Elizabeth Warren and Goliath

By Jim Wallis

I had a most instructive conversation this week with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard economist who is also the Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. Warren has a way of cutting through the jargon and confusion of many economists and of this economic crisis — right to the moral core of the issues at stake. I knew her for her keen insights, but I didn’t know she was from, as she puts it, a “mixed marriage from Oklahoma” — Baptist and Methodist — and that she is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher. In the interview I did with her for Sojourners, her moral and even theological comments were as impressive as her economic analysis of our present crisis. She said the battle for financial regulatory reform is like the battle between David and Goliath.
Warren’s narrative of the U.S. economy, and the banking industry in particular, was very clarifying. For most of U.S. history, our country went through repeated periods of boom and bust, with all the consequences of those cycles. But after the Great Depression, a number of new financial regulations — rules for the road — were put into place that were designed to protect average Americans in particular from the continued abuses of the big banks and the often terrible results in bad times for ordinary people. Two important examples were the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to protect people’s savings and the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 to prevent banks from speculating with depositors’ money. And the new rules worked for several decades, creating both prosperity and security for many American families and an emerging middle class. But starting in 1980, the rules were first watered down and gradually removed, and banks were free again to engage in both the abusive and very risky speculative behavior that helped to bring on the Great Depression, and resulted again in the current Great Recession.

She explained how credit card and mortgage application forms used to be only a page or two and were both clear and understandable to the average person — even allowing people to easily compare and contrast the deals offered. But now, as all of us know, these forms have expanded to 30 pages or more with lots of complications, hard to comprehend provisions, and “fine print” that cleverly hides a long list or traps, tricks, and a myriad of both exploitive arrangements and outright abuses that greatly benefit banks at the expense of borrowers and card holders. In clear moral terms, Warren described the current behavior of our biggest banks as deliberately deceiving, entrapping, and cheating unsuspecting customers into very precarious and ultimately disastrous financial positions. And with no more rules of the road, the banks were leading their customers into the financial ditch. An economic crisis has been the result with massive suffering and pain for millions of Americans.

We are now living in a “lawless” economic environment, according to Warren, where our biggest banks have become our most dangerous predators — and with no protections for the rest of us against the “law of the jungle,” as she puts it. The consequences for our economy, our culture, our families, and even our souls have been disastrous. This is not the way we should want to live, Warren says, and it is creating a world which we should not want our children to grow up in. She makes the urgent case for reform with the compelling analysis of a top economist, the family values of a grandmother, and the moral arguments of a person of faith. The sins of the financial world have become both a moral, and even religious, issue from the perspective of the Methodist tradition “which still shapes me.”

Warren is the “mother” of the idea for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA),which is in the current financial reform bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, and is now slowly making its way through the U.S. Senate. But the big banks are aggressively fighting back, trying to prevent their own regulation only one year after the financial meltdown for which they were in large part responsible. There seems to be no remorse, let alone repentance, from the big banks — only record new profits enabled by their taxpayer-funded bailouts, and enormous bonuses to the executives who made the very decisions that brought the economic system down on the heads and hearts of so many Americans. The biggest banks in America are giving shame a bad name.

Why are new rules, regulations, and protections necessary? Because of the human condition, the realities of human nature, and a biblically orthodox understanding of human sinfulness. Yes, the reasons we need the protections offered by a Consumer Financial Protection Agency are as theological as economic. And it is amazing to me how many of those who oppose any regulation of Wall Street also claim to be religious conservatives. They subscribe to what I label in my new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, “the myth of the sinless market.” I am a conservative Christian too, conservative enough to have a healthy appreciation for human sins, human failings, and fallen-ness, and after witnessing the behavior of America’s biggest banks during this economic crisis, an old theological term called human depravity. It is simply bad theology to trust large corporations not to pollute our waters, poison our air, or cheat their unsuspecting customers. They have to be prevented from doing so for the sake of the common good. Good financial and economic rules reflect, not only good economics, but also good theology. And the free market fundamentalism of Wall Street’s defenders is, among other things, bad theology.

But as Elizabeth Warren, a good Methodist, warns, the banks are trying everything they can think of to kill financial reform. And we must not let them do that. In the name of a fairer economy, of family values, of moral values, and of sound biblical theology, the faith community must now make itself heard on the urgent issue of financial regulatory reform. We must hold our biggest banks accountable to the common good. So let our Senators not just hear from the bankers, but now also from pastors who see what such abusive banking behavior has done to their families and parishioners, to devastated communities with shuttered houses, to the prison of debt that more Americans find themselves in. People of faith across the land must now tell their elected representatives that we will be “watching and praying” to see what they will do about necessary financial reform. We don’t have the money in our financial coffers that the banks do to finance their political campaigns, but we do have our voice and our votes which will be turned against them if they vote against the best interests of our people and for the greed of the bankers. Jesus said it well — choose this day who you will serve, God or Mammon (Money). Let’s now put that choice to our Senators, who need to hear from us this next week while they are in their district offices during the Presidents’ Day recess. Critical decisions are being made for or against critical financial reform right now.

