Religion and Social Justice

Um, he’s mistaken. Who do you think volunteers for Habitat for Humanity? Runs hospitals in Haiti? Gives to orphanages in Africa? Donates time to homeless shelters? Not exclusively Christians, by any means, but they eat that stuff up. And good for them.

Let’s face it, honestly. Compared with the wealthiest country in Africa or Central America, there is no poverty in the U.S., so if Christians don’t spend all their time serving the poor, it is because capitalism has done a fine (if not perfect) job of ameliorating it.

Um, he’s mistaken.

Well I didn’t give him those books to read because they fully agreed with the premise of his question, as a casual glance at them will confirm.

I’m trying to think through the ways that I think this is relevant, but one of my favorite books to combine soc of religion and of social movements is Mitchell Stevens’ Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Its relevance to the current political/religious moment exists on many levels.

Just want to make it clear that I’m responding to Mark’s original question. Kieran seems right on, especially with what I think he is saying in “how small a role politics and social services play in the lives of churches.” My parents are both evangelical Christians, and both are very deeply involved in charitable works, and only moderately involved in politics. Most of my mom’s time in 5 out of the last 7 years was spent teaching inner-city Hispanic kids English and how to read.

Sigh. “inherited or acquired“. Also “that got her there”.

I blame the wine. A nice Sangiovese, fruit forward, but I should have been worried by the newfangled screw cap.

I think you might be able to find some historical literature on this as well. There’s an argument (sorry, I can’t seem to find the citation) that post-1950s evangelicalism has been greatly influenced by the culture of the Cold War, specifically the fight against “godless” Communism. It’s no coincidence that the “under God” part of the pledge of allegiance was added in the 1950s, along with other references to God in American public life.

Some kind of social justice ideals may actually still be a part of the current religious revival – but state-sponsored social welfare programs may be associated with the insidious creep of atheistic communism. Communists provided everyone with jobs. Communists confiscated property (i.e. taxed) in the name of the central state. Communists engaged in family planning. Even publicly operated day care programs could seem a threat to the family. Who wants their children raised by the secular state (or prevented from praying in its public schools)?

At the same time, aggregate standards of living certainly have risen since last century, even if statistics on real wages don’t always look so good. Coupled with this is the erroneous belief – not just among religious conservatives, mind you – that only leftists/Marxists/tenured radicals ever speak, or have ever spoken in the terms of class conflict. But guess who wrote the following passage?:

“The employer is no longer a workman with his employees; his work is mental, not manual; it tasks and strengthens all his powers; his faculties are developed, while those of the men who tend his machines are cramped. He has little personal acquaintance with his employees, and, with noble exceptions, has little personal interest in them. Thus these classes grow apart…And not only are these classes becoming further removed from each other, they are also becoming organized against each other. Capital is combining in powerful corporations and “pools”, and labor is combining in powerful trades unions. And these opposing organizations make trials of strength, offer terms and conditions of surrender, like two hostile armies.”

I suspect that many people would guess that these are the words of a labor agitator. In fact they are the words of Josiah Strong, one of the key figures of the social gospel movement – and they appear in a chapter of his bestselling work, _Our Country, Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis_ (1886). The chapter is dedicated to outlining the rising _peril_ of socialism. Strong hoped for an alternative to both socialism and the kind of capitalism that seemed to be producing it. Today America’s particular capitalism is defended at all costs; alternative capitalisms are denounced as socialism in disguise. Some may even see the idea of these alternatives as an affront to God.

Strong’s chapter has been posted here; there you can find other passages not unlike those you might come across in the works of Marx and Engels.

This question has ben well-addressed by Matt Yglesias and the comments section on his blog. Here’s one more critical point worth noting:

As has been discussed at considerable length below, many religious people (not just conservatives) feel that the government is actively hostile to religion. This perception (accurate or not) is likely to make them uninclined to lobby the government to become more involved in the lives of more people.

