Collateral Justice

One of the things I struggle most with as a nominally progressive pastor is the whole social justice thing. I'm for it, of course. Pretty much across the board, I'm in favor of stuff that makes it clear to all and sundry that I must be a hard core left winger. Material relief for the poor? Check. A visceral distrust of the processes of capitalism? Check. A deep commitment to conservation and the environmental movement? Uh huh. A radically inclusive and welcoming attitude towards gays and lesbians? Check. A passion for liberty and equal rights for artificial and synthetic sentient entities? Absolutely.

Oh. Wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Whichever way, when asked to check a box on the leftist/rightist debates, I come down pretty much consistently progressive and social justicey. Much of the reason for that has to do with my faith, with the radical love towards the Other that is at the heart of the Christian message. Yet as I review those teachings of Jesus, what I encounter has very little to do with using collective power dynamics to resist systemic injustice and empowering the disenfranchised. Yeah, Jesus resisted The Man, and got himself killed as a subversive and and agitator and a general maker of trouble. This sends tingly feelings down the spines of self-described radicals everywhere.

But when you look at what he taught, and the ethic for which he lived and died and overcame death itself, it has very little to do with the socioeconomics and the power dynamics of human communities. Those structures of power aren't even part of the equation. They are immaterial, to be addressed only so far as they must be rejected in order to embrace the Gospel.

When we forget that, it's easy for churches to simply become mirrors of the communities in which they find themselves. It's easy for them to become indistinguishable from the political and social entities that fill the secular spaces around them. When that happens, they lose their grounding, and gradually become little more than an association or a nonprofit entity, organized around a common secular interest or purpose.

There's nothing wrong with such groups. I think they're great ways to get things done in our culture that need to get done. But they aren't church. They do not convey the same message.

That, I think, is one of the primary ways in which both progressive and conservative Christians are prone to stumble. Rather than focusing on instilling in folks a sense of the radical grace taught by the Nazarene, it's easy to get into talk of social issues as the raison d'etre of the church. But what Jesus taught was not sociological, but spiritual. It was not economic, but existential. It is for that reason that it can be such a shattering, dangerous, and transformative thing...not just for individuals, but for cultures as well.

The Active, The Contemplative, and Social Justice

Ever since Ben Gleck (for speaking his name just gives him more power) declared that being concerned for the well-being of the poor, the widow, and the orphan makes you a Stalinist, progressive Christians have been a raging hornet's nest of fury. Well, that's not quite right. It's been more like an open, inclusive, and relational hornet's nest of respectfully stated disagreement. Not nearly as satisfying, but that's how we roll.

That finally waning kerfuffle did stir in me an old tension. It's the way to find balance between spirituality and social justice, between contemplation and action, between the "love of neighbor" that manifests itself in efforts for systemic justice and the "love of God" that expresses itself in prayer, worship, and meditation.

Honestly, progressive Christians haven't really proven themselves to be the best at finding the knob on the "spirituality" door. As a laddie who was raised in a very social-justicey church, there was a great deal of emphasis on social equity and the rights of the disenfranchised. There was...well...rather less effort put into developing a sense of God's presence. More significantly, there wasn't an intentional development of the connection between the two, establishing the connection between those two aspects of the central ethic of our faith.

I was reminded a bit of how much faith and action can be divided while reading through the writings of an unknown 13th century English mystic. I'd been intending to read "The Cloud of Unknowing" for a while, but finally got around to it after a friend mailed me a copy (thanks, Jonathan!). Though I'm glomming on to large portions of the book, I'm not sure I quite embrace the occasionally binary approach to Christian faith that the author proposes. For all of his wit and insight, he tends to split the faithful into the "contemplatives," who sit like Mary at the foot of Christ, and the "actives," who fret about in the kitchen like Martha and kvetch about their slacker sister.

I just can't quite buy into that whole binary approach. Contemplation is not just for "contemplatives." Action is not just for "actives." We have, as human creatures, an admixture of gifts and needs. Though some of us may trend one way or 'tother, most of us require both time to ponder and time to get our hands dirty.

Giving care and seeking justice for the oppressed flows forth from contemplation, and contemplation is where we are called to go when the quest for justice seems too overwhelming for us to handle. In that balance, I think, is where we most effectively serve the Kingdom.

Fox News: Balanced Between the Pernicious and the Absurd

One of my favorite portions of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church...and yes, I have favorite portions...dates from way, way back in 1789. It's that little bit early on about the importance of seeking truth, and how important that yearning for the true is to a life lived according to the standards of goodness and holiness. It states:

That truth is in order to goodness; and the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness, according to our Savior's rule, "By their fruits ye shall know them." And that no opinion can be either more pernicious or more absurd that than which brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and represents it as no consequence what a man's opinions are. On the contrary, we are persuaded that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty. Otherwise, it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or to embrace it. (G-1.0304)

This has always struck me as one of the most helpful portions of our often-dry constitution. Seeking truth and fighting through the filters of our selfish subjectivity tends to make us more open to loving those who are different. Those who care about the truth have a tendency to bear the fruits of the grace that Christ proclaimed.

Today, I stumbled across a particularly egregious-feeling bit of not-truth, one that troubled me deeply. It was over at..ahem..FoxNews.com.

Yeah, I know. Misrepresentation? On Fox? Surprise, surprise. But as much as I find Fox distasteful, they are still among the top 10 sources of online news. So for many, what they say is, well, news. It defines the perception of reality of a significant portion of the Yoo Ess of Ey.

The bit that caught my eye had this tagline: "Not Again: Meet Obama's Controversial New Pastor." To which I said, "Huh?" I know President Obama has been seriously slack in getting his sorry behind to church. As a pastor and DC denizen, I know he's not made a church selection...and, the way I see it, is unlikely to. So how could he have a new pastor?

Well...he doesn't. Not in any meaningful sense. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The pastor in question is Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical and the founder of Sojourner's magazine. Rev. Wallis, though certainly liberal, is a pretty moderate voice. Wallis recently came out against some amazingly ignorant comments that had been made by Glenn Beck about "social justice," in which Beck had condemned a social justice emphasis as both fascistic and communist, and told folks to basically bail on any church that ever quoted from the Gospel of Luke.

So now, in a non-editorial piece that presents itself as news, Fox has declared that Jim Wallis isn't a "progressive evangelical." He is, instead, a "socialist activist who has championed communist causes." Sojourners, the magazine he publishes, is "a far-left magazine" that has, unsurprisingly, also "championed communist causes."

This really rather remarkable bit of 50s throwback agitprop comes to Fox unfiltered from an affiliated right wing group. It represents a perspective so utterly consumed by it's own worldview that the reality of who Jim Wallis is becomes irrelevant. Such a willful disregard for truth isn't just a bit of spin. It's not the sort of thing where you can say, well, gawrsh, that's just my opinion. I'm entitled to my OPINION, aren't I?

Perhaps, in so far as we all have the freedom to misrepresent and deceive to serve our own interests. In doing so, though, the fruits we bear are the farthest thing from the gracious and the holy.