Economic Recovery 1 and 2

For many people, economic recovery means “getting back to where we were a few months or years ago.” That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life – a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life … unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed … quick energy … serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons are one of the most addictive substances possible. They give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feeling of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow – lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making, lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high – crack for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the President’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line – financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer. (For more on this, see my book Everything Must Change.)

Is Christmas Christian?

by Fr. Richard Rohr

As a Franciscan priest, I think I have the right to ask that question. Frankly, it is much easier to ask in a non-Christian owned magazine! We from the Catholic tradition too easily presume that because the title is right, the train following it is on the right track. We are not often open to asking if the train has anything to do with the direction of the original engine. In this case, the birth and message of Jesus of Nazareth.

We all know that the date of December 25 is not derived from Christian tradition. It instead traces back to the third-century Roman feast of the Rebirth of the Sun-normally celebrated as soon as they could observe the same, sometime after the Winter Solstice. Right away, that tells us that the first few centuries of the Common Era had no interest in knowing when Jesus was born or even celebrating it. That came with calendars and the demarcating of precise time.

Frankly, we must confess that it was likely our founder, St. Francis (1182-1226), who began to make Christmas the sentimental celebration that it has become, although his intention was never at all in the direction it has taken. He was the great lover of poverty and simplicity, and would be aghast at the consumer- and group-defining feast that Christmas has become. He merely replicated the drama of the stable with live animals and music.

For Francis and the early Franciscans, ‘incarnation was already redemption”and the feast of Christmas said that God was saying yes to humanity in the enfleshment of his Son in our midst. If that were true, then all questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever–and for everything that was human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation. That’s why Francis liked animals and nature, praising the sun, moon, and stars, like some New Ager from California. It was all good and chosen and beautiful if God came among us “as Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

But groups need and create their identity symbols, and the celebration of Christmas became the big one for Christian Europe, just as Jewish people need Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and Muslims need Ramadan and pilgrimage. The trouble is that the meaning became group-defining instead of life-transforming. As we say today, it got “off message”! It was no longer God’s choice of the whole, but God’s choice of us! (In fairness, most religions make the same mistake at lower levels of transformation).

At those lower levels of civil religion or any religion as a “belonging system” the original meaning is always lost and often even morphs into its exact opposite. Strange and sad, isn’t it? In this case, the self-emptying of God into humble and poor humanity (Philippians 2:7) became an excuse for us to fill, consume, dominate, use, and spend at staggering levels for ourselves. In fact, the days leading up to December 25 are the economic engine around which the entire business economy measures itself in Christian-influenced countries. One might think that the fasting of Ramadan and Yom Kippur might have been a much clearer act of solidarity with the actual mystery celebrated.

Well, this year we might he forced under duress to celebrate the feast of Jesus’ humble birth with honesty! Our economic meltdown is showing for all to see what our real gods have been. It is not the Lord of Israel or his Son that we love, nearly as much as we do our limitless growth, our right to empire, our actual obligation to consume, and our sense of entitlement to this clearly limited planet.

In Christian circles, when I call these false gods into question, I am invariably criticized on other grounds of heresy and church protocols, almost so we do not have to look at what our real loyalties have been and are. “Let’s keep talking about Biblical interpretation or papal infallibility so we never have to look at our lifestyle.” For far too many of us, our final loyalties have been to the system of America, to the free market, to the protecting of the top and not the bottom where Jesus was, and to what Pope John Paul II called “rigid capitalism.” He said in several of his encyclical letters that capitalism had to be critiqued and regulated just as much as socialist communism (e.g., Loborem Exercens). Strange that most western Catholics never quoted him on that theme!

So, come, let us celebrate the feast anew! May we who have consumed the mystery of Jesus now consume his whole meal, and may it free us from needing to consume so much of everything else. If you really have the One, you should not need more and more of the other. Maybe our humble Jesus is stealing our idols from us, and inviting us back into his Bethlehem stable.

As a secular humanist, I have never had a great deal of understanding or empathy for people of faith. Until I started this blog, I thought, like many of my progressive friends, that the world of Christianity was inhabited solely by people like Sarah Palin. In my attempts to understand the Christ that those people worship, I gradually came to the realization that there is much more to Christianity than the black-and-white world that those mis-guided people inhabit. There are a number of links in my blog roll that connect to sites where a more gracious, loving, and compassionate Christianity exists. Back in March, I posted an essay from one of those sites, by David Hilfiker. In my current funk, I re-visited his site and found, perhaps surprisingly, this little gem in another of his essays, entitled “The Church’s Calling to the Coming Crises“:

“Isn’t this just a cover for a liberal agenda? How can we mobilize most of the church along these values? Actually, most of the values we’re talking about are traditionally seen as conservative: challenging materialism and consumerism, love for others, respect for God’s creation. Indeed, the environmental movement is becoming quite strong within many conservative churches, which understand the necessity of protecting God’s creation. What remains to be done is educating Christians to understand how to translate their values into action.”

These thoughts exactly mirror what Chet Bowers was speaking of in his essay that I posted earlier. All of us, along with David Hilfiker, have our work cut out for us. Progressives need to join forces with compassionate Christians in working towards a sustainable future.

In another essay by Hilfiker, entitled “Hope for the Future“, he challenges us to have hope for the future. I needed to read this essay, for I am becoming increasingly gloomy about our prospects. When you encounter the phrase “market capitalism” in the essay, substitute the phrase “market liberal” and you will understand Chet Bowers’ identical understanding of what must be done.

