The Stumbling Block

     

        The indignity thrust upon us during the holidays is exceeded only by the price we are expected to pay for it. The vulgar commercial incentives come as reminders that what we cannot afford to buy measures our worth as human beings.  In this dim light reality is not an option. Nevertheless, the spectacular holiday conjunction of a rising U. S. economy alongside unspeakable violence in the Middle East create obscene contrasts. Monday it was violence in southern Russia; Sunday in Iraq and Syria; the day before in Beirut and Sudan. The dead and wounded are like stigmata—moral wounds—that no candle or carol removes while the victims beg to know what in the world we think we’re doing as they die of violence or starvation and we sing carols?

A practical defensive answer might be that we’re shopping our economy back to health. The other answer, the true answer, is that we’re celebrating our well-earned righteousness.  We are calling on the heroism of the Maccabees, the obeisance of three kings, the beautiful music, the mercies of Allah—all understood to be both transcendent expressions of faith and signs of our superior, if competing, cultures  in this world. That’s the real reason bombs are going off from Boston to Kiev.

The vulgarization of faith for purposes of political empowerment or as footstools for our self-righteousness is the stumbling block to religious perspectives actually intended to bend the arc of history toward justice.

It is this failure to see faith as historic purposefulness that can bring everything to ruin.  As a ferocious 2014 looms with its spreading violent moods, its fossil fuel extractions and climate changes, its growing inequality, its chronic high unemployment, its violent perils, the proper exercise of faith will be finding the courage to stop, think and do justice.   

Have a Good New Year!

Judge More Forgive Less?

   The mourning of Nelson Mandela should include remembering the awesome Truth and Reconciliation Commission he created that brought a deeply divided people through a post-Apartheid trial that was like walking on hot coals. At Mandela’s bidding forgiveness for terrible deeds under Apartheid was on offer to all segments in the conflict—provided the truth could be known and genuine regrets were expressed.  His Commission offered amnesty to wrong-doers by seeking truth through their public recollections and confessions of terrible deeds, whether committed by Afrikaner or Black communities.  Many of the petitioners seeking amnesty were not up to that test.

  

   The political problem was whether reconciliation could serve as an alternative to justice.  Coming from a religious tradition whose core was the forgiveness of sins, Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the Commission’s work and his civic role became a trial of his religious beliefs.  Could the perspectives of faith grant priority to truth-telling and the pronouncing of judgment ?  Commission members were painfully aware of the biblical admonition that exercising such judgment brought judgment down on themselves.  As the hearings proceeded they also became aware that the biblical proscription to judge not lest you be judged could serve as a home for scoundrels.  In the end the Commission granted amnesty to only 849 persons, refusing  it to 5,392 others.*  

     

The exercise of judgment about what is true or false is an uncommon ingredient in the life of most faith communities where respectability is highly valued. However this ritual pattern of avoidance may have ricocheted into the public square. How else do we explain today’s evidence of such large scale financial frauds?  There is irrefutable evidence of dishonest interest rate manipulation in the trillion dollar global LIBOR market.  Bank fraud in the billions includes hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgages written by some of our neighbors that destroyed the homes and careers of other neighbors.  This is all old news by now and while the criminal convictions are mounting (nearly a hundred to date), the cultural environment continues to suggest that we take for granted the ordinary social and political practices that cut along a familiar grain not for the purpose of serving the truth but in order to keep a profitable game going.

   

What ingredient is it that leads people to look the other way?

This brings us to the consequences of today’s dangerous reality of growing inequality: the great majority of financial assets are now in the hands of the top one percent of U. S. population.  This is quickly becoming a tipping point about whether future societies will be able to offer opportunity to all their citizens. Some factions in state and federal legislatures are already clamoring to recognize inequality as the new normal.

Could it be that the foundations of Wall Street fraud are actually built in our local faith communities where granting the remission of sins has come to mean skipping judgment and its sometimes painful truths?  A common diagnosis is that guilt ridden people can be freed toward a new life by a ritual that suspends judgment in favor of a nearly infinite amount of forgiveness (“seventy times seven”).  That’s why it’s worth revisiting the painful journey of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where truth was one of the arbiters of judgment. 

*[See Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of the Republic of South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Official Website at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/index.htm]

Sunday School Lessons

The faith community has only a few years left to demonstrate that its life and message is not about the rhetoric of good intentions, but contains critically important moral perspective applicable to the nightmarish facts accumulating on the ground beneath our feet; nightmares like the corruption of democracy through control of wealth by a few; or Drone attacks that slaughter the innocent; or the mass destruction of creation by our gluttonous fossil fuel appetites.  

