Almost Breaking the World

         Luis Buñuel's 1962 satirical film "The Exterminating Angel" has been refreshed this year by Thomas Ades' operatic version at a time when the plot seems pointedly allegorical.  It tells of a group of elegant guests who attend a formal dinner party then discover they cannot leave at the end of the evening. They bed down for the night but in the morning, inexplicably, they are still unable to leave. Days pass, desperation grows, one man dies, a young couple commit suicide. Near the climax a herd of white sheep and a wild bear break in. The guests are freed from their terror only after they figure out how it all began.

        This nightmare is recognizable in the Syrian, Iraq and Afghan wars. As described concerning Syria by the UN High Commissioner for refugees, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein

"we have seen every conceivable atrocity being committed by most parties to the conflict... and it started from a severe violation of human rights and the rights of children. And from there, we have a crisis that is almost breaking the world in a very real, real sense."

       There is nothing more painful than the struggle of Americans to cope with their entanglement in this nightmare, for instance in Raqqa, where ISIS was embedded and where a report from the Washington Post tells of 11,000 to 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged under U.S.-led airstrikes, where "the sentiment...is increasingly that the U.S. took part in this destruction, but is not taking responsibility for fixing it, for cleaning it up."

    

        As metaphor "The Exterminating Angel" pushes past our familiar historical landscape that documents the marriage of religion and political power, or the dominance of the wealthy one percent who define it as their godly reward. Even though millions of Americans have disabused themselves that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq made any sense the barriers to the next step seem to trap present generations, inexplicably blocking a path to find an alternative to mass destruction of the innocent.  

       This palpable pain and anxiety over the absence of a way forward has many sources that need uncovering if people are to find a way back to health: a toxic mixture of Protestant utopianism, tribal self-interest, Catholic atonement and Silicon Valley-style comfort is deeply embraced as a subconscious revealed secular religion: that the main purpose of societies is to accumulate and prosper against all others, usually understood as our enemies.

       After the guests are set free in The Exterminating Angel," they decide to attend a Te Deum in thankfulness for their freedom but find they are trapped once again inside the cathedral as chaos breaks out everywhere and finally the same flock of sheep enters the Cathedral as gunfire is heard. 

        In this surrealist drama let us say that the sheep represent the world's innocent who perish all around us; and let us say that because our pretty services and solemn assemblies are not focused on these millions in desperate need around the world, that it is not surreal at all to realize our world is breaking, and on a local and global scale. The answer is that a new mobilization never seen before is now necessary to break new paths of life and freedom for all.  That will mean a new era of consciousness-raising among us to clarify that the lies and illusions that demand our devotion must be dashed in pieces.

Bare Ruined Choirs

        As the USA's democracy project sinks further into chaos each day, the high school gun reformers are receiving a free graduate education about its fault lines. The cocktail of claimed virtue (read James Comey), received religion, imperial military power, irrepressible sex, and Wall Street influence peddling, provide a priceless learning curve. Lesson one is the gun violence issue is already off the table. Lesson two is that since no one has constructed plausible solutions to this mess young generations are going to have to build them from the ground up.

        If there's to be summer school this year it better be spent on that construction project. The ground is littered with lessons and obstacles. In Silicon Valley amidst all its riches inequality is growing. In 2014 the top 5 percent of the population earned an annual $428,729, increasing by an additional $60,686 in 2016 alone, while the earnings of the lowest 20 percent increased only $1,726. [Silicon Valley Index 2018].

        Social critic Pankaj Mishra characterizes this new reality where "the old style racial segregation has been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution." 

         Alongside this is the modern illness that confuses data with moral principles. This digital mythic obsession, with its big paydays, can be fairly described as the replacement for religion's tendency toward magical thinking. Since everyone is quoting Reinhold Niebuhr these days the irony he often pointed to is in this case the hard reality that the people shooting at young people may be the closest thing to being their allies.

        Such unfathomable truth at least provides clues J.K. Rowling could appreciate including what witchery led us to accept that economic growth would magically cure inequality. In Republican legislatures across the country this absurdity is being laid to rest as tax cuts for the rich impoverish state budgets.  

        Youthful political practitioners should note how denial often corrupts perception. We can note that the evil of Native American genocide is only cured by not remembering; that the continuing evil of racial segregation is often cured by blindness; that the deterioration of life in jobless communities cannot be cured except by Darwinian fantasies about survival of the fittest. The old fascist dream is risen again.

         Shakespeare gives proportion to the stakes in the loss of democratic practices:

That time of year...When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang....

Which by and by black night doth take away.

        As it turns out then, to get gun control requires the major revolution that the resignation of the Republican party leader Paul Ryan may foretell. Meaning new generations whose illusions have been shredded by bullets turning unabashedly to a lifetime of political engagement, fortified by the sure and certain truth that to share the next meal the whole community must decide. 

        Neither wizards, nor miracles, nor data can replace that common good. Until then the men and women here and around the world who need a share of our bread will be shooting.  