Even though Hilfiker doesn’t say so at the end of his essay, I am increasingly convinced that the only hope for our agenda lies in the Church. Martin Luther King’s vision was not attained without the power of the Gospel behind him. Only visionary religious leaders have the power to counteract the forces that are leading us to our doom.

Hope for our Future

A review of James Gustave Speth’s A Bridge at the End of the World.

“We have not inherited the earth from our parents;
we have borrowed it from our children.”

Honest hope for our future is difficult to find. To look clear-eyed at climate change and the other multiple environmental crises, at global poverty and increasing inequality, at militarism, at capitalism’s domination of the economy and the power of corporations to block meaningful political change, and at the increasing failure of democracy to reflect our deepest values—to look without blinking at all these intertwined threats and still offer not only hope but also possibilities for transformation is a gift we must not let pass. James Gustave Speth’s The Bridge at the End of the World (Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2008) is such a gift.

Speth, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has been for decades the “ultimate insider” within establishment environmentalism, serving, for instance, as environmental adviser to President Carter, the head of the United Nation’s largest agency for international development, and litigator and lobbyist for strong environmental laws. Yet in this fearless review of today’s mêlée of environmental changes, he readily acknowledges that the threats will overwhelm efforts to contain them unless we move beyond traditional environmentalism toward a fundamental transformation of politics, economics, and lifestyle.

In thinking about our environmental future, what ordinarily drains me of hope is not the profound systemic changes or the revolution in personal lifestyle that will be necessary to move toward a no-growth economy. Rather, it is the vast power of the corporations, the enormous influence of advertising on our spiritual and political values, and the seeming incapacity of the American political system to respond. We know what to do about most environmental problems and the issues of injustice. What drains me of hope is the knowledge that virtually every needed change will step on the toes of some powerful group that can stymie public consensus.

In the face of this kind of hopelessness, Speth argues for a thorough transformation. We cannot attack environmental problems one-by-one or in isolation from necessary changes in politics, corporate structure, economy, and injustice.

In general, the world of practical affairs does not truly appreciate how much negative change is coming at us, nor how fast. … So we must look beyond the world of practical affairs to those who are thinking difficult and unconventional thoughts and proposing transformative change. (p. xiv)

“Looking into the Abyss”, Speth’s first chapter, is a careful and almost understated review of those coming negative changes. It is also uncompromising. Climate change is well advanced, and severe damage to human well-being is inevitable, even if we stopped putting excess CO­2 into the air today … which we won’t. It is “highly likely that societies are already too late to head off very serious climate change impacts,” ¹ which will have devastating effects, especially on the world’s poor.

And it’s not just climate change, of course. About half of the world’s tropical and temperate forests have been lost—mostly to clear land for agriculture—leading to loss of species and soil depletion … and worsening climate change. Desertification of arable land—from soil erosion, salinization, devegetation, and soil compaction—has already damaged areas that are together the size of China, and each year an additional area the size of Nebraska is lost to food production. Already human use consumes approximately half of the globe’s total available fresh water supply, and the needs will double by 2050. Already one out of every five people around the world lacks clean drinking water (leading to the deaths of about 1.6 million children every year). Seventy-five percent of the world’s fisheries are already fished to capacity or overfished; the population of swordfish, marlin, tuna, and other large fish has been decimated to ten percent of original stocks. Due to on-going pollution of air and water, virtually every person on earth harbors dozens of toxic chemicals, many of which are already known to cause cancer, hormone disruption, genetic defects or other diseases. Loss of entire species is occurring at a rate one thousand times baseline, so that forty percent of all recognized species on the planet risk extinction, including a quarter of all mammals.

These are devastating changes to our planet. Even writing from a strictly utilitarian perspective that nature is humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit (that is, not considering the intrinsic value of the natural world independent of people and our consequent duty of ecological stewardship), the UN-initiated Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (a four-year effort involving 1360 scientists and other experts) concluded in 2005, “Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide. In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.” ²

Clearly, human activity is overwhelming the earth’s capacity for homeostasis. While exact prediction of the future is a fool’s game, to play Russian roulette without even knowing how many bullets are in the chambers is insane.

The complex interactions between these environmental crises and other economic and political threats are underappreciated. “All these issues can contribute to conflicts over human access to water, food, land, and energy; ecological refugees and humanitarian emergencies; failed states; and armed movements spurred by declining circumstances. They are profound affronts to fundamental fairness and justice in the world,” ³ which, in a vicious cycle, in turn dramatically aggravate environmental degradation.

While acknowledging some significant successes—specifically in protecting the ozone layer and ameliorating acid rain—from the traditional environmentalist response (of which he has been an important leader), Speth makes clear that these successes have been overwhelmed by ongoing degradation. The traditional response—pragmatic and incrementalist, enacting new policies through government bureaucracies or engaging the corporate sector, trusting that problems can be remedied within the system at acceptable economic costs, downplaying the necessary lifestyle changes and threats to economic growth—is inadequate and must be revolutionized.

