The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 1 April 26, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri , trackbackAs an activist and organizer, I used to have a vision of my role in social change that kept me protected in a certain way from people and their problems. When I was a union organizer and community organizer, I spent countless hours at workers’ kitchen tables listening to their problems. Often they cried. I consoled. By a few months into a campaign, I knew enough about so many interconnected lives in a workplace or neighborhood for 100 John Sayles screenplays.
But my purpose wasn’t to help people, it was to “help them help themselves.” I wasn’t a social worker. In fact, as hard-nosed organizers, we were taught disdain for social workers who ministered directly to people’s short term needs. We were even advised by many of our mentors not to socialize with the people we were organizing, “because it could complicate things.”
When I met her, my wife Elizabeth became a new mentor to me. As a Christian who had always led a “missional” life, there had never been a time in her life when she wasn’t personally intertwined with a whole bunch of troubled lives. When we were first dating, she was visiting several times a week an old disabled man in one of the poorest sections of DC. Though he was confined to a wheelchair, he had no ramp to get in or out of his house. He was also half blind, and yet somehow was (barely) taking care of his two adult mentally retarded children. The man’s house was a disaster of filth and decay. Elizabeth was organizing a group of her coworkers to clean and fix it up. A few times she tried to get me to go visit with her. I resisted, saying things like, “I think we often just mess things up worse when we get involved in lives so different from our own,” and, “I choose to make a different kind of contribution.”
It’s a few years later now and, thanks to Elizabeth, I have finally gotten out side of my own “four walls” and into other people’s lives as a participant, not just an observer/organizer. It’s been a life-altering experience, even though I’ve only just dipped my toe in the water.
I remember, in college, during one building take-over protest (I can’t even remember what the cause was), when we angrily read/barked Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (a great book) at passers by through a mega phone. The Christians I’ve been hanging out with lately, spend their lives trying to live with and directly aid the “wretched” of their neighborhoods and towns. So I’m incredibly grateful to Christians for what they’ve taught me over the last few years.
And now I want to give something back.
Too many Christians these days are rejecting the paradigm of “organizing” (intentional, structural social change) just as dogmatically as I used to reject “service” (individual, sacrificial social change).
These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me.
But they’re attempting to answer these questions almost in complete ignorance of humanity’s long history of tackling problems of that scale and scope at the social level, at the level of whole societies. In other words, they’re approaching big social problems just as cluelessly as I have always approached “little” individual problems.
Today I attended Brian McLaren’s Deep Shift conference. One of the agendas of the conference was to get Christians engaged in social problems such as poverty. Both Brian and local pastor Tim Keel told some horrifying stories about what life was like in the slums of some African cities. And through Bible teaching, they left no doubt that Jesus called us to do something about it.
But when it came to, “HOW?” they could only offer the political economy of the personal: Be a good-hearted business person. And consume less.
Brian said something remarkable (if you’re able to place it in historical context): “Capitalism is our only option. So we have to figure out how to practice good capitalism instead of bad capitalism.”
Tim Keel said something equally remarkable (if you place it in the context of Brian’s statement, and have spent some time thinking through how capitalism actually works): “When we consume less here, we can build up prosperity and security over there.”
Those statements represent the two pillars of today’s pop economic thought. And all alone, they’re really harmful. They are the equivalent in political economy of Joel Osteen’s pop theology. “Think good thoughts, make good choices, and all will be well.”
[I should add here that Brian, Tim and so many other Christians are participating in and seeing with their own eyes a lot of *real* efforts where consuming less to give to development projects is working, and where practicing “socially responsible Capitalism” is working. My point isn’t that Christians should stop participating in those kinds of things, it’s that those kinds of personal efforts will unfortunately never be enough to even scratch the surface of world poverty. That kind of personal/relational work does form the foundation of any sincere big picture transformation…but only if we go beyond the personal to the (yes, I know, it’s horrible) political in a really big way.]