 

[Shakespeare Sonnett 73]

Blind Mans' Gulf

        The first thing to know about the just completed showing of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick film on the Vietnam War is the financial support it received for production and advanced promotion; as if disparate forces like nonprofit foundations, banks and billionaires had gathered themselves in a shared hope of parting the awful waters of the war toward a new world.  The advance promotion--as is always the case with television--was over the top, tempting Burns/Novick to break new ground in self-promotion, and with a hype that suggested the prospect of something like Charlton Heston's Moses descending from Sinai.

       After eight two hour segments showing horrifying scenes of violence and death the film's final segments suggested a post-war era with scenes of good will and the struggle of veterans on all sides to come to terms with this hell they had lived through and that now plagued them with misgivings, resentment and guilt.  

        The problem is that instead of a better promised land The United States went right out and did it again with its invasions in the Middle East fifteen year later.  

      

         The Burns/Novick film's final theme is reconciliation, drawing no connection, no dotted lines to the next war in the Middle East.  Papered over by hype and film-maker hubris, seventeen hours of the Vietnam War is therefore overtaken by its propaganda function. The USA keeps on doing it: the U. S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the same empty-mindedness that characterized its invasion of Vietnam. Burns/Novick underline that after hastily succeeding the French collapse, U. S. first responders--diplomats, military officers, military advisors--arrived in Vietnam with no experience or knowledge of the country and its culture or long history.  

        In Iraq the Bush era cohort quickly demonstrated that they too knew nothing of the Middle East world they were proposing to turn into a democratic ally of the U. S.  Motivated by the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon but focused on the geo-political world of oil--not on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden who launched the WTT attack--but on their wrong-headed obsession about Weapons of Mass Destruction, this  Bush era misdirection created a war whose length (seventeen years) now stretches over almost as many years as the Vietnam War's twenty years.

        One stark factor that supported this war-making madness among both Democrat and Republican Presidents: Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Ford to Nixon to Bush I to Clinton twice to Bush II is that all of them lied, creating pretexts out of thin air (the Gulf of Tonkin, Communist Dominoes, WMD's) and they built sand castles to inspire young soldiers to patriotic sacrifice of their lives. 

        While sometimes the fabled Wolf actually does come, most modern wolves are manufactured from political or Wall Street ambitions using the accelerant of the trillion dollar media industry. Which is why, in the end, the Burns/Novick film about Vietnam becomes a cautionary tale that leaves us in the dark. 

     The story not told includes the billions made by shipping, arms, and aerospace corporations when the nation goes to war; and in the instance of the Iraq war the emergence of private mercenary forces such as Blackwater that receive hundreds of millions in DoD contracts without oversight by congress or the electorate. 

        The challenge to citizens today, to people of faith today, is to overcome our susceptibility to the screens in our pockets, on our desks, in our living rooms that, whether brilliant creations of artists or the calculated propaganda of politicians, or the machinations of Wall Street, are intended to make other people rich.

 

          Light in the present darkness. That's the task.

Faith-Based Wars

        Because the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS series on Vietnam pays scant attention to the context of a hundred years of  French colonization that preceded it the result is a certain illiteracy that bends how the film series views the twenty years of war that follow.  Perhaps the lengthy French occupation is not shown because it had a clearer more revealing purpose, one that begs us to look the other way. It was to extract the region's rich mineral and natural resources for the profit of French enterprise. This purpose was sacred, supported by Catholic missionaries teaching a version of Christianity to the Vietnamese intended to pacify them to accept their own victimization; that is, moving their natural wealth into European hands.   

        It's this colonial history that frames the political and spiritual reality of the years after the brief WW II Japanese occupation and after the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.  Irregardless of how both Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the age of colonialism in China, India and Africa were dedicated to their Christianizing purpose they also served the same simplicism:  that a higher moral purpose, God's purpose, required the servitude of native populations to build the wealth of Western nations.

        Which may be why the U. S. State Department  never showed President Truman the letters from Ho Chi Minh requesting American help setting-up a democracy in Vietnam. For Secretaries of State such as John Foster Dulles God's purpose was served by enriching the U. S. 

         So much for the ancient biblical instruction about welcoming strangers and delivering justice. 

        Just so the U. S. could not escape its metaphoric identity as successors to French colonialism.  The Burns/Novick film toils in each segment to respect the naivete, innocence, and heroic sacrifices of American soldiers in a misbegotten cause, but that does not illuminate how American leaders understood the slaughter of Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands to be worthy of the sacred purpose to defeat Communism and save Vietnam for the West.

        This role as faith-based champions against Communism makes the Burns/Novick segment incomprehensible when it shows the self-immolation of a devout Buddhist Monk protesting the American supported Diem regime in 1963.  As the flames consume the Monk, Thích Quang Duc, he is surrounded  by a large circle of followers kneeling in prayer.  What Americans see--including the ambassadors, the President, the Generals--is an  act of religious fanaticism, blind to understand this was a window into the spiritual center of Vietnamese culture.   

