Friday’s events were about as tragic, senseless and deplorable as anything imaginable.  The only appropriate immediate response is grief, prayer and comforting the afflicted.  What is just as disturbing, however, even if we don’t like to hear it, is how often the needless death and suffering of children occurs everyday — very often as a result of many of the actions taken by people, governments and corporations in the wealthiest and most powerful nations like our own (in the form of “collateral damage” from drone warfare, for instance — the intention might be different, but the outcome is the same).

A thousand miles closer than Connecticut to Texas is the Mexican border, for example, where  the same number of children have died many times over in recent years for similarly belligerent reasons — and that is only the tip of the iceberg.  What if we, the Christian Church in the United States, would come to love and weep for the rest of the world’s children in the way that we love and weep for our own — the children of the Congo, of Syria and of Iraq?

It is usually asked what to make of God in the wake of such events.  As a student and professor of theology, I am obviously interested in this kind of inquiry and could offer a few thoughts on the matter.  Is it not equally appropriate to ask though what to make of those of us who claim to worship and know this God while yet remaining utterly distracted and mostly self-serving in the midst of this kind of suffering — suffering that happens not just last week, but all the time (e.g., severe acute malnutrition, something even more violent, afflicts an estimated 19 million children worldwide).  After all, it is indeed God, Christians maintain, that suffers with the suffering on the cross — as a consequence of our unawakened desire, apathy and discontentment with what we have been given.  I’ve said more about this here.

With regard to this specific incident at the political level, there are public policy concerns to be raised for sure, but I will not take up those issues here.  Speaking as someone who grew up and continues to enjoy hunting, suffice it to say that the dominant conventional positions are naive — the simple call for better gun control on the one hand (though I tend to lean this way at least when it comes to assault rifles, glocks and the like), and the libertarian dictum about how “people [– not guns –] kill people” or “only outlaws will have guns” on the other hand — as if many better preventative systemic safety measures shouldn’t be taken… For a better treatment of this, I recommend senior pastor of FBC-Austin Roger Paynter’s sermon here.

While there are always going to be some seemingly irredeemably pernicious folks who are out to do terrible harm like this, society must take a certain degree of responsibility.  Dismissing the killer as a barbaric monster, lunatic, etc. might make you feel better, but it doesn’t fix anything — nor does blaming Satan, free will or abstract human “fallenness”, however real these things may be.  People are not born ready to kill kindergarteners, even if they are born “sinful,” and it’s no coincidence that this happens as it does in the United States, which is one of the most technologically advanced, virtualized and at the same time hyper-individualist cultures in the world.  By “individualist”, I mean the placement of excessive value on autonomy,  competition, freedom (personal and political) and independence.  These values run quite contrary to the urgent need for Christian values like interdependence/mutuality, community, relationality and accountability.

This week a faith group I’m a part of is taking on the simple but profound challenge of reaching out to one person who is generally regarded as “other” or an “outsider” — someone stigmatized maybe — economically, politically, socially… whatever.  I extend this challenge to anyone: love somebody different this week.  Better still, try to do it every week, and make it a New Years resolution.

Somewhat to my surprise, the concerns I had about the Citizens United ruling thankfully may not have been so detrimental this time around — though doubts about the reality and efficacy of democracy definitely remain.  I initially wanted to talk about the electoral process itself, the degree to which big money continues to corrupt both parties, and especially the exclusion of third party voices in the presidential debates.  There’s little question in my mind that without campaign finance reform, term limits for congress, and greater transparency and accountability with respect to the lobbying power of corporate and special interest groups, the supposed differences between republican and democratic candidates will remain relatively inconsequential for the achievement of much needed structural, if incremental, political change.