A central issue is that environmental devastation is built into the capitalist economic structure, exacerbated by the extraordinary power of large corporations and reinforced by the failure of democracy in the face of that power. Environmental tinkering with these structures is not enough; they must be radically transformed. Within the developed world, significant lifestyle changes will be necessary. Unless there is fundamental transformation of society, Speth convinces me, there will be little chance of significant environmental recovery until it is far too late.

Market capitalism was arguably an appropriate mechanism for organizing the economy when the fundamental economic problem was scarcity, when there weren’t enough of the necessities for everyone. Resources were for practical purposes unlimited, human technology wasn’t yet able to drastically alter the environment, and productivity (economic output per worker) was low. But—thanks in large part to the power of market capitalism—those conditions no longer pertain. There is now enough for everyone; the primary problems are maldistribution and injustice; resources (eg oil) are increasingly limited; technology can easily overwhelm the earth’s homeostasis, and productivity is high.

Markets work through appropriate pricing of resources and products. But most environmental damage is external to the market. Under free-market conditions, my polluting the river doesn’t cost me anything but the people downstream have to pay in one way or another. The cost of preventing or cleaning up the pollution is, therefore, not included in the cost of my product. This competitive necessity to “externalize” costs renders free-market capitalism impotent (even in theory) to control environmental damage. The only solution is for government to force internalization of the costs, but global corporate power makes such government response difficult and relatively ineffective. Similarly,

“[t]here are fundamental biases in capitalism that favor the present over the future and the private over the public. Future generations cannot participate in capitalism’s markets. From an environmental perspective, that is a huge flaw because the essence of sustainable development is equity toward future generations.” ⁴

Moreover, built into the legal fundamentals of the corporation are profoundly anti-social structures. The only liability that corporate owners (shareholders) have for the corporation’s mistakes, for instance, is the loss of their investment; they cannot be sued even for the corporation’s culpable malfeasance. The corporation is a “person” whose “freedom of speech” (i.e. advertising) cannot be limited by the community’s best interests. Corporate managers are not legally permitted to make moral (e.g. pro-ecological) decisions that do not enrich the corporation financially; that is, managers are legally driven to externalize any cost they can. All of which is to say that we have created immensely powerful, utterly amoral entities, given them all the precious legal rights of human beings, yet require no human being to be accountable for their actions. John Cavanagh et. al., put it bluntly. “We must dramatically change the publicly traded, limited liability global corporation, just as previous generations set out to eliminate or control the monarchy.” ⁵

But the deeper, even more fundamental problem is that capitalism requires constant growth. Competition forces firms to expand in order to survive. The all-important financial interests of shareholders demand growth. Consumerism (where goods and services are acquired not primarily to satisfy common needs but to create identity and meaning) always requires more. Politicians discover that economic growth boosts approval rates, keeps difficult social justice and other issues at bay and generates larger revenues without raising taxes, so they are unlikely to challenge corporate growth. “Growth has often been America’s ‘out’—the way, many believed, that the nation could somehow square the circle and reconcile its love of liberty with its egalitarian pretensions.” ⁶ The explicit assumption of virtually every national politician is that economic growth is the bedrock of the American Dream, ignoring the inconvenient truth that constant growth is incompatible with the survival of an earth hospitable to human life. In a living organism, constant growth is called “cancer.” Without radical societal transformation, the only remaining brakes on constant economic growth are the earth’s ecological limits. To be sure, those brakes will ultimately be mercilessly effective. We will stop growing … eventually. Whether human beings will find that which remains desirable is an entirely different question.

Speth is writing specifically to Americans and more generally to the people from developed nations since those 20% of the world’s people account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures. But he also recognizes the massive environmental devastation in developing countries, which puts poverty and inequality squarely on the environmental agenda, too. As long as people remain without adequate food, shelter, health care, or education, we cannot expect them to voluntarily slow their economic growth. As it is, the poor bear the brunt of the environment’s rejoinder to our assaults. As a global culture we simply don’t stand a chance unless there is enough redistribution of income to give the world’s poor some recognizable stake in the future of the earth.

The only hope for adequate change is through governmental action, but the rise of corporate globalism has given corporate power a stranglehold on the American democracy. The corporate community is cohesive on issues that affect its general welfare; its financial contributions to campaigns followed by intense lobbying (through an army of 30,000 lobbyists in Washington alone) give it enormous political power, so that on most issues that seriously concern the corporate community there is little disagreement between the two political parties. Furthermore, through commercial advertising, political issue advertising, support for business-oriented think tanks, well-funded studies, positions on non-profit boards and contributions to their causes, and support for university and other research, corporations are able to dominate public discussion of most issues. The few forums for truthful environmental education of the citizenry are marginalized. The largest media outlets, of course, are all corporations themselves, sharing the same broad corporate interests (on, for instance, labor, government reform, economy, and regulation).

On the face of it, I will admit, this does not seem hopeful. The hope, as I see it, is that Speth recognizes and articulates the breadth of the change that will be necessary. Working at things piecemeal—while perhaps necessary in the short run—will only delay the full-blown nightmare unless we are also working simultaneously to transform the entire system: economic, social, political, and environmental all at once. The shorthand is that the ecological disaster can be averted only by a fundamental change in the economy, which will happen only with a fundamental change in corporate structure and power, which will happen only with a fundamental change in governance. The epitome of hopelessness is to work at something that—even if it succeeds—has no chance of changing the larger structures that condemn us to an unacceptable future. Far better, (in my heart at least) is to work as a part of a larger transformation—already well underway, according to Speth—that recognizes and is attacking the fundamental problems at their roots, even if those problems seem profound and vast.

