Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Religion, Democracy and Oligarchy


       In the foreground of the country’s deepening democracy crisis is the growing effort by Republican-led states to cut taxes, block Medicaid expansion and curb voter turnout. In the background is the growing concentration of wealth. In 2012 ten percent of the U. S. population earned half the country’s income; meaning the U. S. is already on the way to government by an oligarchy of the wealthy.  [Annie Lowerey, NY Times, September 10, 2013]
       
       The good news is the progressive and diverse coalitions growing rapidly in Southern states to protest this trend.  Demonstrators by the tens of thousands have filled the streets—80,000 last Summer in North Carolina—with more than a thousand people arrested for acts of civil disobedience.  New coalitions are disrupting legislative sessions that ignore the needs of low income families by blocking Medicaid expansion or limiting the number of days and hours election polls will be open. In Georgia

“There was a son of a sharecropper and an advocate for the homeless, a college student and a great-grandmother, a retired store manager and the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church”….among 39 arrested on March 17th [NY Times March 18, 2014]
       
       While clergy are sometimes leading the protests, they comprise only part of the new coalitions that have come together to resist Republican-led strategies. More than 80 citizens were arrested in Georgia just weeks ago.  Dramatic scenes in the Georgia legislature over its refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act led to acts of civil disobedience  including the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—once the home pulpit of Martin Luther King.
       
        Even while the gloves are coming off in these citizen protests against Republican policies the hour has grown late. This very day the Supreme Court struck down limits in federal law on the overall campaign contributions the biggest individual donors may make to candidates, political parties and political action committees. The “Citizen United” Supreme Court decision three years ago recognizing corporations as persons had already opened the flood gates to governance by the wealthy.  Revolving doors for staff moving from Wall Street to government and back again is pervasive. In the face of rampant corporate corruption among the big banks, a tame Securities and Exchange Commission staff has done little. Its own staff and board are composed of personnel formerly employed at giant Wall Street firms.  The hour is, indeed, growing late.
       
         While protests are growing against the Right, faith-based movements toward the Right also are growing.   New conservative church denominations are forming in the country. Often energized by gender issues, their composition is visibly an all-white community of the privileged. As many as a quarter to one-third of congregations in the traditionally liberal Presbyterian denomination may move toward this orbit this year.  
       
        A more hopeful story is unfolding with unionization efforts at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi. Led by a marching community coalition that includes local clergy, human rights advocates, and the UAW (demonstrating lessons the UAW learned in Chattanooga about the need for allies and shared strategic planning), with Nissan workers urged by religious leaders to vote their conscience, not listen only to the high pressure propaganda coming at them. [LA Times, March 14, 2014]
       
         The real question is whether the moral and religious roots that gave democracy life in the U. S. in the first place will find its full voice in this prophetically challenging moment. The future of democracy in America may turn on the answer to that question. 
       
          The record is mixed.  Christian churches co-habitated with slavery and segregation for hundreds of years.  Jewish congregations have maintained their loyalty to the apartheid state of Israel during its 60 year repression of Palestinian people and huge settlement expansion into Palestinian territory.  Muslim leaders often confuse their spiritual and prophetic tradition with the more familiar authoritarian rule practiced today in Syria, Egypt and many African lands.
       
         It doesn't have to be this way. There is a new, well educated younger faith-based generation of leaders coming online that may yet breathe new life into the links between faith, justice and democracy. The original Tahir Square uprising in Egypt was an expression of democratic yearning among an educated younger Muslim generation. “Jewish Voices for Peace” is a movement growing out of diverse Jewish traditions and raising its prophetic voice against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  Christian groups once deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s are once again beginning to provide new leadership protesting the consequences of rising inequality.
      
        “The most important fact to remember,” writes Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect, “is that concentrated wealth translates into concentrated political power.”  Conscientious voices on the Left and Right should be able to see such concentration is disastrous for both democracy and their historic faith traditions.

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