Today's news features the argument that J. P. Morgan's $13 billion fine for mortgage irregularities (a polite way of saying fraud) is actually a good deal for them. They are said to still have on hand that much again. What a relief that must be, especially since the exploding growth of Wall Street profits (including J. P.'s) continue to strengthen the financial community’s capacity to simply buy the political system.  

Former mayor of Philadelphia and governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendel, is now working at the private equity firm, Element Partners, holding investments in the natural gas industry whose ambitions, The American Prospect, reports (Nov./Dec. 2013) include 100,000 fracking wells for Pennsylvania alone.  The tangled launch of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has become a window into just such corruptions, playing into the hands of the private health care industry including big pharma, the mega insurers and the health tech equipment companies.

The evidence is that the practice of religiously expressed or nobly articulated exhortation actually erect a comfort zone behind which people can hide as ancient peoples once did, cowering behind their city’s walls as an enemy advanced upon them.  But what if the “Trojan Horse” is already inside the gate as seems the case today?

Religious language requires concrete ethical articulation. There are beginning to be important examples of this: in the Shale rebellion in Pennsylvania and the Moral Mondays Movement that started in North Carolina and is now appearing elsewhere across the country. Faith groups are often leading or facilitating and participating in these movements. This movement to resist or to occupy is the leasding edge of what must become a new non-violent revolution 

There is a seductively strong connection between good intentions and the sentiments of religious language when application proportionate to the scale of the problems around us is missing.  Consider the Congressional hearings in recent weeks that cross-examined NSA officials about the secretive role it played through gross internet invasions of privacy from Angela Merkel down to everyone else.  The same hearings made clear the existence of para-governments resident in both federal and corporate agencies that are able either to secretly serve elected officials or undermine them. 

Sunday School lessons today must acquire that scale to he heard and respected by the powerful. Consider Floyd Norris’ discussion below of pervasive bank fraud in setting interest rates.  (Norris is Chief Financial columnist of the NY Times; October 31, 1913).  Excerpts:

LIBOR— the London interbank offered rate — is supposed to represent the costs that each bank would face if it received an unsecured deposit from another bank. Each day, banks report Libor rates for maturities ranging from overnight to 12 months, in numerous currencies. The announced Libor rates are based on averages of bank submissions. In Europe, there is a similar Euribor. Banks cheated on both.  

“Don’t worry mate — there’s bigger crooks in the market than us guys!” wrote an official of Rabobank, the large Dutch lender, after he agreed to a request from one of the bank’s traders in 2007 to submit a phony rate for Libor rates in yen.

          Even without fraud, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech at Harvard, that Libor rates “are basically more akin to fiction than fact.”  “In the U.S.,” Mr. Gensler said in his speech, “Libor is the reference rate for 70 percent of the futures market and more than half of the swaps market. It is the reference rate for more than $10 trillion in loans.”

           

The danger signals require a new vocation of deeper reflection and action. A first step in the case of faith communities is to modify their saturation in the study of scriptural texts so that texts serve as a light shining on contemporary issues, no generalities or abstractions please; a new process should turn Sunday School into critical thinking seminars for young and old.  Religious language is not the same thing as ethical thinking about the search for the fairest tax policy, the wisest environmental regulations or the best health care policy. Progressively inclined folks active in churches, mosques and synagogues —and all others who link love and justice together—can easily feel overwhelmed by this predicament. 

  

By creating a “think tank” process inside weekly congregational life, the weekend Sabbath lessons can become critical thinking exercises.   Every region in the country has university-level faculty who could help resource a new wave of think tanks, a bit like the old travelling Chautauqua’s that brought learning to remote local communities a hundred years ago. Let the new lessons begin. 

Modern Theology

       On the same day Apple released its new super I-Pads this week it was given a free pass for its practice of outsourcing millions of jobs.  None other than California’s  Democrat  Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome (former mayor of San Francisco) proclaimed on his website that the new California Economic Agenda does not intend “to recreate the past and restore the jobs lost to global competition.” [http://www.ltg.ca.gov/s_aneconomicandcompetitivnessagenda.html[

         

        In a magisterial article also out this week, Harvard’s professor of political economy, Benjamin M. Friedman, laments the growing jobs gap but utters not a single word about deterring or correcting Silicon Valley’s massive export of jobs to China. [see “Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise: The Jobs,” The New York Review of Books, 11/7/20013] 

      

        Inevitability is the theme here; meaning corporate success and its consequence are in the same category as an act of god, like lightening or hurricanes.  It’s an inexact analogy since there always are alternatives to corporate lightening, but obeisance is the thing.  When decisions were made in the private sector fifty years ago that would doom Detroit, Cleveland and swaths of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles as U. S. capitalists decided they could make more money in overseas manufacturing, it was the worshipful obedience to such decisions that closed the deal and destroyed whole cities.  Memories are soon lost, as in the old quip about the difference between de jure and de facto segregation: de facto meant nobody did it. It was just modern theology at work.