Is this just trading one kind of hopelessness for another? What are the realistic chances of such fundamental change? Speth makes several important points.

First, such deep and wide-spread change is not generally possible during most political eras but does become possible during times of crisis; and our nation is entering such a period of crisis that will become increasingly severe. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial meltdown, and the current recession are merely the foreshocks of what is coming. Quoting Gar Alperovitz, Speth reminds us, “Fundamental change—indeed, radical systemic change—is a common as grass in world history.” ⁷ People rarely see it coming (and it isn’t usually the change they anticipated), but it comes frequently and, often, suddenly. Speth was writing before the 2008 presidential election, which certainly demonstrated the possibility of political change.

Second, the dirty little secret of America’s commitment to consumerism and economic growth is that it doesn’t make us any happier. If more consumption made human being happier, Speth concedes, there would be virtually no chance of stopping the environmental tsunami that is coming. But it doesn’t. Corporate advertising’s core message—that “more” will make you happier—is a bald-faced lie, and most of us know it. Study after study indicates that beyond a certain minimal standard of living, increases don’t raise either the levels of self-perceived happiness or the psychological measures of well-being. In fact, just the opposite appears to be true. As a nation we are—even by objective psychiatric measures—more anxious and more depressed than we were sixty years ago. And the general population is beginning to realize this.

In one survey,⁸ 83 percent of Americans say society is not focused on the right priorities, 81 percent say America is too focused on shopping and spending; 88 percent say American society is too materialistic; 74 percent believe excessive materialism is causing harm to the environment. If these numbers are anywhere near correct, there is a powerful base on which to build. ⁹

Third, and perhaps most hopeful, change has already started and is well under way across our nation and around the world. New forms of business ownership are widespread: ten million Americans work in some 11,000 employee-owned companies; 120 million Americans are co-op members of everything from credit unions to rural electric cooperatives to insurance companies; the top one thousand pension funds own nearly $5 trillion in assets that can be used to influence corporate decisions on behalf of their members’ interests; and cities and states own and earn revenue from their own businesses, for example, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil profits as dividends ($3269 in 2008) to every state resident. The international social movements for change (e.g. the World Social Forum), while widely ignored in America’s mainstream media, are stronger than many imagine and will grow still stronger.

What I find most hopeful in Speth’s book is the wide range of suggestions for action at every level:

1. Personal changes in lifestyle (most of us reading this will have to cut consumption significantly) to even make possible a no-growth, ecologically sustainable society

2. Spiritual/social education about how to strengthen family and social connectedness

3. The movement toward rooting the economy in local areas

4. Organizing to push for measures that guarantee good, well-paying jobs and minimize layoffs and job insecurity

5. Campaigns to modify corporate structure in order to significantly reduce corporate power and inject social values into the decision-making process

6. Changes in government to make our democracy more responsive to the people and resistant to the power of corporations and

7. Even changes in the way we measure economic activity so that we get what we want (human well-being) rather than “growth.”

To be sure, we must not give up the immediate and urgent efforts to address directly climate change and the other environmental crises. But at the same time, we must begin a much broader movement to reorient our society towards our common values. Those who care most about the earth (or poverty, or inequality, or oppression) must recognize that economic and political reform are their issues, too. For example, public financing of campaigns (probably the only way to substantially change the influence of money in politics), limiting the legal “personhood” of corporations and restricting corporate charters, embracing a no-growth economy, redistributing income to assure global equity are now necessary conditions for our future. What is our vision for human society? It includes the primacy of human relationships (especially family), meaningful work, leisure, care for the earth, universal health care, universal education, care for the elderly, global equity, and so on. We can no longer only work for these goals in piecemeal fashion. A Movement to include all of them has already begun. We are invited to join it so the earth may remain hospitable to human life.

I find it very interesting that Dr. Boyd writes that the alliance of the religious right with the Republican Party has “greatly compromised the holy beauty of the kingdom of God to non-Christians.” That is certainly true in my case. That is why I have a category in the side-bar entitled “Religious Left” because I subscribe to the notion that Christianity should be about questioning the power relationships in our society, not endorsing them. Wasn’t Christ brought before Pontius Pilate by the Sanhedrin because he was a threat to the established authorities?

Here is Dr. Boyd’s essay. Perhaps it will inspire you to do further reading in the field.

Taking America Back for God?

Shortly after the Gulf War in 1992 I happened to visit a July Fourth worship service in a certain megachurch. At center stage stood a large cross next to an equally large American flag. The congregation sang some praise choruses mixed with such patriotic hymns as “God Bless America.” The climax of the service centered on a video of a well-known Christian military general giving a patriotic speech about how God has blessed America as evidenced by the speedy and almost “casualty-free” victory “he gave us” in the Gulf War (Iraqi deaths apparently weren’t counted as “casualties” worthy of notice).

