The question for faith communities on
Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for the unanswered
inequality and rising authoritarianism in the U. S. Becoming part of the answer could mean a metamorphosis
beyond reach in the same sense that halting the rise of autocracy could be
beyond reach. A positive answer surely
means unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically
meaningful alliance with the communities and organizations of high moral and
ethical purpose. Bonhoeffer’s “saints without god.”
How religion and inequality share the
same boat is not a pretty story. A slave economy built the first several
hundred years of the very religious Americas
that was comfortable with the normative belief that human nature was a biologically
determined hierarchy. At the founding of
the U. S. although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton destested slavery he still
believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision
for the nation. Correcting the picture
portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell
political historians Jason
Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which
he lived….No founder of this country more clearly envisioned the greatness of a
future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times
6/20/16)
While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners)
was less extreme, more important was a belief in an elitism of “nature” that was
held almost universally until after the mid 20th century and was applied in the Protestant imprint on
U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and
Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first
class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such superiority of religious identity made
90 hour work weeks, child labor and sweat shops employing poor women legitimate
expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.
It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of
the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive
decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold. The
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top
one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth. The pre-eminent
economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman reported that
at the close of 2016 the
bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40
years.
The
average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was
$16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the
same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by
231 percent.
Three consequences of this staggering inequality
shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability
to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that
could occur if the President, any President, manages to suspend the power of courts by exercising the
power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.
Such chaotic consequences are all in the category of cause and effect
and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy
high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over
the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and
benefits, leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs
that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job
protection and security. Forbes Magazine
estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This
third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and
Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians.
The net effect is that the gains of a
century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put
into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong
to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years
ago. Worse are anecdotal reports that
the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back
to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.
This tragic system of racism and religious-based
classism handicaps the potential of
people of faith to join together to counter the rise of the Trump era authoritarians.
Racism forced Black churches to form separately. The ownership and managerial
classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices
have locked denominations into a sociology in which they represent a normative
segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.
The pattern grew from people who worked
mostly with their hands and backs feeling uncomfortable in churches where their
bosses worshipped. Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God,
Adventists. Catholics and Jews lived a
world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier
Protestant world. In other words,
religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism
that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of
authoritarianism.
There are better angels in this history. The 19th Century glory of the
churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata)
was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20th
Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the
outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban
slums filled with sweat shops. Christian
and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U.
S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to
become unions. It still required decades for church leaders
like Walter Rauschenbush to convince at least some Protestant groups that the
teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts
played respective roles in the first forty years, creating major workplace and
public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of
unionization (FDR).
The tragedies of the 20th
Century led to a failure of further development toward an equitable world. The Soviet Communist Revolution gave corporate
owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and WW II became a cauldron
from which the shape of today’s inglorious inequality grew. The deep wound that
now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers
of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.
There is good news! A new glory is on the
rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial
Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational
movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too
many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos
amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.
In
the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the
incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional
budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have
less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities. Because
the resources are not evenly divided and the stakes so high, the new interfaith
religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will
be severely tested as will be the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy
reform.
Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher,
everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will
define belief.
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