Instead though, something more immediately interesting and perplexing has grabbed my attention; namely, the pervasiveness of two basic blind spots at the popular level of dialogue about contemporary American politics:

1. Most people, when they think about politics — even though they’ve heard about this and live it every day — still do not appreciate just how much globalization and trade liberalization have changed the rules of international economics and therefore necessarily the role of government dealings with domestic fiscal and private-sector regulation issues (see endnote below for further explanation).[i] In general, the mainstream media doesn’t talk about or seem to understand this.  Instead, the U.S. is still regarded as a more or less autonomous nation-state, albeit the most powerful one (a thoroughly modern and enlightenment-based idea that has lingered on much too long, kind of like many Reformational theological assumptions do in the church).
2. With regard to why Obama got elected instead of Romney, there are no doubt already many reasons being cited.  And it’s important not to forget how close the election was despite the big electoral college victory.  But here’s another key oversight: to the extent that the election was a reflection of America’s changing social landscape, the culture wars were more determinative of the outcome than the fiscal ones.

There’s a popular narrative amongst some conservatives used to explain how and why the United States is changing, and it goes something like this: whereas previous generations believed in JFK’s quip about asking “not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” the emerging entitlement generation and the growing welfare state populous just wants handouts.  Romney lost, in other words, because nearly the majority of the people in this country can now safely be called at best naive or irresponsible, and at worst lazy freeloaders who aren’t self-sufficient and morally upstanding.  Admittedly, this is a terse account, but I’m amazed out how many people seem to buy into it.

Now, there’s often a real grain of truth to conventional myths, and this is no exception.  Of course this “entitlement” attitude exists, and maybe it’s even growing — but it’s a gross caricature and still not even close to the dominant issue or “threat.”  To believe otherwise is to miss the fundamentally more significant, glaring trend.

The culturally progressive ideals of tolerance and value-pluralism, the decline of traditional role of religious institutions in society, pro-immigration policies, and individual liberties with respect to reproductive rights and sexuality — like’em or not — are here to stay.  This is not new.  Christendom died a long time ago; it’s just becoming all the more noticeable (marijuana legalization, gay marriage passing in other states, the first openly gay woman in the Senate, etc.).  Standing against gay marriage used to make you trustworthy.  Now it’s just as likely to identify you as a bigot.

The question of fiscal and economic austerity vs. the welfare state, however, may very well still be up for grabs.  For example, there are many young people who would prefer to have Ron Paul and Gary Johnson as president, and identify as libertarians.  While I don’t share this outlook myself and would refer my libertarian friends to #1 above, the argument for small government and lower taxes has not been defeated; rather, what we’ve seen is the beginning of the end of the religious right’s grasp for power.  (This does not mean religion is going anywhere; it is definitely not.  And indeed it’s being increasingly argued that we’re living in a post-secular society.  But the “none’s” and the “spiritual but not religious” folks are becoming the new normal.)

Romney had to run through an extended and overly negative primary race against a group of other candidates that, with maybe one or two exceptions, were associated by way too many people with conservative extremism (most notably Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain).  No matter how much Romney tried to shake this and appear more moderate by the time of the first debate, his image had already been tainted.  And it didn’t exactly help, in light of the financial crisis and the OWS movement, that Romney himself could be labeled as a member of the 1%.  Romney’s opponents in the primaries did such a good job pointing this out that Obama basically just had to carry on the same message.  Obama did run misleading negative ads; so did Romney.

So anyway, on the day after the election I did something I hadn’t done in many years: watch Fox News (and I only survived because I turned on the Daily Show afterwards).  I watched a full episode of The O’Reilly Factor and some of Hannity.  And within just this hour and a half, I was reminded of some basic truths that go something like this (though of course I’m not saying Fox News is a reliable test case for mass media in general):