        This may help explain Ken Burns' illiteracy about the subsequent faith-based non-violent resistance to the war. By 1967 Jewish and Christian leaders were mobilizing their own opposition to the war and by 1968 a coalition named Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam had distributed twenty-four thousand copies of a 400 page paper-back, "In the Name of America." It was composed entirely of newspaper clippings of U. S. brutalities and indiscriminate destruction; e.g. CIA operatives interrogating captured Vietnamese then pushing them out of their helicopter. By 1969 forty thousand people of faith came to Washington to march by candlelight to Richard Nixon's White House, each carrying the name of one of the 40,000 dead U. S. soldiers at that point in the war. It marked a daily death toll of 40 U. S. soldiers per day. 

        The Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee distributed a shocking slide show about "The Electronic Battlefield" showing the use of cluster munitions with hundreds of shards of flying steel exploding above ground and shattering pigs, children and old folks working in the fields and villages. Shown repeatedly at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in some cities church volunteers bought multiple carousel projectors and slides to show the horror of the war to churches, synagogues and other groups.  The point is that this resistance by non-violent interfaith movements during the war practiced a religious tradition that, like the Monk Thích Quang Duc, was not centered in illusions of American greatness.  Strangely, leaders of the anti-war movement of the 1960's report that no one from the Burns research teams asked about their faith-based non-violent actions.

        This is important today because the old time religion of the Vietnam war--faith merged with American nationalism, especially in the age of Trump, is still in play--sometimes for cynical reasons (Lindsay Graham on the "health policy choice between socialism and democracy"), more often because it asks for no moral engagement on the frontier of policy choices about equity, justice or injustice. Trump age heroes are the people with the most money and therefore the most power.

        The irony is that the people supporting Trump are among the least advantaged by the turn to globalization that ended their jobs and who must now send their children--as a means of employment--to fight and die in Iraq or Afghanistan.  The old paradigm still teaches that all this is a religious happening because God is making America great again.  Whether people accept this today may be influenced by the lessons being taught, or not, by the Burns film about Vietnam. 

Democracy as Myth

        When the U. S.  health care system was transferred in the 1980's from the awesome authority of physicians to the power of corporate-based managed care groups--HMO's--the new equation replaced the wisdom of doctors with the techniques of corporate management. Patients would no longer be seen as a source of revenue but as a cost that would be contained and minimized by efficiency.  

        This was a 'dream of reason' wrote Paul Starr in his 1983 Pulitzer prize winning book "and did not take power into account,"

"The dream was that reason, in the form of the arts and sciences, would liberate humanity from scarcity and the caprices of nature.... not least of all, the diseases of the body and the spirit."

            

        Although more progress in health care followed, the change also cast up a new world of power that has left in its wake both growing inequality and widespread distrust of the profiteering to be had through the new corporatized health care model.  A critical analysis of this power, measured by its total impact in the U. S. must deal with both healing understood as a metaphor of faith and health care corporatism's claim to deliver the most justice for dollars spent.  The numbers are staggering and don't fit ordinary people's pockets or understanding about what's going on.

• The U. S. pharmaceutical industry is reported to be worth $446 billion. 
• Forbes Magazine cites a CDC report that the private insurance industry is worth $900 billion.  
• The Center for Responsive Politics reports 811 lobbyists in 2017 working for the insurance industry at a cost of $79 million.  
• Salon cites a Kaiser Health News analysis that thirty-eight major drug makers and trade groups will spend a total of $50.9 million this year on 1,296 lobbyists (See Opensecrets.org)

            You may be for or against Obama Care and Bernie Sanders' new single-payer proposal for Medicare-for-All, but you can be certain of one thing: No stone will be left unturned to preserve this huge health care corporate profit system.  

             Readers may also remember that they cast no votes about the rise of managed care as those major policy changes unfolded thirty-five years ago. The voting public has had to depend on the authority (the power) of other sources.  "When professionals claim to be authoritative about the nature of reality," wrote Starr,  "whether it is the structure of the atom, the ego, or the universe, we generally defer to their judgment."  A very bad dependency if democracy (rule by the people) is to be real.

       These coming weeks in Wahington citizens must weigh what it means for the future of health care if insurance company profits are subordinated to decrease inequality and pay the cost of health care for everyone.  It's a justice question and a challenge to all faith communities and other community groups to enter the public square of political life to tackle the task of critical thinking about about writing new laws and changing old laws in order to give the people equity.  

         Without that happening democracy will continue in its mythical status. And yes, it is a question that bears on the growing threat of fascism in the U. S.

"Power, at the most rudimentary personal level, originates in dependence, and the power of the professions primarily originates in dependence upon their knowledge and competence....what makes dependence on the professions so distinctive today is that their interpretations often govern our understanding of the world and our own experience. To most of us, this power seems legitimate"  [The social transformation of American Medicine: the rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry]  

Or, as Ivan Illich put it many years ago, "a professional is someone who has a stake in your not knowing what he knows." [Deschooling Society]

Labor Day’s Inequality Flood and the Roots of Authoritarianism

         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 7^th 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.

Labor Day and the Roots of Authoritarianism

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 20^th 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 19^th 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 19^th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20^th 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 20^th 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.