by Audrey deCoursey
Rupert Murdoch’s new Wall Street Journal offers an interesting affirmation of what many of us of the Brethren Left (i.e. the Radical Wing of the Church of the Brethren) have known for a while: we progressives are just as Christian as those Christianically coalesced righties running (ruining?) our country.
Yet, unsurprisingly, the column concludes that the left-leaning of some churches’ leadership is what’s causing their populations to decline. The writer seems to have no way to counter the charge that church support for labor justice is not theologically sound as part of the Christian mission. So he resorts to denouncing it as unpopular. Which has never really been the best standard of what’s moral and Christian, now, has it?
To read the text of the full article, click here.
In the piece from October 16, 2007, Steven Malanga writes,
Everyone knows the potent force of the Christian right in American politics. But since the mid-1990s, an increasingly influential religious movement has arisen on the left, mostly escaping the national press’s notice. This new religious left does not expend its political energies on the cultural concerns that primarily motivate conservative evangelicals. Instead, working mostly at the state and local level, and often in lockstep with unions, its ministers, priests, rabbis, and laity exert a major, sometimes decisive, influence in campaigns to enforce a “living wage,” to help unions organize, and to block the expansion of nonunionized businesses like Wal-Mart.
The new religious left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration in part from the Protestant “social gospel” movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Baptist Minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute wealth and forge an egalitarian society. Rauschenbusch called for the creation of a kingdom of heaven here on earth—just as presidential candidate Barack Obama did last week at a church in South Carolina.
(Note the fascism-resonating language of calling progressive coalition building working ‘in lockstep.’ ) For an example of the religious left supporting economic justice, click here to read about the Reformed Churches denouncing corporate globalization as the new slavery.
Bafflingly, Malanga states his historical analysis as incontrovertible -
Despite decades of economic progress that have reduced unemployment levels to record lows and made America a magnet for opportunity-seeking immigrants, leading clergy of the religious left depict the free market as a vast exploitative force, controlled by a small group of godless power brokers.
- yet he then paints a picture of real life in America that completely contradicts that prosperity he celebrates just paragraphs above:
Around two-thirds of poor families today are single-parent households, largely dependent on government subsidies and headed by women with little education. The entry-level, low-wage work for which these mothers are qualified makes it hard to support large families. And the time they must devote to raising their kids makes it hard to climb the economic ladder. Poverty is increasingly about the irresponsible decision to have children out of wedlock. In many inner city communities where poverty is entrenched, 75% of all children are now born out of wedlock. (my emphasis)
The explanation for this lack of ‘progress’ for most people would seem to be obvious. But, no, it is not the vast exploitative powers of the economic system that create these people’s economic problems: it is their own immorality.
Religious left clerics also ignore the evidence that much poverty in prosperous, opportunity-rich America results from dysfunctional—dare one call it “sinful”?—behavior.
For a column in a secular newspaper, this theologizing seems a bit out of place. Not only is his portrait of ‘America’ internally inconsistent (how is there such suffering and impossibility of ‘climbing the economic ladder’ in such an ‘opportunity-rich’ society?) – it relies on blaming the victims of the economic system for what they’re suffering, and it exploits religious language to do so. It is the woman ‘irresponsible’ enough to have children that is the problem, not the irresponsible economic system that does not respond to basic human need. By the morality of the market, the ‘responsible decision’ for a poor woman would be to accept her assigned lot in life and the limitations it confers, such as not reproducing; it would be ‘irresponsible’ for her to question an economic system that deems only certain members of the population fit to have children. But why shouldn’t every person get to have children and have enough to eat? Why should any of us have to make that choice? Isn’t the system broken if we do? Are we not irresponsible to God if we mold ourselves to be ‘responsible’ in a system unresponsive to human need?
In the Journal’s theology of the marketplace, to be poor is indeed to be sinful, and to be rich is to be good, which may be why Malanga cannot analyze a person’s economic status apart from her moral nature. The capitalist economic system is the ultimate moral good, and we human cogs are measured only in how well we fit ourselves into it. And those of us who call for people to know their own humanity as what makes them beloved in the hands of God, not their earning power – for those of us who see economic systems as tools to be molded to benefit human society, and not the other way around – well, we must seem heretics from the market’s gospel indeed.
Fortunately for us, the left’s ‘clerics’ offer a much more coherent analysis of what’s going on: a sinful, irresponsible capitalist system oppressing the grassroots laborers it relies on to function. And, we’re taking action against it, through the pulpit, on the picket lines, and in our Sunday School classrooms. I guess we’ve got the right’s reporters so scared by our movement, that they’ve taken to enscribing soteriology in their ‘news.’