•  Besides the fact that it serves profit-motive and ratings rather than truth, for the mainstream media, all that exists and that is credible is what exists and is covered by the mainstream.  Everything else gets completely dismissed and delegitimized by oversimplified mischaracterization.  In other words, the underlying narrative and ethic has to justify the approximate status quo (even if it’s being criticized/reformed).
• It’s essential for the mainstream to give the appearance of an accurate and fair representation of reality, however, so great effort is made to achieve this.  The manipulation to do so is powerful, subtle, and shockingly persuasive.  I would even call it intoxicating.  It’s a very smart machine (e.g., sometimes you have to bring on your token spokesperson of a non-mainstream view as a straw man and knock him or her down!).
• Neither being wrong nor seeking reconciliation is an option.  There is only “us vs. them,” and our side is obviously right about all the big issues.
• Don’t mess with our security and prosperity.  Anyone who suggests military spending is out of control or that decades of belligerent and rapacious U.S. foreign policy provoked 9-11 is clearly out of her mind.  And if you’re not talking about economic growth, don’t you dare bring up global poverty and its relationship to neoliberalism, environmental degradation, depleting natural resources or climate change (it’s either “not a real problem,” “not my problem,” “God will take care of it,” or worse, “the market will…”).

It is through tactics such as these that people become convinced by scapegoat narratives like the “entitlement culture.”  I’m all for fiscal responsibility and decreasing spending where appropriate, but what I also wonder about actually, is whether we’ve got this “entitlement culture” argument backwards; that is, is it not possible sometimes that those who feel most entitled in this country are in fact the people who think they’ve “built it” and feel entitled to their high living standard as a consequence?  Maybe we need to rethink our theology of work and money.

And maybe it’s possible that some people like myself actually believe government isn’t completely incompetent all the time (kind of strange how we have so much trust in military to always do the right thing though… speaking of the military and fiscal responsibility, if we cut our defense budget by 43%, it would only take us back to 2003 — here’s a chart).  Consider the following from Paul Rosenberg:

Right-sizing, rather than perpetually shrinking government [unless you’re a fan of financial crises and super-PACs]: As the response to Hurricane Sandy vividly reminded us, government workers aren’t worthless greedy parasites, as the Tea Party would have us believe. They’re everyday heroes who regularly do the largely invisible work that keeps our modern society going – and do it twice as long and hard in times of dire emergency.

What’s more, the most vital tasks governments take on are precisely those that businesses don’t want – that are too uncertain, too costly, take too long to pay off, or that produce too many benefits for others versus those who undertake them. In short, governments need to be judged by different criteria than businesses do. We need to sharpen those criteria and then meet them, rather than impose inappropriate business criteria on them.

But above all, we need to determine the size and scope of our government by the size and the scope of the threats, challenges and opportunities we face that government is most appropriate to deal with in order to “promote the general welfare”, as stated in the Constitution.

The “threats, challenges and opportunities” that Rosenberg is referring to are exactly what I’m talking about in point #1 above: the obstacles of globalization, unfair “free” trade, and unsustainable consumption empowered by militarism.  As I’ve argued in many previous posts, that Christians have a mandate for dealing with these problem through political and economic means is clear, even though our first allegiance is to the church and kingdom of God.  Democrats and Republicans alike are idolators with lots of blood on their hands.  On Tuesday I counted myself among them — even if I voted for a few Green Party folks! (cause that’s as close as you can get to voting for Jesus:))

The following is taken from Miguel A. De La Torre‘s book, Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins.  This is one of the texts we’re using right now in the Christian Ethics class I’m teaching.  What’s all the more impressive about this passage is that it was written in 2004, well before the financial crisis.  The class disparity in this country has only increased all the more since then, as recent events have made clear.  For a more recent account of the disproportionate income and capital distribution in the U.S., read here:

With economic policies put in place under Reagan, the income gap widened dramatically, while the middle class shrunk.  These new economic policies radically changed the distribution of wealth in this country.  During the 1980s, the top 10 percent of the population increased their family income by 16 percent, the top 5 percent increased theirs by 23 percent, while the top 1 percent increased their income by 50 percent.  By the end of the Reagan administration, the income of the top 1 percent was 115 times greater than the bottom 10 percent (Phillips 1990:12-17).

The economic policies of the New Deal were replaced by a supply-side philosophy that consisted of cutting, if not eliminating, social services and benefits for the poor while providing tax breaks for the wealthy.  The hope was that economic benefits given to the wealthy would “trickle down” to the less fortunate.  According to figures published by the Census Bureau, this led to the richest among us seeing their inflation-adjusted income rise by 30 percent from the late 1970’s to the mid-1990s, while the poorest aw their income decrease by 21 percent.

