ShawnNeidorf.com

Politics, Public Policy and Progressive Faith

Archive for the 'Economics' Category

16 June
0Comments

Rev. Liz Muñoz: Economics a Core Christian Justice Issue

Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) of the Center for American Progress interviewed Rev. Liz Muñoz, an Episcopal priest with St. James Cathedral in Chicago, about strikes by fast-food workers seeking higher wages, better conditions and more hours. Muñoz works with Arise Chicago, which brings faith communities into the fight over labor issues.

From the interview (emphasis mine):

JJ: Why do you think faith communities and faith leaders are involved with these strikes? What basic principles and values are at stake here?

LM: Well, first of all I would say that it’s biblical. The prophets often warned people about landowners and those who controlled jobs and wages. “Woe to those who did not pay the workers just wages or who withheld wages.” Ezekiel, Isaiah, Micah, all these prophets spoke to this issue. Jesus told many parables of workers being paid just wages and right wages.

In fact, throughout history one of the core Christian justice issues has been economics.

JJ: So it sounds like there is a larger movement at work here—a sort of collaboration between faith groups and the greater labor movement. What connection do you see between these two groups especially moving forward?

LM: In this country we are in an age of crisis—of economic crisis. I don’t think anybody would deny that. As faith leaders we are called to respond to that kind of crisis. This is true throughout the Bible. The prophets have called leaders and people of faith to stand up.

To quote the prophet Ezekiel, “God said, I look for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land.”

I think we as faith leaders are called to stand in between that gap, to point out where injustice is happening, where there are wolves, so to speak, tearing at the net.

As the New York Times reported last summer, a study by the National Employment Law Project found that the recovery is generating more low-wage work than anything else (emphasis mine):

The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

And that’s to say nothing on the still-too-high unemployment rate and the ominous numbers of long-term unemployed. Paul Krugman (nytimeskrugman) addressed this last week in a column headlined “The Big Shrug.” In it, Krugman lamented that the current state of affairs has been allowed to become a new normal, despite the harm it causes. Looking for answers to why this has been allowed, Krugman notes the presence of monetary hawks, warning about the perils of low interest rates. But he also points to two other reasons:

Why isn’t reducing unemployment a major policy priority? One answer may be that inertia is a powerful force, and it’s hard to get policy changes absent the threat of disaster. As long as we’re adding jobs, not losing them, and unemployment is basically stable or falling, not rising, policy makers don’t feel any urgent need to act.

Another answer is that the unemployed don’t have much of a political voice. Profits are sky-high, stocks are up, so things are O.K. for the people who matter, right?

 

14 June
0Comments

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

David Brooks‘  (@nytdavidbrooks) column in today’s New York Times is headlined  “Religion and Inequality.”  In it, Brooks laments the decline of religion as a source of cultural standards, leaving “the meritocratic hierarchy of professional success” as the only remaining social metric. That’s all well and good, but the online correction is what really caught my eye:

An earlier version of this column misattributed a passage from Corinthians that ends with the statement, “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” The letter to the Corinthians is by Paul, not Jesus.

Noted.

13 June
0Comments

God, Politics and the Difference Between Charity and Justice

Presbyterian minister Mark Sandlin (@marksandlin) minces no words in his list of “10 Political Things You Can’t Do While Following Jesus,” posted on the God’s Politics blog on Sojourners.

Among the items on the the list:

  • Force your religious beliefs and practices on others (#10).
  • Favor the rich over the poor (#8).
  • Support capital punishment–execution (#1).

Sandlin writes that he created this list after an earlier list of things one could not do while following Jesus was criticized for being too political. Instead of retreating, he opted to write an explicitly political list and take whatever grief was headed his way. As one might hope, the comments on both of these blog posts are substantial and interesting.

Not surprisingly, many of the items on the political list deal with policy issues–immigration, budgeting, health care, the death penalty, etc.–and that resurrects the battle over whether Christians are called to follow Jesus personally while leaving government to be government, or whether government–as something we create and maintain–should reflect our core values. I strongly believe the latter, though I recognize it gets tricky when trying to make policy in a religiously and otherwise pluralistic society. For my part, faith motivates me to care, but  I find it easy to make wholly secular arguments in favor of policies that ensure people get food, education and health care.

Furthermore, if we are going to rely solely on personal acts of kindness and charity, we miss the opportunity to seek justice. In our modern, complex society, that comes through policy. Through laws and courts and social movements. Charity is wonderful, but it is not a substitute for justice.