A lot of the 2nd Great Awakening religions have parallel social services networks. The Mormons, for example, have a Welfare-like institution that is part of the non-profit “Deseret Industries.” Older members are assigned as responsibilities to younger members; shut-ins are regularly visited; young mothers are swooped down on with casseroles and lasagnas. There is a real sense of charity going on here, but it is well organized to be within the religious body. In fact, this social network is what makes the Mormon church attractive to converts.

On another side of the issue: the Mormon church has only recently become politicized. In the late 19th c., brother Brigham (Young) actually assigned his flock 50-50 Democrat-Republican registration, so that the feds would leave them alone as a split voting block. Up until the 1980s, there were still some Mormons in southern Utah who had respected Brother Brigham’s original assignation for their family. But now, specific social questions have changed the way the Mormon Church approaches politics.

The Church mobilized against the Equal rights Amendment. This may have been the Church’s first modern intervention into the political process. Later, in the mid-1990s, bishops in California were instructed to preach in favor of gay rights bans–resulting in one suicide in the Stanford U. ward, as my horrified cousin witnessed. And since marriage is literally the theological center of the religion, I’m sure that the Church was vocal during the current campaign.

Someone should take another look at their non-profit status…

I would like to be the first to take the “social justice” defense to its logical conclusion: From the point of view of fundamentalists, the mere existence of non-Christians is a question of social justice. From their point of view, non-Christians are all going to be cast into the lake of fire. What could be more unjust than that?

I sometimes see people push the notion on these comment boards (sans evidence) that in the United States Christians are more charitable than everyone else. In terms of absolute numbers, sure, there must be more Christians doing charitable work than anyone else, but I know plenty of atheists who devote their lives to helping others.

MDP, I lived in an awfully religious community in the States in the early 80s, and Falwell’s peak covered only a very tiny part of the community that thought of itself as religous and conservative. Note that the Moral Majority was dismantled in ’89 because it _failed_. Right-wing Christians went out of their way to distance themselves from Falwell, for fear of being seen as nuts. I sat in a deeply conservative and nationalist American church, watching people nod as the pastor preached against “those who would confuse what is Caesar’s with what is Jesus’.”

As for my evidence of lack of charity, how often do Christian conservatives bring up Matthew 25:35-45 compared to Mark 14:7 when discussing state welfare policies these days? When people start finding Biblical reasons to oppose public poverty support on principle, charity is long gone.

I think it’s helpful in this discussion to break out two (overlapping, and not exhaustive) groups: sincere born-again Christians and what, for lack of a better word, I will call muscular Christians. The former include, say, the guy who partied until he got drafted, then came home bewildered from Vietnam and found religion. He is poor, works hard, and spends a ton of time helping the poor in this country and others, including having adopted two children with developmental problems. He is gentle and kind–and happens to think abortion is a horrible sin, as well as homosexuality, drug use, porn, along with a host of others. This guy is honorable, if overly judgemental.
The scary latter group, however, are using the former to reshape America in truly scary ways. If you know anyone who simultaneously reads Ayn Rand and the Left Behind series, these are them. If you know anyone who is an “executive coach,” these are them. If you know anyone who pays thousands of dollars to fly to exotic places to get “motivated,” these are them. They are building super-congregations as large as the Mall of America and their message is an All-American one: “You are Good, and You are Saved–and you Deserve Salvation.” There is no grace, no charity, and no humility in this strain and it is a virus that has grafted American Puritanism and Capitalist Greed into a single dangerous disease. These guys have power, money, a LOT of energy (all those damned pep talks), are well-organized and THEY delivered the election to Bush.

I think the operative term here is ‘social justice‘. Current ‘right-wing’ US Christianity seems, from my admitted outsider’s perspective, to be perfectly compatible with considerable amounts of charitable good work. Many ‘right-wing’ Christians are, personally, involved in charitable good works.