I’m not getting down on Brian, Tim or any other Christians—or, for that matter, non-religious lefties, who share the same economic thinking. In the present day, when it comes to economic thought, we’re all starting at zero. For a couple hundred years up to the early 20th century, there was a long tradition of deep, experiential and theoretical work done in economics by passionate people who had the exact same goals as today’s Christians who are saying, “Everything must change.”
But twists and turns of history have hidden all that experience and knowledge from current generations. In some ways starting from zero is a good thing, because so much baggage had accumulated around those old traditions. But it’s wrong for us to simply repeat those two hundred years of trial and error, making every mistake they made, and ending up inevitably crushed by that same old debilitating baggage in the end.
OK…so in the next installment I’ll get into the economics itself. This post is way too long already!
Tags: Brian McLaren, capitalism, Consumerism, economics, Tim Keel
Comments»
good thoughts. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
I just discovered this blog and became an instant fan. I’m deeply appreciative of your critique of an ahistorical approach to ending poverty and your call to develop a “thick” economic analysis to complement a robust theological analysis (though I’ll defer comment on Brian and Tim until I’ve read through their latest myself). When your summer tour wiki is up, throw in the EnVision conference (www.ev08.org) - you’re encouraging exactly the kind of capacity for complexity that we’re hoping to generate with it.
Been reading this blog for a few weeks now, and I am looking forward to your next post on this topic.
Behind the rejection of organization there is a rejection of organizations in general for many. This is a discouraging trend. It is not one or the other, but rather it is both personal and organizational. I am a pastor in Austin and we are starting a new church community to try and be both personal and organizational. We are trying to look at it very holistically right now.
Looking forward to reading more and learning how we might apply it.
I’m eager for the next installment!
this post (and the next one) belong in a book!
An important part of the answer is in the community nature of the church
- a committed group of people, each doing what they do best
- pooling resources to enable some folks to spend significant time in transformational activities
- a commitment to education and community building as part of outreach, leaving an indigenous community in place to carry on and expand what was started
- freedom to experiment, discovering new ways of doing things (co-ops, community living, etc)
- decentralized planning, trusting community members to organize and exercise judgment and passion
This is SO rad, Zack! I’m really looking forward to the next installment. But I think there are definitely Christian communities that are already working to radically transform economics and politics in the direction of justice. I’m reading God’s Politics by Jim Wallis right now, I believe at your recommendation, and my sister’s. It’s so, so good. I want to work for Sojourners when I grow up.
Are you suggesting something different than what they’re doing? I guess I’ll have to wait for Part II to find out…
Hope to talk to you soon…
And also I really like your story about how as an organizer, you used to want to “help people help themselves” but not “get involved in lives so different from our own.” I like that your relationship with your wife changed you. It makes me think of Jim Wallis’s adage that “God is personal but never private.”
Ok, no pressure, but that setup requires a pretty earth-shaking follow up
I feel like you’re saying the notion of “being a better capitalist” is lukewarm water and way too “at a distance.” Which I agree with. It seems odd that people claiming a deep shift would essentially suggest just being nicer at what we’re currently doing, which seems less a shift and more of a tweak. “Minor Tweak” probably doesn’t have the same ring from a marketing standpoint.
I have a friend who spends 90% of his time attempting to change the community around him for the better (read: for the kingdom) by connecting with and engaging the businesspeople he has developed relationships with. It is murky water I’m afraid, with more political and financial issues coming into play than any ideological or theological issues. I’ve seen him try different things, but eventually pick one tiny little change to affect, one small ripple in the pool to try and generate, due to the extremely stiff-necked and self-motivated people he’s dealing with. (reference Don Marquis’ quote about making people think.) I wonder if the Deep Shift guys are taking this tack? I don’t know much about them but I am looking forward to hearing your follow up, and I appreciate the brains and careful analysis you give on your site. Bravo!
Positive Empowerment…
I liked this article.
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