The so-called “Reaganomics” pushed unemployment to almost 10 percent, median family income dropped to 6 percent below pre-1973 levels, and poverty rose from 11.1 to 14.4 percent.  The bottom quintile received 4.7 percent of all income, a full percentage point below the 1973 level.  From 1947 through 1979, real income had risen from all segments of society.  Since 1980 income has risen only for the most affluent countries (Cooper 1998:338-54).

Throughout the 1990s, during the so-called economic boom, only the top quintile increased its share of the nation’s income.  From 1979 to 2000, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the gap between the rich and the poor more than doubled as the U.S. experienced the greatest growth of wage inequality throughout the Western world (Wilson 1999:27).  These radical economic changes within the United States have contributed to the smallest and fastest-shrinking middle class among all industrialized nations.

By the close of the century, the top 1 percent of taxpayers each had on average $862,700 after taxes, more than triple what they had in 1979.  Meanwhile, the bottom 40 percent had $21,118 each, up by 13 percent from their average $18,695 (adjusted for inflation) in 1979.  The year 2000 proved to have the greatest economic disparity since 1979, when the budget office began collecting such data.  The National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, claims that the top 1 percent enjoys the largest share of before-tax income for any year since 1929.  By 2002, according to Census Bureau figures, 34.8 million individuals found themselves living in poverty compared to 25.4 million individuals in 1968), of which 12.2 million were children.  Further contributing to the widening income gap was the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, signed by President Bill Clinton.

It seems that, in general, no matter how hard the poor work, they often continue to slip into greater poverty.  The growing disparity of wealth between the poor and the rich leads us to question if it is a “work ethic” that is at stake or perhaps a “work ideology” that allows the wealthy and privileged to rationalize classicism.  Why is it so difficult of the poor to “get ahead”?  Is wealth really a reward for hard work, and poverty a punishment for laziness?  Or is there another explanation for the accumulation of uneven greater wealth by those at the top of the economic ladder?  Increase poverty directly affects the well-being of our society: it leads to a rise in crime, drug and alcohol addiction, family disintegration, child abuse, mental illness, and environmental abuse.  Instead of dealing with the causes of poverty and seeking a more equitable distribution of resources, those privileged with wealth seldom make the connection between the riches and the poverty of others.  More often the view their wealth as something earned, a blessing from God, or a combination of both.  They tend to seek to insulate themselves from the consequences of their riches, moving to gated communities and sending their children to private schools.

Ethicists from the margins argue that communities that ensure a just economic base must place the humanity of their members before economic development (the latter of which can be code language for increasing corporate profits).  Development today usually means short-term profit, and often at the expense of the marginalized.  Yet, true development, economic as well as socio-political, takes place when society’s treatment of its most vulnerable members enable them to pass from a less human existence to a more human condition.  Conditions faced by the poor are caused by oppressive structures that lead to the exploitation of workers and creating material want.  The ethical quest for more humane conditions requires a set of social actions – a praxis designed to overcome extreme poverty, raise consciousness of classicism, foster dignity for all people, develop an equitable distribution of the earth’s resources, and secure peace –to testify to one’s love for God and one’s neighbor, a love that binds God with neighbor.

Regardless of how we choose to define this more human condition, it remains threatened by increasing poverty. The so-called “work ethic” is debunked when the poor work, and many full-time, simply to survive; when there are few if any other options for work; and when the work is unrewarding and unfulfilling.  Some full-time workers receive the legal minimum hourly wage, but their income still falls short of the official poverty line.  Is it any wonder that in 2001 the top quintile, the most affluent fifth of the population, possessed half of all household income, while the lowest quintile, the poorest fifth, received 3.5 percent of the total household income.  Furthermore, 49 percent of those who live in poverty yet worked full-time during 2002 lacked any form of health insurance and were literally an illness away from financial ruin.