However, in the past many Christians have been committed to the idea of ‘social justice’ i.e. the idea that it’s somehow right and fair that the poor receive a greater share of a country’s wealth and that this rightness and fairness is not merely a matter of personal empathy or compassion but rather a substantive view about justice and what a just world actual constitutes. That the very nature of Christianity mandates some form of egalitarianism [even if that egalitarianism may have a distinctly different character from, say, secular socialism].

The fact that many Christians (on the right) are involved in charitable good works does not mean that they are committed to social justice at all. Especially if they act out of (admirable) personal compassion and empathy rather than out of some distinctly Christian (meek inherting the earth; rich men/camels through eye-of-needle; etc.) conception of social justice.

I think that part of what is wrong is that so very many religious conservatives are not even remotely charitable. When I start hearing evangelicals citing 2 Thessalonians 3:10 as a reason to end welfare…

Isn’t voluntarism part of the meaning of “charity”? Giving away other folks’ money doesn’t strike me as especially charitable, regardless of how needy the recipient. Someone else got to this point later in the thread here when he posted that Christians who work for the benefit of the poor don’t necessarily believe in social justice, because social justice entails egalitarianism.

Let’s see, what’s the question here – why aren’t the American wingnuts clamoring for social justice?

Lol. Is this the winner of “the most ridiculous item of the day” contest or something?

Sebastian – down boy, I’m on your side. ;)

I would like to suggest that the “current flourishing” has lacked a social justice element because it has been largely driven by individuals—like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—who have strongly identified with the Republican Party’s economic agenda. In other words, Christianity—in the hands of Republicans—has developed a “moral focus” that selectively ignores the teachings of Jesus that they find…well, a bit unwelcome.

After all, Jesus urged his followers to not concern themselves with their wealth (“…sell all you have…”) and to be wimps when confronting bullies. Republicans find themselves not wanting to follow such teachings because they sense that obeying them could end up threatening their privileged positions in society. So they’ve tended to focus attention on moral “issues” that do not threaten their economic fortunes in any way, like abortion and homosexuality. Republican strategists who have felt some identification with Christianity have simply turned this intuitively sensed “interest” into a weapon that they’ve been able to use in the political arena to advance their economic agenda.

The time has come for Democrats to put Republican Christians on the defensive. The first thing we need to do is accuse them of wrongly suggesting that Jesus would be a Republican if he were a United States citizen today, instead of a Democrat. It is easy to point to specific teachings by Jesus that would clearly define him as a bleeding-heart liberal. Indeed, most Republicans would be quick to describe him as “far to the left” of the majority of Democrats. Did he not teach his followers to give freely of their possessions to others, and to respond to any attack by an enemy from another country with acts of loving kindness? Can there be any doubt that Arnold Schwarzenegger would call him a “Girly Man?”

When the arguments start, Democrats need to point out that it is only logical for us to conclude that Jesus told us which moral issues were the most important to him by the amount of time he spent commenting on them. Which moral issues did he emphasize the most? There is little doubt that he thought it was especially important for his followers to be willing to deny themselves materially if that was what was required in order to obtain the benefit others. He repeated this theme more than once.

We might then want to point out that neither abortion nor homosexuality were addressed by Jesus. Does that omission mean that neither of those practices is wrong? Of course not. But it does strongly suggest that even if it seems obvious to us that Jesus thought homosexuality and abortion were sinful practices, it should also be obvious to us that he didn’t perceive them to be as alarming as the other imperfections he saw within human souls.

If he did think that abortion and homosexuality were more serious “crimes” than failing to love your enemy, then why did he not mention them when he had the chance?

If one examines closely the words that were attributed to Jesus by the authors of the Gospels, there is no evidence that he believed abortion and homosexuality were more offensive than the failure of a rich man to deny himself for the benefit of others. Democrats are clearly justified in believing that they have a stronger claim to a true identification with Jesus than Republicans do.

