in the white South, Volkswagen was the one campaign that labor thought it could win….the union had won the support of the German auto-and-steel workers union, IG Metall, which, under the terms of Germany’s “co-determination” law, controls half the seats on Volkswagen’s corporate board. Indeed, due to Volkswagen’s Nazi roots, the American authorities in postwar Germany made the company go one step further, requiring a two-thirds majority from board members for any significant policy decision—in effect, giving the union veto power over Volkswagen’s various projects. Many of the workers who opposed the very idea of a union at Chattanooga argued, rightly, that Volkswagen was a good employer that paid them well and respected their rights. They failed to realize that the company’s conduct had been largely shaped by influence that IG Metall wields over VW’s labor relations.

         How did the Levitical teaching that you are not to slander your neighbor nor profit from his loss—claimed as roots by three world faiths—compose such contradictory violations in Chattanooga?  The answer is more and more faith communities are in love with the idea of themselves, the grace of God that will always protect them and save them. Of course this means evil can run rampant and your neighbor can be slandered because even to mention it would mix politics with religion.  

Faith communities that practice in the public square can build agency and responsibility for the battle against evils like those that carried the day in Chattanooga. They can freshly study and embrace the idea of worker dignity, worker co-determination—let us even say worker ownership—because it acts out, makes real, the sovereignty of individual freedom in its indissoluble responsibility to do justice to one’s neighbors, to one’s co-workers.

Can evil grow? Yes, and its petri dish is inequality.