It is safe to conclude from this snapshot, I think, that whatever path voters and policymakers decide to take in the coming years, “going back” to old strategies like supply-side economic theory is simply not an option.  It would be a category-error and a very premature leap at this point, however, to say based on these observations that the question of who or what to vote for or care about has been answered.  It seems to me that yet another subject of great importance for responsible citizenship and Christian political engagement is the nature of the electoral process itself.  I will try to examine this next.

“I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.” – Socrates

“It is not always the same thing to be a good man and to be a good citizen.” – Aristotle

At the heart of Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of community lay the idea of the common good.  Aquinas had learned from Aristotle that the good life is a life in common.  Aristotle had written, for example, that “the good of the city is the greater and more perfect thing to attain and to safeguard.  The attainment of the good for one person alone is, to be sure, a source of satisfaction; yet to secure it for a nation and for cities is nobler and more divine” (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b).  Commenting on Thomas’ vision, theologian and ethicist Timothy Gorringe remarks that “Justice and the Common Good, both of which derive from the Holy Spirit, are the heart of his vision.  Under good government the countryside feeds the town and the town rewards the country; under bad government the crops rot and the people starve.  Justice and the common good are at the heart of sustainability” (Gorringe, Living Toward a Vision: Cities, the Common Good, and the Christian Imagination.  Anglican Theological Review, 2010).

Gorringe goes on to explain that the church is the primary community entrusted with living out this vision of hope for the world.  The church has the responsibility of relating the visioning of Scripture to every area of life, such that there is no sharp division between the sacred and the secular.  This idea is supported by the Hebrew Prophets and their holistic depiction of reality which “saw human behavior as bound up with the flourishing or failing of the natural world: ‘Because there is no knowledge of God,’ says Hosea, ‘therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; . . . even the fish of the sea are perishing’ (Hos. 4:3)” (Gorringe, 524).

Continuing to address the issues of the relationship between the church, society and the environment, Gorringe asks the following three questions:

1.  How do we build a relationship with the Earth and with one another wisely, justly, and in ways that are sustainable and in balance with the web of life on the planet?
2. How do we understand the interdependence of rural and urban?
3. How do our cities, in their infrastructures, residential spaces, architectures, and overall economy of life, need to change in order to meet this goal?

Instead of merely summarizing Gorringe’s response to these questions – which is not my main concern here – we first have to see some of the problems themselves in more concrete terms.  Here’s what he says on this front:

“We all know that we are exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity, living in bio-deficit.  For everyone to live like a Londoner we need three planets; like a citizen of Los Angeles, five planets; like a citizen of Dubai, ten planets.  We have unsustainable buildings like the Sears Tower in Chicago, which uses more energy in 24 hours than an average American city of 150,000 or an Indian city of more than 1 million.[i]  We have a situation where New York City uses as much electrical energy as the whole continent of Africa . . . the world we have constructed and that has given us so much is dependent on cheap energy, more specifically on oil.  A growing body of independent oil experts and oil geologists have calculated that oil production either has peaked or is about to.  They are saying that technological advances in oil extraction and prospecting will have only a minor effect on depletion rates.  Peak oil does not mean that the world is suddenly going to run out of oil, as your car runs out of petrol if you do not fill it up.  What it does mean is that we will reach the point where sources of cheap, easy-to-get oil are exhausted.  When that happens, then every successive year will see an ever-diminishing flow of oil, as well as an increasing risk of interruptions to supply” (Gorringe, 525).

Gorringe then discusses the problem of climate change, which is directly related and obviously very important, but I’m not going to address that now.  The point is, the dominant orthodox economic assumptions based on a consumer-capitalist society of perpetual growth and a non-zero sum game understanding of wealth, are quite simply incompatible with the limitations, inequality and unsustainability of our current global situation – and this is not even to mention the present and potential geopolitical consequences that are continuing and beginning to be a felt as a result (e.g., violence, militarism and overall instability and insecurity in the Middle East and increasingly other parts of the world).