Doing this would immediately put Republican Christians on the defensive. Whenever they try to defend themselves from the charge of hypocrisy, all Democrats need to do is ask them why it is that they can’t follow Jesus’ teaching re: social justice? Why is it that they are concerning themselves with the motes they see in the eyes of others when they have beams in their own?

Is it because they like to willfully ignore Jesus’ teaching? We need to start publicly pressuring Republican Christians to agree with us that Jesus’ specific teachings on moral issues should be taken more seriously than any advice on other moral topics that followers or predecessors might have expressed at other times.

If we do this in good faith, we will be able to bleed away some of the support that Republican Christians have enjoyed because we will have made it safe for many devout followers to see that one can be a good Christian and also a Good Democrat at the same time. After all, Jesus was just such a man.

http://www.taxwisdom.org

Following up on Tom T., it’s clear that a large component of giving to a church is in the nature of a club membership. This has to be netted out, before you can get a real idea of what people are actually doing in terms of genuine charitable contributions.

I’m not aware of any large charities (as opposed to proselytising agencies etc) operated or funded by the big US evangelical churches, but then, I wouldn’t be. Can anyone provide information on what kinds of charitable work these churches are doing?

“If you are limiting analysis to the short period of Christian history (1930-1970?)where concepts of Christian social justice coincided with leftist concepts of social justice the question might as easily be, “What went wrong with Christianity that much of it fell for leftism for 40 years?” as it might be “What went wrong with Christianity causing it to abandon leftist concepts of social justice”.

Sebastian, this is a key point: there is a tension between leftist concepts of social justice and older Christian ones. But you’re wrong about the 1930s-1970s as being a narrow, exceptional period. Here is Rev. Josiah Strong (I’ve also quoted him above) of the Home Missionary Society writing in his bestseller _Our Country_ (1886) about the problems of industrial capitalism – in a chapter that is unquestionably _anti-socialist_:

“This is modern and republican feudalism. These American barons and lords of labor have probably more power and less responsibility than many an olden feudal lord. They close the factory or the mine, and thousands of workmen are forced into unwilling idleness. The capitalist can arbitrarily raise the price of necessaries, can prevent men’s working, but has no responsibility, meanwhile, as to their starving. Here is “taxation without representation” with a vengeance. We have developed a despotism vastly more oppressive and more exasperating than that against which the thirteen colonies rebelled.”

Elsewhere in his book Strong considers the apparent resemblances between socialist ideas and his own (particularly those concerning property) in order to show how his are not just different, but are also aimed at undercutting the foundations of socialism. Today’s evangelical movement (except, of course, for those not on the right) would never have to make such a fine distinction. Given the longer (at least pre-1900) history here, it remains a valid question to ask why this has changed.

I think there are three keys to understanding the shift that has made such sentiments as Strong’s seem the exclusive province of the left: 1) real progress in improving the baseline standard of living; 2) the failure of (formerly) existing Communism; and 3) Christian anti-Communism. Furthermore, many people now seem to confuse diagnoses with prescriptions, leading to a tendency to label criticism of systemic/structural problems as a mark of “leftism.”

But just as that kind of analysis does not necessarily have to lead to “leftist” solutions, the discrediting of many “leftist” solutions does not mean we should just throw out that kind of analysis. A focus on hard work, responsibility, and good individual choices is extremely important, but there are limits to what this alone can accomplish. Work is certainly better than welfare, but the existence of some form of the latter (and I really do think it needs further reform) does not preclude the practice of the former, even among its some time recipients.

Oh, and just to make a long post longer, why hasn’t anybody objected to the characterization of today’s Christianity as _unusually_ concerned with “private and personal behavior”? How many of the people involved in the campaign against that “pillar of barbarism” (not my term), polygamy, were actually directly affected in their own personal lives? Not many, but it sure didn’t stop them from enlisting the power of the federal courts. And in the 1830s, Sylvester Graham waged war on the evil of masturbation (but his solutions came in the form of mildly sweet crackers, not ballot initiatives.)