The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American flag waving in the background. Majestic, patriotic music now thundered. Suddenly, four fighter jets appeared on the horizon, flew over the crosses, and then split apart. As they roared over the camera, the words “God Bless America” appeared on the screen in front of the crosses.

The congregation responded with roaring applause, catcalls, and a standing ovation. I saw several people wiping tears from their eyes. Indeed, as I remained frozen in my seat, I grew teary-eyed as well–but for entirely different reasons. I was struck with horrified grief. Thoughts raced through my mind: How could the cross and the sword have been so thoroughly fused without anyone seeming to notice? How could Jesus’ self-sacrificial death be linked with flying killing machines? How could the kingdom of God be reduced to this sort of violent, nationalistic tribalism? Has the church progressed at all since the Crusades?

The evangelical church in America has, to a large extent, become intoxicated with the Constantinian, nationalistic, violent mindset of imperialistic Christendom. The evidence is all around but nowhere clearer than in the simple, oft-repeated slogan that we Christians are going to “take America back for God.” The thinking is that America was founded as a Christian nation but has simply veered off track. If we can just get the power of Caesar again, however, we can take it back. If we can just protect the sanctity of marriage, make it difficult, if not impossible, to live a gay lifestyle, and overturn Roe vs. Wade, we will be getting closer. If we can just get prayer (Christian prayer, of course) back into our schools along with the Ten Commandments and creationist teaching, we will be restoring our country’s Christian heritage. If we can just keep “one nation under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, protect the rights of Christians to speak their minds, get more control of the liberal media, clean up the trash that’s coming out of the movie and record industry, while marginalizing, if not eradicating, liberal groups such as the ACLU, we will have won this nation back for Jesus Christ.

The myth of America as a Christian nation, with the church as its guardian, has been, and continues to be, damaging both to the church and to the advancement of God’s kingdom. Among other things this nationalistic myth blinds us to the way in which our most basic and cherished cultural assumptions are diametrically opposed to the kingdom way of life taught by Jesus and his disciples. Instead of living out the radically countercultural mandate of the kingdom of God, this myth has inclined us to Christianize many pagan aspects of our culture. Instead of providing the culture with a radically alternative way of life, we largely present it with a religious version of what it already is. The myth clouds our vision of God’s distinctively beautiful kingdom and undermines our motivation to live as set-apart (holy) disciples of this kingdom.

Even more fundamentally, because this myth links the kingdom of God with certain political stances within American politics, it has greatly compromised the holy beauty of the kingdom of God to non-Christians. The myth harms the church’s primary mission. For many in America and around the world, the American flag has smothered the glory of the cross, and the ugliness of our American version of Caesar has squelched the radiant love of Christ. Because the myth that America is a Christian nation has led many to associate America with Christ, many now hear the good news of Jesus only as American news, capitalistic news, imperialistic news, exploitive news, antigay news, or Republican news. And whether justified or not, many people want nothing to do with any of it.

Christians must reject any and every fusion of the kingdom of God with our political agendas, whether Republican or Democratic, liberal or conservative. The kingdom Jesus established and modeled with his life, death, and resurrection doesn’t seek to “win” by any criteria the world would use. Rather, it seeks to be faithful. It demonstrates the reign of God by manifesting the sacrificial character of God, and in the process, it reveals the most beautiful, dynamic, and transformative power in the universe.

To the ‘Furiously Raging’ Religious Right

December 16, 2008 2:37 p.m.

Posted by: Peter Laarman, Executive Director

See also: “Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?” (Messiah, Jennens libretto, adapted from Psalm 2, KJV)

Yes, when I finally read the Lisa Miller essay in Newsweek to find out what the fuss was all about, it instantly occurred to me, and I will put it bluntly: it is not homosexuality as such that is abomination to the Christian Right, it is the idea of a God who loves everyone and who honors love and fidelity in all forms and expressions.

These people imagine a vain thing, and they imagine it in a way that has consequences that are dangerous to themselves and others. They imagine that God Almighty shares their particular prejudices and their particular politics. They think of the Bible as uniquely theirs to own and interpret. And so they rage furiously together when someone like Lisa Miller has the temerity to present, in a national publication with significant reach, other ways to construe the divine stammering (Schleiermacher) that is contained within the sixty-six books that most Protestants take to be the whole of Holy Writ.

Although some of the furiously raging still claim a Calvinist lineage, they forget that for Jean Calvin, as for Fr. Luther, nothing in Scripture that contradicts the spirit of Christ, as disclosed in the words and deeds, can claim ultimate canonical authority for the baptized.

A friend and colleague of mine in Pasadena, Fuller Seminary professor Glen Stassen, once observed that he could not find many fundamentalist sermons from the 1990s (he had been reviewing Southern Baptist sermons in particular) that actually drew upon the teachings and parables of Jesus. The proof texts and sermon texts these preachers used were nearly all rules and regulations laid down in Levitical holiness codes, in wrath-filled passages from the prophetic literature, and in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature.

This heavy reliance on rule-bound scriptural teaching works really well for wannabe moral enforcers, but to recall the words of our Saviour (himself quoting Isaiah): “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

I am no trained theologian, nor do I pretend to be. But I must observe that neither, for the most part, are Miller’s attackers trained theologians. Yet most of those in the attack pack do exhibit unearned pretension (sin against the Holy Spirit, anyone?) to ultimate knowledge of what the Bible is about and also to ultimate knowledge of what Jesus intends for us poor mortals with respect to who we can love and who we cannot love.