       

       This adds up to the huge importance of the current prosecutions of corporate fraud and setting in place tough regulations under the Dodd-Frank law.  The dramatis persona embodies a great sameness.  Big money can make you look the other way, especially if it’s the gods at work. 

       

        Such dollars without sense show parallel dramas. Over the last fifty years it’s possible to watch a whole generation of glittering universities rise and brilliant scholars write their juried journal articles but still discover that the high school dropout rate in many urban school districts hovers around 40 to 50 percent today, just as it did in 1963.  Articles written back then always mentioned the family environment of low income people whose limited vocabulary limits their children’s.  Articles written today repeat the observation.  Fifty years of familiar stories about kids getting on drugs, committing crimes, heading to prison. It was also fifty years without decent incomes for millions of families, who if they had time and money to grow their vocabularies they could have advanced themselves.

        This week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports unemployment offers a continuing picture of the deepening disaster for millions of our sisters and brothers:  “Despite 43 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007.”       

       

        The Times' Catherine Rampell writes that “the labor market lost, rather than gained, momentum over the summer, leaving us with less than a desirable cushion just as the government was shuttered in response to political shenanigans,” citing Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial about the new data from the BLS.  [NY Times 10/22]  Even before the recent shutdown the federal government had the lowest number of civilian employees on its payrolls since 1966, according to their delayed September jobs report.”    The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington reported:

*  The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking is still 4.8 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession.  By that measure, over 21 million 

people are unemployed or underemployed….

* ….there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007. 

 * Nearly two-fifths (36.9 percent) of the 11.3 million people who are unemployed — 4.1 million people — have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.  These long-term unemployed represent 2.7 percent of the labor force.  Before this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.  [Oct 22 CBPP web]

         This is huge and very bad news. Or is it just the gods disposing?

              

                          

The Rising

Fresh evidence that religious language can be murdered in broad daylight came Wednesday morning when the Republican Caucus sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn sung when the British Parliament ended the Atlantic slave trade. While the Tea Party crash this week has dressed itself in garments of martyrdom, mainstream Republicans continue to see nothing wrong with gerrymandering congressional districts and creating voter registration barriers—all designed to block access of Blacks, Latinos and other low income people across the country to their voting rights.

As this strange second Civil War continues people continue to use religious ideas to support the “truths” they prefer:  In the past, Africans were said to be biologically inferior and therefore slavery was a divinely inspired kindness to them. Capitalists, lucky enough to accumulate vast wealth used  it to polish an image as icons of divine blessing.

While almost no one really believes such stuff any longer, the irresistible temptation to use faith language to lay claims to truth helps conceal the huge power play unfolding as “the owners” not "the believers," take charge. They're the owners of the Shale oil system and its pipe and shipping lines; the corporate powers that own our politicians; the financiers who hold your mortgage and credit debt. 

The profound reason to hope the faith community will help is because its origins lie in the battle against just such demonic powers—by definition powers that claim to be doing everything for your own good. The modern gods no longer want your virgin daughter sacrificed on their altar, they want you to learn to submit to their inequality regime, to accept without resistance your extended family’s worsening and unequal status today. 

A first step toward resistance will require people of faith to abandon their neutrality. This means de-schooling ancient pastoral fantasies long nurtured in monasteries and seminaries (and at a great remove from a Moses struggling against Pharaoh, or a Jesus leading the common peasants into Jerusalem) people of faith, must practice a non-violent form of love that insists on justice. 

Such a faith is already blowing fresh winds in North Carolina. A huge start toward a non-violent and instructive social justice movement is underway there. A reaction to the Republican’s ruthless blockade of voting rights has led faith leader’s and many others to abandon the neutral center. 

Many thousands are marching on Moral Mondays in North Carolina cities inspired by faith leaders like Rev. William Barbour, an NAACP president and Disciples of Christ Pastor. The large coalition growing there is practicing coalition-building across disparate lines by focusing on the perceived injustices they face. Black and White people of faith have locked arms with LGBT advocates, labor unions, environmentalists, women’s rights leaders, intellectuals from the universities and many others, some of them people Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have called “the Saints without God.”  Not only do they share a commitment to the common good, but hundreds of them have been arrested while engaging in acts of civil disobedience, going to jail for their faith whether holy or secular.

A new spirit is blowing in this wind as people discover that when they embrace both love and justice many people can come together. This is "a rising" that needs to spread. 

The Potential for Democratic Collapse: Can Faith Communities Make a Difference?

   

With the Polar ice pack melting, unusually severe storms increasing and a dysfunctional American democracy, it’s a good time to ask a lot of questions about faith and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Capitalism.  A prime example is the increasingly powerful interests at play in the fossil fuels empire that are releasing both floods of shale drilling and a growing corruption and political recklessness that could sink American democracy.      

