The question for faith
communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of
responsibility for today’s unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism.
Flooded Houston, the epi-center of a fossil fuels empire that created enormous
wealth by turning land into unlimited concrete for profitable development is
now the scene of immeasurable human catastrophe. As with Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans the disaster scenes in Houston pulls back the curtain on a city
whose people live only on the margin of the empire of oil.
Houston
ranks as the 15th most unequal city among the nation's 50 largest according to
the Brookings Institute. On April 7th 2016 the Houston
Chronicle reported
“The richest 5 percent of households
here earn nearly 12 times more than the poorest 20 percent. About 156,000 of
the city's households have an income under $18,759.
The
current state of public policy about this income inequality in the U. S. persistently
avoids such realities. State government in Missouri is cutting back
minimum wage increases approved by St. Louis city voters. New Trump tax
policies announced four days ahead of Labor Day prescribe “reforms” that
primarily help the rich and add to the national debt. The real “wall”
supported by big money players is their strategic investment in primary
elections that look toward the mid-terms of 2018. Their clear purpose seems not
about improving wages and working conditions but how to extend the warp
of the economy in favor of their peers at the top of the income pyramid. The
top 1 to 5 percent.
A positive
alternative strategy from faith communities concerned with the common good will
require unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically
meaningful alliances with secular organizations who share a high moral purpose
to meet the needs of the common good. Bonhoeffer's "saints without
god."
How
religion—so popular in America—and endemic inequality have come to share
the same boat is not a pretty story and begins with the slave economy that
built the first several hundred years of the very Christian
Americas; a continent whose conquerors were comfortable with the
normative belief that human nature was a biologically determined
hierarchy.
Even at
the founding of the U. S., although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton detested
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…[he]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, there was
a dominant 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 for 90 hour work weeks, child labor, and
12 hour days in sweat shops employing immigrant 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
today of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of
authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to exist separately. The ownership
and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and
Congregational edifices locked denominations into a sociology of segregation
and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and
cities.
The
fateful pattern of church-based class division developed from the same
inequality that now divides Houston and the rest of the U. S. People then
and now who worked mostly with their hands and backs could not be comfortable
in churches where their bosses were sitting. It was reciprocated by the
managers of the dominating class. 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 Rauschenbusch 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 of this Progressive Movement that reflected a coalition between religion
and secular humanitarians such as Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull house.
This reform era created major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore)
and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).
The
tragedies of the 20th Century interrupted this momentum. The Soviet Communist
Revolution put the Capitalist era on high alert and gave corporate owners an
excuse to resist collective organizing and limit the power of unions to
organize. WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s
global-wide 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. And the younger generations
care little about the segregated life of congregations, They’ve moved on and
mostly outside organized religious life.
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. The new interfaith religion of community unity
without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will
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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