For a truly enlightened theological discussion of biblical authority, I defer to my own organization’s hardworking theology squad, which published (in Resistance: The New Role of Progressive Christians, Westminster John Knox, 2008) the best account I have yet seen of how contemporary Christians are to hear and respond to the Bible’s prophetic testimony. I myself am just a country preacher and a wannabe organizer of faithful Christian people. I am not currently married myself (in case anyone is interested), but I have officiated at the marriages of lots of people and counseled many others who are unhappily married. I yield to no one in my love for the God’s Word—both those sixty-six books and also the revealed Word in the person of Christ Jesus.

Here are my own biblical and theological lodestars with respect to marriage:

1. God loves human individuality, and the indwelling of the Creator God’s image and likeness cannot possibly be limited to persons whose sexual behavior and/or models of marriage conform to some culturally constructed earthly norm—a 20th century Ozzie and Harriet norm, evidently, in the case of the furiously raging.

2. God’s supreme gift to humanity is what we call communion (a concept too rich to unpack here), and the highest human expression of communion is what we call marriage. Because God clearly intends all to enjoy this highest gift, and because same-sex couples clearly do enjoy it in equal measure with non-same-sex couples, it is humanly perverse not to honor and recognize the communion of same-sexers.

3. In respect to the alleged procreative function, do we not often affirm at wedding ceremonies that the love between those to be wedded mirrors the love between Christ and Christ’s church—clearly a non-procreative love? (I’m just asking.)

4. Even if we were to accept the terms furiously raging and go with the Pauline prescriptions and proscriptions, what are we to make of that late-called apostle’s famous pronouncement, “But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (I Corinthians 7:9)? Here is what I make of it in relation to marriage equality: You who rage so furiously cannot have it both ways! You cannot denounce gay people for their alleged sexual promiscuity, yet deny gays and lesbians any option but total sexual continence—a standard you yourselves could never abide. Where is the “do unto others…” in such a stance?

What the raging conservative Christians, in their role as would-be sole proprietors of biblical interpretation, have done in respect to marriage is actually rather sad when you think about it.

They have imagined a vain thing. They have built themselves an idol, calling it sanctified marriage and presuming to define sanctified marriage as occurring only between “one man and one woman.”

How insulting to the human spirit! And how mightily insulting to the great “I AM,” whose ways are not our ways, and who can tolerate lots of human foibles but who really has a big problem (if the Bible can be trusted) with the one thing called idolatry.

I found this essay by Van Jones that I think speaks to the crux of the matter. The Left will not make a lot of progress in the community of the faithful until they come to terms with what Van Jones writes about.

The Religious Left Fights Back

July 28, 2005

Rabbi Michael Lerner is stirring up trouble again—thank God.

Earlier this week, Lerner was the main organizer of a national gathering in Berkeley, California, for the religious Left. His “Spiritual Activism” conference was intended to help launch a much-needed new initiative: the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP).

Lerner has been the spark-plug for many progressive, faith-based undertakings over the years, including Tikkun magazine. But this latest effort is an order of magnitude more challenging than anything he has attempted thus far. And given the stakes for our ailing would-be democracy, the birthing of NSP may prove to be his most important calling.

Lerner wants to help forge a new alliance of “religious, secular and ’spiritual-but-not-religious’ progressives.” This alliance will someday expose and challenge the cancer of American consumerism. And it will oppose the religious Right’s abuse of scripture to promote war, intolerance and ugly corporate agendas.

By itself, those two goals would warrant full-throated support from all progressives. But don’t be surprised if the good rabbi’s efforts also draw some serious “boos” from many parts of the Left, as well. That’s because Lerner’s bravest and hardest work is aimed much closer to home.

He wants to do more than just minister to the mall-lobotomized masses or give the fundamentalists a well-deserved spanking. He also wants to challenge the Left’s chronic and toxic bias against religious feeling, expression and people.

Challenging Left Bias Against Religious People

Lerner hopes to end “religio-phobia among progressives.” And such efforts will not be welcome among a great many secular progressives.

As for me, I will be praying for the Rabbi’s success. I am an African-American Christian who was raised in the American heartland. When I moved to the cosmopolitan coasts of Connecticut, and later California, I ran headlong into shocking levels of anti-religious bigotry among left activists.

I literally have had liberals laugh in my face when I told them I was a Christian. For a while, I felt self-conscious about telling other activists that I preferred not to meet on Sunday mornings, because I wanted to go to church.

It is still commonplace to hear so-called radicals stereotyping all religious people as stupid dupes—and spitting out the word “Christian” as if it were an insult or the name of a disease. I thought progressives were supposed to be the standard-bearers of tolerance and inclusion.

I certainly know the monstrous crimes that have been committed through the ages in the name of religion, or with the blessings of religious people. But I know a few other things about religion, too.

I grew up in the Black churches of the rural south, listening to the stories of my elders. As children, we heard about the good, brave people who had poured their blood out upon the ground so that we could be free. We learned how police officers had clubbed and jailed them. We learned how Klansmen had shot and lynched them. And how the G-men from Washington had just stood by, watching and doodling in their notepads.