As inequality grows such forces are compelling economically vulnerable people to sell partial land rights for fracking and shale drilling.   They are becoming increasingly helpless today and this is a condition that should invite the liberating and prophetic power of the faith traditions. But is that real any longer?  

Compare the last hundred years of faith community activism with today’s faith-based localism.  The “social gospel” in the early 1900s gripped faith-based consciences over terrible factory and mining working conditions, including exploitation of women and child labor.  A Federal Council of Churches was convened with thousands of faith leaders at its founding assembly in 1908. They adopted  an historic fourteen point ethically-based Social Creed that helped propel a progressive movement whose reforms under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson changed the whole landscape of public health protections and worker rights.

 After WW II faith communities gathered in Amsterdam to form a World Council of Churches to rethink and begin to reconstruct a post-Hitler world. Their mission was two-fold: theological in the wake of Nazism’s failed “religious” rationales and the Allies failure to advocate against the Holocaust; and humanitarian as they supported creation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and relocate millions of displaced persons to new secure beginnings.

Again, in the 1950s U. S. faith groups (tardily but finally) created ecumenical agencies and interfaith coalitions for civil rights inspired by many prophetic figures of the times, including Martin Luther King, Jr.  Creating ecumenical agencies for racial justice a National Council of Churches and a national office of religion and race furthered the Civil Rights Movement in local communities where local congregations felt too threatened to raise their voices.  These faith communities played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights act of 1954.

This is no longer real, nearly all lapsed today in favor of a “localism” intended to encourage individual participation rates while avoiding the public square controversies of the civil rights days that broke up many local congregations. 

It’s not an organizational or tactical question any longer. What’s at stake is the power of religious language itself, the power of a mythic moral vision about an exodus to freedom from slavery, about dry bones coming alive, about god born in poverty, about a city with waters of life flowing through it, about everlasting life. Theologian Paul Tillich taught that the symbol (for example, of faith) participated in the reality which it represents.  

What’s at stake as democracy hurtles toward the cliff’s edge is whether the symbolic language of faith is real anymore.  Today, it’s in the hands and voices of the people of faith to answer that question.  More  soon about faith-based roles in the public square. 

Moral Compass in the Heart of Darkness

The Syrian refugee catastrophe has become a metaphor for the devil himself, so obviously born of the confabulations of the rich nations. Their dearest interests, not the Syrian people's, is the keystone to the nightmare. Syria has become a twenty-first century version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel about the African ivory trade written in 1898.  In a land awash with American, Israeli, Russian and Iranian agents (to name a few)—the current version of Conrad’s novel is re-enacted in corporate and global struggles over food, oil, and control of the tech universe. 

This dystopia of rich and poor struggling in Africa and the Middle East now clearly extends to the struggles over growing inequality in the U. S. and Europe.  Both last week’s solo terror attack in Washington and the assault on the huge shopping mall in Nairobi lap at the shore of American imagination, which is why the FBI has been sent scurrying in all directions to learn where it might happen next.  

Amid such moral confusion it may be helpful to take recourse to John Milton, the 17^th century Puritan poet, who worked as a pamphleteer and civil servant during the first English Revolution.  An eloquent advocate of free speech, Yale’s Professor John Roberts tell us he invented “the very language of insubordination, creating an entire vocabulary of resistance, protest and revolution.”  This was because he wanted the biblical Word about righteousness and justice to become incarnate in the revolution’s new social and political institutions.

 There was not quite that intention with the American Revolution though we Americans have thought it so. The emerging USA pursued a different incarnation: to make all men free to pursue their own interests; and as it turned out on a vastly rich continent, men used slavery, Native American removal and financial manipulation to make themselves rich if they could. Because some could, later they enshrined their success and wealth as the customary measures of a divine American way. It was, in fact, an incarnation of themselves. 

Karl Barth, the famous 20^th century theologian, pointed out how this 18^th century formula worked.  In effect, God was given an honorary box seat—at the top of the grandstand—but men were given the central place on the field of play. His most terrifying example was the 19th century Dutch colonial empire which he described as a place of wealth and skulls, the skulls of the slave trade.

There was something about the Puritans like Milton, and the earliest Christians including Augustine, that understood this human propensity to self-elevation.  Anyone who reads about the despoiling of Syria can understand the ancient Christian sense of being caught in sin.

Ironically, the community seldom heard from in public life today is the faith community, composed more than any time in recent decades of highly educated and trained clergy and lay leaders, many of them women, and from a younger generation.  They could exercise a public and transformative role identifying saints, sinners and devils.   More about this in the next Public Liturgies blog.