Rev. Scotty McClennan (@scottymcclennan), the dean for religious life at Stanford University, delivered a sharp sermon in 2004, differentiating between charity and justice, drawing heavily on the ideas of McClennan’s mentor, Rev. William Sloane Coffin.

McClennan, who has worked in law and ministry, recalled the emergence of homelessness in the United States in the 1980s:

I was doing a lot of housing law in the 1970′s, when there was virtually no homelessness problem in Boston or anywhere else in the nation. A big problem had developed, though, by the time I left my law practice go to Tufts as the university chaplain in the mid-1980′s. A political decision  had been which had reduced the federal housing budget from $33 billion annually to $7 billion. This was accompanied by political decisions nationwide to de-institutionalize mental patients, without the willingness to fund the community mental health centers required in local neighborhoods to house those patients, as had been promised. A lot of mentally ill people were simply discharged to the streets. As a direct result of these two types of political decisions, in Boston and all over America we suddenly had homeless people visibly everywhere — sleeping in subways, in parks, on heating grates.

Strangely, this was all happening at the same time as new governmental incentives were being implemented for business, along with general tax reductions — helping fuel an economic boom which resulted in enormous increases in wealth for the already well-to-do, but not for the poor, who lost ground during the 1980′s. Churches and other charitable organizations were asked to step in, provide shelters and food pantries, and help the homeless and hungry at dramatic new levels. Now, certainly “The churches have to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. But they have also to remember that the answer to homelessness is homes, not shelters. What the poor and downtrodden need is not piecemeal charity but wholesale justice” (Coffin [2004] Credo: 155). They need political action and structural change in society, not just a warm meal and a bed in a church basement.

More from that sermon, quoting directly from Coffin:

Charity is finding a baby drowning in a stream and pulling it out; charity is pulling out a second baby and a third baby that come floating down the stream; justice is going upstream, finding out who’s throwing the babies in, and stopping the evil at its source. “Had I but one wish for the churches of America I think it would be that they come to see the difference between charity and justice. Charity is a matter of personal attributes; justice a matter of public policy. Charity seeks to alleviate the effects of injustice; justice seeks to eliminate the causes of
it. Charity in no way affects the status quo, while justice leads inevitably to political confrontation” (Coffin 2004: 62).

 

11 June
0Comments

Bradley Whitford: Make Grace Happen on Earth

The web site Babble has posted “15 of the Best Graduation Speeches Ever,” a compilation that includes Bradley Whitford‘s 2004 speech to graduates of the University of Wisconsin. It’s a good speech. Here’s the bit that Babble highlights:

Take action. Every story you’ve ever connected with, every leader you’ve ever admired, every puny little thing that you’ve ever accomplished is the result of taking action. You have a choice. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. Action is the antidote to apathy and cynicism and despair. You will inevitably make mistakes. Learn what you can and move on. At the end of your days, you will be judged by your gallop, not by your stumble.

But the part that really captures my attention comes a little later. From the transcript:

Infuse your life with action. Don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen — yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

Don’t wait for grace; be grace. A fine progressive faith manifesto.

I recently discovered, somewhat to my shameful surprise (more on that later), that Whitford has been engaged in progressive faith activism for some time. I knew he was a liberal activist–I’d seen video of him speaking in Wisconsin during the battle between state workers and Gov. Scott Walker–but I was surprised to learn that he was part of a religious community and involved in social causes through his church.

And then I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being surprised. It’s too easy to fall into the false assumptions that all people of faith are conservative and all liberals are secular. I know liberal Christians exist–really, I know it–and, still, I was startled to learn that Whitford was one of them (us).

I discovered Whitford’s religious activism when I stumbled onto a piece he wrote for the Huffington Post in 2005 in defense of his church, All Saints (Episcopal), which found itself under IRS scrutiny for a sermon delivered just before the 2004 election. Whitford’s defense of the sermon is short yet eloquent, and his larger argument in favor of churches holding political leaders to account is plain but powerful, as is his discussion of what Christianity is and is not. Notes Whitford:

Jesus Christ was the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of Preemptive War. He was an advocate for the poor, not of supply-side economics. And let’s not forget that Jesus himself died in a bogus death-penalty rap. His was the original “bleeding heart,” yet I am afraid he would be described pejoratively by many today as a “do-gooder.”

Whitford has been involved in pro-marriage equality activism, and last fall, he conducted a Q&A at All Saints with Bishop Gene Robinson (@BishopGRobinson) about Robinson’s book, God Believes in Love: Straight Talk on Gay Marriage. It’s worth the hour.