We learned of marches and mayhem, freedom songs and funerals. We saw images of billy-clubbed Black women on their hands and knees, searching for their teeth on Mississippi sidewalks—crawling while still clutching their little American flags. We felt pity for the children who spent long nights in frigid jail cells, wearing clothing soaked by fire-hoses, while their bones—broken and untended—began to mend at odd angles.

We saw pictures of Black men, like our fathers, hanging by their necks—their faces twisted, their bodies rigid, their clothes burned off—along with their skin. And we saw photos of carefree killers, sauntering home out of Alabama courtrooms—their faces white and sneering and proud.

We learned how the very best of humanity had faced off with the very worst of humanity—each circling the other, under the same summer sun. That epic struggle had elevated southern back roads and backwaters onto the Great World Stage. And the fate of a people—along with the destiny of a nation—hung in the balance, for all to see.

In the end, we children cheered, for the righteous did prevail. More than that, they performed one of the great miracles in human history: They transformed Apartheid America into a fledgling democracy, tender and delicate and new.

The Soul Power Of The Civil Rights Movement

All progressives today proudly celebrate that achievement—and rightly so. But one key fact seems to escape the notice of today’s activist crowd. The champions of the civil rights struggle didn’t come marching out of shopping centers in South. Or libraries. Or high school gymnasiums.

To face the attack dogs, to face the fire-hoses, to face the police batons, these heroes and she-roes came marching boldly out of church-houses. And they were singing church songs. They set an example of courage and sacrifice that will endure for the ages. And as they did it, they prayed on wooden pews—in the name of a Nazarene carpenter named Jesus.

The implications are clear for those who seek today to rescue and redeem U.S. society. The facts are simple and profound: The last time U.S progressives captured the national debate and transformed politics, people of faith were at the center of the movement, not stuck in its closet.

As a descendent of enslaved Africans who were told that God (and not capitalist greed) required their degradation, I know the crimes of the Christian church as well as anyone. But as a child of the civil rights movement, I also know the power of Christian faith, the power of moral appeal and the power of spiritual strength—to break asunder the bonds of servitude.

And in our do-or-die effort to set things right in America, it is time for U.S. progressives to return to the bottomless well of soul power that sustained the slaves and defeated Jim Crow.

Progressive People Of Faith Have Proud History

That is why I applaud Rabbi Lerner’s efforts. He is standing in a long tradition of faith-honoring Americans, who have helped lead the charge from barbarism toward democracy. In the 1800s, escaping Africans fled enslavement through the bedrooms and basements of Quakers, along the famous Underground Railroad. In the 1980s, religious congregations led the Sanctuary Movement. Their efforts opened up U.S. cities to Latinos who were fleeing U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s violent and covert interventions in Latin America.

The Rabbi’s new efforts also resonate today. Reeling from the steady string of recent defeats, even the most hard-core U.S. activists are seeking deeper meaning and spiritual sustenance in their lives. At the same time, previously apolitical “spiritual types” are getting involved as activists for the first time—to defend the Earth and her people from the predations of the Bush agenda.

Rev. Jim Wallis’ most recent book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, struck a chord this year and became an instant bestseller. Rev. Frances Hall Kieschnick (spouse of Working Assets powerhouse Michael Kieschnick) is taking steps to start a Beatitudes Society, to give more voice to progressive people of faith. Similar efforts are springing up on smaller scales all across the country.

Somewhere, in all of these stirrings, I see the seeds of a wisdom-based, Earth-honoring, pro-democracy movement—one that affirms and applauds religious and spiritual impulses, while opposing fundamentalism, chauvinism and theocracy. Over time, this kind of progressive movement has the potential to win—and win big—in the United States. To be honest: it is probably the only type of progressive movement that stands a chance in a country as religious as ours.

Such a movement is within reach. But progressives must abandon the old pattern of reducing the Great Faiths to their worst elements, constituents and crimes—and then dismissing all other facts and features. It is not just stupid political strategy. At a moral level, it is a form of blindness and bigotry that is beneath all of us.

Two Things Upon Which Everyone Can Agree

My prayer is that a critical mass of progressives can agree on two basic premises.

Number one: Any progressive approach to “faith in politics” that ignores the awful crimes of religiously-inspired people is dishonest, inauthentic and can never achieve emancipatory ends.

Number two: At the same time, any approach that fails to honor and embrace the positive contributions of religiously inspired people is also wrong-headed. Worse, it foolishly and needlessly shuts progressives off from our own history, achievements and present sources of vital support.

I believe that Rabbi Lerner has come up with a thoughtful, sensitive and wise approach, worthy of broad-based affirmation. He aims to: “build an alliance between secular, religious and ’spiritual-but-not-religious’ progressives—in part by challenging the anti-religious biases in parts of the liberal culture.” But he also wants to acknowledge “the legitimacy of anger against those parts of the religious world that have embodied authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic practices and attitudes.”

That is a formulation that the vast majority of progressives should be able to adopt, affirm and cheer about. I certainly do. And in wishing him all the best, I shout: Amen, brother Lerner … Amen!