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The Rector's Rant: A Historical and Theological Reflection on These Economic Times by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy
Over the last few weeks, our nation has been rocked by reports of corporate misconduct and fraud, stock market decline, employee pension fund mismanagement and the specter of executives being led away in handcuffs. Even that paragon of purity, Martha Stewart, has been accused of being a liar and a cheat. Political leaders and Wall Street bureaucrats have rushed to implement reforms and institute harsher penalites. It has been intimated that the problem is isolated and aberrational rather than endemic and systemic. Such reforms are driven by a fear that unless this problem is quickly "resolved," uncertainty and anxiety may spread from the investment to the consumer side of the economy and then we're in real trouble. But the issue is deeper than a matter of "confidence."
The problem with the analysis so far is that, for the most part, it fails to ask the deeper questions. How we got in this mess may well inform how we get out.
An Historical Reflection
The American Experience, since its inception, has been shaped by an essential contradiction: the need to protect the privileges of the elite coupled with a fear of the masses in tension with the professed ideals of democracy and the proclamation of the ideology of equality. The men of means who crafted our foundational documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights) and thus who shaped our National Identity were men who were themselves formed by an 18th century English culture of hierarchal and hereditary aristocracy dependent on a "neo-feudal" exploitation of the lower classes.
Edmund Morgan writes in Essays on the American Revolution: "The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class; the new against the established."
To be reminded that five groups of "Americans" were not represented at the Constitutional Convention--Indians, slaves, indentured servants, women, and men without property--is not simply a matter of retrospective political correctness masked as historical critique. Rather, it is to observe that in being both excluded from the table and from the creative imaginations of those who were there, the interest of the majority of "Americans" were neither represented nor protected.
This essential "design flaw" has been played out in 200+ years of American history, as a struggle to live up to the ideals of democracy and equality in the context of an economic and political system which conspires to protect corporate wealth and power and the privileges of the elite. The issue is not conservative/liberal or Republican/Democrat but one of basic paradigmatic understanding about how the world works.
Richard Hofstadter, in The American Political Tradition, in reviewing political leaders from the founders to mid point in the 20th century, wrote: "the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise... They have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man. That culture has been intensely nationalistic ..."
This capitalist culture greatly accelerated after the Civil War with the advent of the Industrial Age. Kevin Phillips, in Wealth and Democracy, observes that in 1906, the top 1% of Americans owned as much as 60% of all U.S. wealth. Such excesses, coupled with a perception that government was unresponsive if not complicitious in this arrangement, led to individual acts of terrorism as well as a growing socialist movement in America. The efforts to organize small farmers and workers into unions for greater political and economic power in the early decades of the last century were met with extreme violence (including the National Guard) and counter violence. Huey Long, the southern populist, 1934-35, explored running for President on a platform critical of the 4% of the elite who owned 85% of the wealth of America.
Franklin Roosevelt (President from 1933-1945) did much to try to "save capitalism from the capitalist" by progressively taxing the rich. The top rate was between 91% and 94%. This tax scheme remained in place until the 1960's, it should be recalled. By 1970, the income gap had narrowed substantially, with the top 1% owning barely 20% of the wealth.
Accelerating during the Reagan/Bush revolution, the gap between rich and poor is nearing record highs again. In 1999, the top 1% owned a third of the wealth of the nation. The top fifth of all the American populations now earns 11 times more than the bottom fifth - the largest gap in the Industrial World. President Bush's efforts to repeal the mischaracterized "death tax" (a tax designed to prevent the transfer of wealth of the richest Americans to their heirs and thus prevent the establishment of an American Aristocracy similar to England) threatens to further accelerate the development of a "plutocracy," which Kevin Phillips defines as the "fusion of money and government, or a "rule by the rich."
The growth of the plutocracy - the hostage of politicians to money that not only talks but screams - and increased concentration of the wealth of the many in the hands of the few, threatens the democratic process itself. Each year, fewer and fewer Americans vote and those who do, do so without enthusiasm because the average American has grown cynical and despairing in believing that the "system" cares about them and that our government is impotent to address real problems. The disparities of the plutocratic system are only challenged by the compelling hope of equality embedded in the immortal words "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Throughout American history, periodic revolts by Indians, blacks, small farmers, socialists, labor unions, migrant workers, Chinese and Mexican immigrant workers, women, gays, youth and others have all been animated and sustained by the call to greater equality and freedom. The extension of the promise of economic justice to all Americans is the unresolved paradox of the American experiment. Including the excluded, making visible the invisible and rejecting any language that institutionalizes a permanent underclass as no more than an ideological justification for a permanent "overclass"-- this is the "dream deferred" that the current economic crisis exposes.
A Theological Reflection
Hebrew law provided clear guidelines for humankind's relationship to labor and possessions. Sabbath-keeping reminded a covenanted people that humankind are co-creators with God but even God rests from the need to be productive. Shabbat reminded them of the need the earth has to rest and be restored from human labor (Exodus 20:8-11). The Law of Moses provided that a portion of the produce of the field (gleanings) were to be left for sojourners and aliens--non-Hebrews traveling through, or exiled to, Israel (Leviticus 19:9). At the Jubilee Year (every 50 years) any land indentured to another was to be returned in order to prevent the development of an aristocratic landowning class (Leviticus 25:10). Such laws were developed following the Exodus to remind Israel that they were not to imitate the domination system of Egypt that had held them in bondage.
In demanding a King, a monarchy like other nations, and thus foregoing God's appointment of anointed and "provisional" Judges, Israel fell away from the intention of God for how their social life was to be ordered. The prophets called such resistance to God's plan "Sin" and were usually killed for their witness. (See, for example, Amos 5.)
