Divorcing Faith from Capitalism

        Two kinds of pathos have emerged from the slaughter of the innocents in Charleston.  Their blood documents our national failure to create a culture of hope and opportunity for millions of young adults, a failure that keeps turning disaffection into the madness of Charleston-style attacks. 

Equally poignant are the faith testimonies at Mother Emmanuel AME Church, partly overflowing with expressions of love and forgiveness that seemed more like calls for anger suppression and crowd control.  No new movement either for gun control or a program to redistribute wealth through tax reforms has emerged; no new proposals have been forthcoming to reduce income inequality in order to put more young adults into higher education and technical training. 

In the King era—constantly evoked today--the Southern Christian Leadership Conference always enunciated fresh policy proposals and organized movements to seek action. Today’s rising African Americans and Latino educated classes are rightly pursuing professional careers that would not have existed for most of them fifty years ago. They are walking through a door opened by the action-focused King era.  But there’s been a change. A new systemic global inequality has created a global population with no prospects for a positive and constructive future. The question is whether there is a common witness that can be mobilized to address this calamity? 

In his column written two days ago David Brooks writes in the NY Times about this disaffection in the U. S. as faith systems seem increasingly broken and in decline:

   

“We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.”         (NY Times 6/30/15)

Abroad, the “Isis” era has irrevocably broken the West’s centuries old cultural claim that its Christian-based faith produced its legitimate exercise of power.  A new Islamic puritanism is rising among  the African/Middle East/Asian revolutions of the desperate poor.  Domestic parallels  to this are clear as growing violence in the U. S. by estranged young adults has become a counterpoint  to chaos from Libya  to Afghanistan. 

Perhaps we can now realize that the “American” freedom that seemed so attractive to us usually depended on someone else’s servitude.  Through the practice of slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow sharecropping and wage laborers, capital owners have enjoyed an unregulated distribution of wealth. Their control of legislatures and courts has been the winning formula for this dominant minority in our capitalist system.  

An effective response to today’s growing inequality and the chaos it is creating means directly challenging the link between faith and the financial success of market capitalism. Today’s active entrepreneurs are too easily pulled into the notion that markets are either not a moral issue—a rampant belief these days in Silicon Valley—or that their claim of positive impacts is proof of their moral standing. 

Almost fifty years ago, in 1968, the assassination within a two month period of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy heralded an end to the Poor People’s Campaign and the Lyndon Johnson War on Poverty. It was followed in the 1970’s by a tidal wave of U .S. investment transfers that effectively ended the opportunities that had caused the great migration of African Americans in the first place to move from the deep south to job opportunities in northern industry. 

Economist Anthony Atkinson documents that as job opportunities at better wages increased from the 1920s to the 1960s inequality declined. “The top one percent owned 36 percent of the wealth in the 1920s and then declined to 24 percent in the 1950s.”  But as American investors moved their money overseas and U. S. steel mills and manufacturing began to shut down the top one percent came to own 50 percent of the wealth today. [Inequality: What Can Be Done; Harvard Press 2015]

The Confederate battle flag may come down from the state capitols but the task of Christians, other faith communities, and other people of good will in 2015 is to insist, en mass, that inequality is addressed in legislatures and enacts drastic changes in tax policies; changes that will move income from the grossly rich into the homes of ordinary Americans and to people all over the world.  A liturgy of justice for all is needed again; major social movements of the people, by the people and for the people.

This is the sixtieth issue of Public Liturgies and we intend it to be the last one.  Thanks to our followers and readers.