People power is collective power. You, me, the neighbors down the street and across the world -- our power comes when we communicate with one another, and when we act together in ways that bring all our varied gifts and skills, and resources to bear.
Christians know about this. -- Or at least we do in the abstract.
(I Corinthians 12) But I don't know how many of us take that knowledge into daily living and connect it to the world around us and our relationships with one another.
So much
Randian rhetoric is being thrown around and actually taken seriously in what constitutes mainstream American political conversation that it makes no sense to me at all. (Intellectually I can explain it, but emotionally it's a complete non sequitur.)
Human beings are social animals. And everything we have that constitutes human civilization is brought about through social interaction. I can't speak for all faiths, but I can speak for mine. I'm a Christian. And the core concept for Christianity is radical relationality.
Creation itself is brought into being relationally. And the entire creation story -- both versions of it and the story in the garden which follows
(Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Genesis 2:4b-24, and Genesis 3)are all about relationships.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is also all about relationship -- that God loves the world loving each person, and all people. Christ calls us to love God and to love one another.
(John 3:16; Matthew 22:36-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-37)
Some of God's ways are mysteries, but the core of God's values and purposes are known. If one's philosophy of the world is built on those stories there is no way short of self-deception to make the kind of move that puts individuals at the center of things, and that rewards individual efforts, while destroying or privatizing the commons, and ignoring the needs of those on the margins of society.
For Christians, Jews and Muslims, it is God who is the actual center. Over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures, human beings put other things besides God at the center. And when that happens, things always fail and fall into disorder.
The ways people and human systems fail tends to fall into patterns. And in spite of the fact that most Christian churches spend most of their time talking about personal sin and personal failings. Most of scripture is not really concerned with that. Personal sin is real, but it is easily dealt with in comparison to structural sin, so most of Scripture is actually speaking to the latter.
Yes there are laws. The book of Leviticus is all about laws. But all the rules in Leviticus are rules that shape a social order where God is at the center of everything, and human beings relate to one another in ways that by the social norms of the ancient world are just and righteous.
Slavery was a part of the formal structure of the ancient world as was patriarchy. Scripture did not critique them. The Hebrew Bible establishes boundaries for the treatment of women and slaves, but does not conceive of a societal order without slavery or patriarchy.
By New Testament times Roman marriage mores have become the norm of the day so there is no concubinage in the New Testament, though patriarchy remains. And in Rome as in more ancient times, slavery remains a societal norm. Christianity challenges them only in oblique spiritualized ways in the New Testament,
(Galatians 3:28 and I Corinthians 12:13).
But, by drawing on the core principles of scripture and tradition the Abolitionist movement, the Women's movement and the Civil Rights movement of the last two centuries found ample resources upon which to base strong moral arguments with deep grounding in Scripture and tradition resulting in the transformation of the established order of over 5000 years of human history.
That shift has happened. And the last piece of it within my experience.
Slavery and patriarchy were both deeply embedded in the order of the world for well over 5000 years. We still have vestiges of both hanging on in places, but although the behavior still exists; the paradigm has really and truly shifted.
This happened because enough people were spiritually and morally focused to imagine it into being and then together people struggled, with some even dying for it, until change came, and now we are living our way forward through the rest of the transition.
The challenge for the 21st Century is to continue to bring those same spiritual and moral forces to bear on the problems we face today.
One of those problems is Global Warming. And we have it because we lost our moral compass with respect to human stewardship of the resources on the planet.
The other global problem is one the Old Testament knows well. The prophets speak to it over, and over, and over --- oppression of the poor, crushing the needy, and dealing unfairly in the marketplace or in the distribution of land so the wealthy and powerful are privileged while the needs of the poor, the widow, and the orphan are ignored.
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice,
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? -- Micah 6:8
We have yet to devise an economic system that does justice, loves kindness, and walks humbly.
Instead we have an economic system that spurns those values as worthless in the real world of business affairs.
Based on the political conversations that are all over the news media these days I am forced to conclude that our economic system has become God for a broad swath of the politically connected elite. What the system says it needs is what the system gets when governments and corporate boards are in charge of the decisions.
Now this is a sin with a name that gets tons and tons of ink in Scripture. It's called idolatry.
We will get no where we want to be as a world if we keep thinking like that. You see they have it backwards. The world where God reigns supreme is a world based on doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. And when we stick to those values, and rely on God, no matter what comes our way, amazing things happen.
It's like Schroedinger's Cat. Our reliance on God and empowerment by God's vision of a world shaped by God's values is the "earlier random event" that allows that world to spring forth, so that "justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
(Amos 5:24)
Ancient schemes of slavery and patriarchy fall to dust when God's light shines fully. (Maybe there's a reason the vampire stories are so attractive to young people right now. The vampire metaphor seems more than apt for the way our economic system is functioning right now.)
The system we have is not working properly. (Unless your idea of proper is that the planet should be denuded of resources with the vast majority of the benefits flowing to those who already have the most of all.)
God's vision is very different from that.
In God's Kingdom there is enough for everyone. No one is hungry, or struggling to get by, and there is global peace, healing, community, and fellowship. That is the vision God is calling us toward. It's the vision faithful Christian's share. And that vision in some form is found all across the world among people of different faiths, and among people who claim no faith as their own. This is the vision that is the hope of our world.
So now we all need to get to work locally. We actually all share a moral vision that is grounded deeply in Scripture and tradition. It is that vision that needs to be front and center as we confront the ways in which the current system is flawed and failing and devise new ways of doing things.
We can be making changes locally that align with the vision we share, and all this starts when we share our stories -- especially our economic stories -- with one another.
