Religion and Social Justice

I was chatting with my neighbor Dick Dwayne in the weight room of the Berkeley YMCA yesterday, and (surprise!) the subject of the election came up. The election and, of course, the role of the religious right in its outcome.

He grew up a Catholic, I a fundamentalist Protestant, and both of us were galvanized as young men to join in the battles for civil rights—in large part as a result of the Christian ideals we imbibed in the church. Though these ideals led me away from the Church of Christ, an organization I saw as antithetical to Jesus' teachings and hostile to egalitarianism, there remained even for me a messianic, transcendent aspect to the civil rights cause. We all wanted to join in the effort, as the prophet Amos proclaimed, to "let justice roll down like mighty waters."

And it was black ministers like Martin Luther King who saw the moral centrality of brotherhood and equality. They led their congregations to march for political change as they preached that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Religious fervor in the fifties and sixties was closely tied to the movement for civil rights, even for those of us who were no longer observant.

And later, this combined moral and political imperative led Dick and me and many others naturally to oppose the Vietnam War and to support justice for women and gays. It led us to deplore the age of Reagan, with its selfish corporatism and prideful international bullying, as immoral, or at the least amoral.

What I have come to realize, in other words, is that religion, in one sense or another, has long been intertwined with politics. The institutional wall between church and state is—and should continue to be—impermeable; but the moral impulse may be embodied in political movements as well as in metaphysical transcendence. Churches are the originators of crusades and inquisitions, but they can also occasionally do good in the world.

So here's the conundrum now. Why is the religious right in the US today such a force for injustice and hatred, as it seems to me it is? How can it allow itself to be mobilized by people like George Bush to support divisive, antiegalitarian policies? If "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," as Jesus taught, why has Halliburton been awarded the needle-enlargement contract?

The answer, in part, may be that the religious right is focused principally on personal rectitude in expectation of a just eternity, rather than on amelioration of these earthly arrangements that we are experiencing only temporarily. But if that's true, then why is it so different from the equally religious civil rights movement?

Mark Schmitt puts it into historical context, pointing out that the three previous periods of Great Awakening in American religious life created the impetus, successively, for the American revolution, the abolition of slavery, and (yes) the civil rights movement. If what we are experiencing now is a fourth Great Awakening, Schmitt writes, it is very different:

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change?

I need some reading suggestions here. If you've read Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism you'll probably recognize that my question comes from there. Here's a chart that summarizes Fogel's basic view of the Great Awakenings, which I believe is idiosyncratic compared to that of most historians of religion (Fogel is an economic historian). Fogel helped me understand the question, but not to answer it.

I cannot answer it either, but this may be the question to pursue as we attempt to understand each other in the two halves of this divided country.

Comments

[Keith]

And so we stand with mirrors: someone here, and someone there, with no agreement reached; but catching, though, and passing the reflection we've singled out from far, this pure reflection, on to another from the gleaming mirror. Ball-game for gods! A play of light, in which three balls, perhaps, perhaps even nine, will cross, not one of which, since first the world grew conscious, ever fell wide. Catchers, that's what we are! It comes invisibly through the air, and yet how absolutely the mirror meets it! - this (only then fully advent), this reflection, that only gives us time to estimate with how much force it will go on to where.

Just this. And our long childhood lasted for it; necessity, affection, long farewells were all endured for this. But this repays.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(German poet, 1875-1926)