In New Testament history, John the Baptist taught his disciples, including a precocious student named Jesus from Nazareth, that if anyone had two tunics (underwear) they were to give one to the person who had none (Luke 3:11). Mary, in rejoicing in the news of her pregnancy, exults God who "puts down the mighty from their thrones and sends the rich empty away" (Luke 1:52-53). Once Jesus told a rich young man to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor and come and follow him because he perceived how money for him had become an idol (Matthew 19: 21-22). Of himself, Jesus said, the birds of the air have their nests but the son of man has no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). The Prince of Heaven's birthplace was a filthy borrowed stable-cave, his throne an animals' feeding bin, his attendants, despised and likely drunken peasant shepherds (Luke 2).
In the early church, the disciples held all things in common and those of means sold their possessions to provide for the care of the most vulnerable (widows and orphans). Those who selfishly held back their possessions were liable to judgment for their greed (Acts 4:32-5:11).
In the teachings of the Church Fathers, provision for the weakest members of the community by those of means was a clear expectation. "As long as anyone has the means of doing good to his neighbor, and does not do so, he shall be reckoned a stranger to the love of the Lord."-- Irenaeus, c. 202 C.E.
Throughout Christian history, the monastic tradition has consistently held that the basis of community life in Christ is, first and foremost, poverty. Such poverty enabled hospitality to those in need: "Show mercy, always offering generous help for every grief and distributing alms to the poor with a gentle heart while saying with your whole soul, "This is not my property, but that of him who created me."-- Hildegard of Bingen, 1179 C.E.
The prophetic tradition constantly calls us to dream again the Dream of God (see Verna Dozier's book of that same title) and to be more faithful to the values of the Kingdom of God. Prophets of this present age have been none the less clear than those of old: "We are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied to a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people can not expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968 C.E.
A prescription for change
Unless this present crisis leads us to ask fundamental questions about how our society is organized and governed to benefit a few, provide just enough to the many in order to insure "domestic tranquility" and "order," while keeping in need the most, the quick fixes will do little to fundamentally alter the basic power arrangements which frustrate our democratic ideals that impel us to greater equality. Indeed, as economists have told us for years, these cycles (now: "bubbles") in capitalist economy are unavoidable.
True reform requires us to think outside the box. To site one example: the present educational system relies on a college entrance exam, the SAT, (which is acknowledged by educators to be no reliable predictor of success) to fill the limited seats at institutions of higher learning. In choosing to discontinue its reliance on this instrument, administrators in California's UC system have tellingly revealed that the SAT's, if it predicts anything, predicts the families of means who were well off enough to hire tutors and other helps to prepare their children for the exam. Rather than factoring out the hard working, motivated young people who do not test well and who can not afford specialized help, because there are not enough spaces for those who want to attend college, why not make more seats!
Keith Parker, the affirmative action officer at UCLA, once told me that the issue is not lowering the standards in admitting people of color but rather is the challenge of "making the table bigger," ( As a Christian and the son of a Christian minister, the "Eucharistic image" of an open and welcoming table was not lost to him.)
If true reform is to come, perhaps the voice of the Church may be, like John the Baptist, a prophetic voice which cries in the wilderness of our despair and cynicism. As ever, change will not come from the most wounded who have been rendered invisible in the media (how rare are the stories about the poor in the movies or TV - with the exception of, perhaps, Cops - how absent the "poor public" is from even Public Television). Again, as Kevin Phillips reminds us there are no high paid lobbyists for the poor whose voice can't be heard over, , the voice of money that "screams." If change is to come, it will come from an increasingly disillusioned middle class.
Howard Zinn, in his powerful retelling of the American experiment through the history of the marginalized, the poor and excluded, writes: "The fact of discontent is clear. The surveys since the early `70s show 70-80% of Americans are distrustful of government, business, the military… for the first time in the nation's history, perhaps, both the lower classes and the middle classes…were disillusioned with the system.
Millions of people have been looking desperately for solutions to their sense of impotency, their loneliness, their frustration, their estrangement from other people, from the world, from their work, from themselves…It is as if a whole nation were going through a critical point in its middle age, a life crisis of self-doubt, self-examination.
All this, at a time, when the middle class is increasingly insecure economically. The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children's playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes." (From: A People's History of the United States 1492-Present by Howard Zinn, Harper Collins 1999)
Conclusion
Our American tradition, with its profession of equality for all, compels us to question a system which increasingly functions to protect the priviledge of the few to the detriment of the many. Most egregious of all is an increasingly regressive tax system for the richest individuals and corporations (including off-shore tax dodges) which provides few resources to clean up the environment, improve public education, repair and rebuild aging and decaying infrastructures in our cities, fight debilitating diseases, provide universal health care for all citizens including a prescription drug plan for seniors, adequate childcare for the working poor, long term care for the aged, insure jobs for all who are able to work, transition homes for the homeless, better mental health care and hope for the world's poor in greater charity overseas. The militarization of the U.S. economy, which continues to involve us in curiously timed foreign wars which distract us from the critical needs at home, must be reversed. Anyone recall "the peace dividend?"
Our Christian tradition compels us to hold all economic systems up to the light of the Gospel, to what a Pope once called God's clear "preferential option for the poor." As disciples of Christ, we stand at the Gate of the City and speak God's words of both judgment and promise--a call to repentance and to New Life.
We will survive these times. As Americans and as Christians, we are called to transcend them, to envision and then to help build with God a new future of promise.
Copyright © 2002 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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