There is another dimension to the contemporary world order that I do want to underscore, however, which is dependent on energy as well but that deserves its own category (this was touched on in a previous post, but it should be mentioned again).  Orthodox economic theory in the developed Western world is not only about growth, but also trade, and specifically trade governed by the theory of comparative advantage.  Trade under this logic is thought to secure prosperity by encouraging all countries to specialize, by doing what they do best, and then trading with countries that have a comparative advantage in other sectors and industries.  The Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank in particular – were set up in part to make this happen.  The somewhat obvious oversight of this theory, however, is that not all countries have any comparative advantage – not even close.  Nonetheless, in order to be eligible for loans that could help poorer countries develop their infant industries, these international institutions decided to require that underdeveloped countries — in order to be elligible for assistance — adopt “free” trade practices by lowering any barriers to entry for foreign transnational corporate competitors to invest in their (the third world) local economies, so as to expose industries to international competition early on and thereby “help” their development at the global level.  This is kind of like forcing parents to let their children play on the big-kid playground long before they are trained to fend for themselves.

The question for our purposes at this point though is one that pertains to U.S. politics, and U.S. politics from a specifically Christian outlook.  So why is all of this relevant then?  Well, because the United States for the greater part of the latter half of the twentieth century has been the forerunner and chief architect of this international deregulatory project, as evidenced close to home by the case of Mexico and NAFTA under Bill Clinton’s leadership – to give just one relatively recent and familiar example (there are many others).  The United State and the EU have had their histories of high protectionism, some of which remains today.  The EU, for example, excludes metals, agricultural products, and textiles from free-trade schemes, such that discrimination against basic commodities is one of the biggest roadblocks for poor countries – probably even more so than debt.

Thirdly, in addition to energy and trade, there is the financialization of the market and therefore the global economy in general.  Case in point, for instance, is the Great Recession of 2008.  The shift from industry-based markets to financial capital has enabled the speculation on stocks (or sectors like the housing market) all around almost instantaneously.  There is trade in interest rates, the buying of bonds or currencies on one exchange to sell them at a profit on another, and other financial instruments and derivative like swaps, options, forwards and futures.  In many cases investors are essentially gambling on the prosperity of nations themselves.  Increases and decreases in the market indexes correspond less and less to real changes in the material world but nonetheless impact it profoundly due to variations in currency stability and other virtual or hyper-real factors.

Lastly, global capitalism trivializes culture and disintegrates value.  It’s been said that healthy ecologies (and perhaps societies) abhor monoculture, but the proliferation of market preferences and economic imperialism insists on hegemony, and a very adaptive one at that – so much so that we see McDonalds assimilating quite a bit to its different international environments.  And yet, it’s still the same fast food.

Here’s what Graham Ward in his book The Politics of Discipleship says about globalization in general and global capitalism in particular with respect to its impact on culture:

Capitalism in its expanded global form is a participatory system.  I may choose a postmaterialist option and not buy sportswear from Nike bcause of the charges of sweatshop exploitation, but my index-linked pension, the investments made by my mortgage company and my bank, my credit and debit cards, and online shopping all situate me firmly in the global economy.  Globalization is not simply the effects of free-market economic policy adopted by this country or that, or even the ideology of international operations driven by multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank; it is an environment, an atmosphere.  It implicitly possesses and promotes a cosmology.  Like a religion, it generates its own mythology, and however much it deals with empirical goods, metrics, positivist facts, and processes that are entirely focused on the concrete, immanent logics of this world, its ethos and ethics are utopian and transcendental (Ward, 2009, 97).

This is why it’s so important for the church to tell a better story about reality and therefore God’s will through the person and work of Jesus.  It has the mandate of cultivating a different and more life-giving environment among its members, as well as commissioning them to let this rub off on others who are being sucked into the madness of the consumerism, the global market, of militarism, and recently especially the fear and personality-driven, corporate-purchased and controlled process of electoral politics.

Considered solely from a global and international perspective, however, we might overlook just how much these disparities and unsustainabilities are hurting people at the national level as well. In the next post, then, I will try to zero-in on domestic poverty and the shrinking of the middle class as a result of several key changes sine the late 1970s.