Which moral issues did he emphasize the most? There is little doubt that he thought it was especially important for his followers to be willing to deny themselves materially if that was what was required in order to obtain the benefit others.

That strategy may work someday, but it would certainly have required a different Democratic ticket, given both Kerry and Edwards’ willingness to pay the absolute minimum possible taxes on their enormous wealth.

“I’m not aware of any large charities (as opposed to proselytising agencies etc) operated or funded by the big US evangelical churches, but then, I wouldn’t be.”

I think the problem in analyzing it that way is that evangelical churches tend to be relatively autonomous and often work locally. When taken together, their work would be equal to that of a ‘large charity’ but they won’t hit your radar because many of them are a lot of little charities run locally. It would be like decrying the lack of large-scale barber shops. There are lots of barber shops all over the country, but other than supercuts none of them would count as ‘large’. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of haircutting being done, it just isn’t done by large organizations.

But there are also quite a few large organzations which Sam lists.

Quoted text in main post:

…why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice

When was it established that there’s some dramatic new flourishing of religious belief in the US?

I never heard anything about it till the end of last week. I must have missed something.

Charity is not social justice.

Matt is right: Indeed Christianity throughout the world still seems, to my non-expert eyes, to have a lot more in common with the left-egalitarian model [often combined with more socially conservative views on the family] than it does with the current ascendency of the Christian right in the US.

Christianity includes all sorts of views, from left to right, and it does adapt to different cultures and societies. It also depends on which Christian church you’re talking about. For instance where Catholicism is the predominant religion, you see a stronger presence of egalitarian views.
I don’t think it’s religion itself that shapes these differences. I think it’s a two-way process, but mostly it works the other way round – existing national, cultural and social differences shape different views of Christianity in relation to social matters. So you need to look at those factors.

What the right has done effectively in the UK and the US (it seems) is to tell us that God will look after the good guys and guns the bad guys. The thing the right doesn’t want us to do is get real and develop collective political and social action – the only thing that works. There’s nothing new here – just making sure the divided and ruled stay that way.

Generally speaking, why do lefties like abb1 think of themselves as open-minded, well-read, skeptical, critical-thinking types, when in reality they are the opposite? Discus.

Looking at the list provided by Sam, I thought a reasonable starting point would be to compare the activity levels of evangelical and secular charities. Food for the Hungry has an annual budget of $27 million. This doesn’t seem like much, given that the numbers cited imply total church-based giving in the tens of billions. For comparison, Oxfam (UK) has a budget of more than 100 million pounds, drawn from a much smaller population.

Maybe there is a more systematic study somewhere. At least as far as monetary contributions go, I remain sceptical of claims that churches are particularly active.

Poverty is very much a relative term.

So we’re doing even better than Ethiopia? I guess Bush’s rising tide really has lifted all boats, after all.

Sorry…here I am getting all catty with Jason again. Jason, in all seriousness: do you realize that when you say “poverty is a relative term” you’re essentially supporting Bellatrys’ assertion that there are, in fact, poor people in America?

Asg,
Generally speaking, why do lefties like abb1 think of themselves as open-minded, well-read, skeptical, critical-thinking types, when in reality they are the opposite? Discus.

I think you’re confusing ‘lefties’ with ‘liberals’ here. I don’t think we, the lefties, think of ourselves as open-minded, etc. We have our dogma and that’s all there is it – no need for the critical-thinking stuff, who needs this shit. But we do really care about Social Justice.

Now, the liberals – yes. They do indeed fancy themselves as open-minded, etc. And judging by this thread where they discuss such nonsense at such length they really are open-minded, not to mention ‘well-read’. Not that anything’s wrong with that.

Thanks.

You mean Christian charities like the Salvation Army or YMCA. For the Oxfam guy – Feed the Children (Christian charity) $504 million in projects. $575 million budget. Most Christian charities are not well known. Much of the charity work is done on a church by church basis.