My first Christian reading group March 18, 2009
Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , comments closedIt finally happened! I was invited to a Christian reading group. We’re reading a book called Reading in Communion. We meet at Homer’s, the Christian coffee shop I wrote about a few weeks ago, a place that’s filled with several study and discussion groups at 7:30am.
I lost my book somehow — at least I couldn’t find it yesterday when I went to catch up on the reading. (This is our 4th week, but I was out of the country for the last two.) So I had a flashback to grade school when I had to admit I didn’t have my book. A friend let me read along in his. It was completely marked up, notes in the margins and big highlighted chunks everywhere.
We talk some about the book. And talk some about other stuff. It is great.
Meanwhile, a friend from the secular lefty side of my life is telling me I should read the McCullough bioraphy of John Adams. She suggested we try to get a reading group set up! Of course, she grew up a fundamentalist Christian before rebelling and leaving that culture in college. I know that it’s not only Christians who do reading groups. In fact, my parents each had a book group for decades. But I can’t think of a single book group that’s taking place among all of my progressive/lefty friends — and they’re a pretty intellectual and engaged group. Actually, there is one acquaintance who is attending a group — but it’s a Christian Bible study group that he’s attending out of curiosity!
This gave me an idea to survey 20 friends on the left side of my life and 20 on the Christian side and see how many reading groups they’ve heard of in their circles. Maybe I’ll do that.
Untitled March 16, 2009
Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , comments closedHey all! Listen, this is just a rough draft for discussion — just an experiment to try to figure out how to make some of these points. Let me know if you have any reactions.
Middleclass Christians are trying to figure out how to use their wealth to eliminate poverty around the world. It’s a beautiful movement that’s infecting churches everywhere. Last week I listened to this message at a church in London and then came home yesterday to the same message at church in Kansas City.
Ending poverty has been a central mission of the church since the beginning. For most of the 20th century, however, much of the church picked up a “conservative” (I’d say radical) ideology that shifted responsibility to the the “invisible hand” of the market to take care of the poor. But as we dive into this new era, we find ourselves relying on ideas from that old conservative ideology.
In his book Everything Must Change, Brian McLaren, suggests we change the story we live by — away from a story of competition and greed toward a story of sharing and love. Millions of Christians are doing that. But even if the plot is changing, the setting and characters are still taken from the pages of the old story. We have to change the very elements from which we’re constructing this new story of the church.
In the old Capitalist story, the main character is the individual — or family, or small group — who works in jobs or starts enterprises for money. The story follows our main characters from job to job, enterprise to enterprise. It’s a story of freedom and independence because the characters are free to choose any job or start any enterprise — and free to spend the money earned however they want.
Mainstream Middleclass Christians are mainly focusing their rethinking on the conclusion of that story: on what they should do with the money they earn. They’re questioning whether the freedom to float from cubicle to cubicle, even with a high salary, is the right kind of freedom to chase. They’re seeking instead a different kind of freedom: the kind that comes from vulnerability, dependence and community. (The strength of a religious approach to social justice shines here. Listen to Tim Keel’s sermon (March 15) that I witnessed yesterday at Jacob’s Well church in Kansas City and try to imagine a non-religious equivalent. To bolster our confidence in taking the leap of faith toward community, he has available both a big-picture philosophy of the world as well as an incredibly powerful and useful philosophy of the self. A non-religious approach (today at least) simply has to say, “Do this because it’s the right thing to do.” Which isn’t anywhere close to being enough.)
But how to get there? Two answers are popular now. The more mainstream one is: Give your money to the poor. The other one, a little more radical, focuses more on the system itself as a problem. It’s answer is to withdraw — for example by quitting your capitalist jobs and starting a cooperative enterprise. Most churches who have caught the anti-poverty bug include people who are pursuing a mix of both approaches.
The problem with both of those new stories, however, is that the main character held over from the old story — the individual or small group as an economic producer and consumer — doesn’t exist anymore in the real world. When we understand that, then we are led to a different kind of story because the setting and characters are different as well as the plot. I’ll get there, but first let me try to back up and explain what I’ve said so far.
Have you ever met anyone who has a perfectly inverted picture of themselves — for example, parents who believe they are raising independent children, but who are really smothering them? Well, our economic system, capitalism is a little bit like that. The story that capitalist society tells about itself is a story about a society made up of free, independent workers and entrepreneurs. That story has been told by philosopher/economists from John Locke to Tom Friedman, and woven into every breath of popular culture. The reality is the exact opposite: Capitalism’s revolutionary project during it’s 500 year run has been to build one great unified machine of production in which we are all completely dependent on each other. I realize that sounds a little bit like the interdependent community that Christians are looking for, but it’s not as simple as that.
Think of some items that you could not do without: I don’t know, maybe a drug that saved your life, the furnace that keeps you from freezing in the Winter, and your bicycle that gets you to work. Nearly every important thing we rely on is produced through the social effort of thousands — possibly millions — of workers. (Remember to count not only the workers who assembled the thing, but also the ones who made all the parts, the ones who made all the machines and equipment used in the process, the ones who mined, transported and prepared all the materials, and so on.)
When times are good, and jobs outnumber workers, it’s easy to forget about our interdependence because, as we float from job to job, and our paychecks command more than we could possibly consume, we could not feel more independent.
When the system contracts, on the other hand, our utter dependence becomes immediately and painfully clear.
But, in these hard times, in this capitalist system, who do we find that we’re dependent on for our living? Our fellow producers? No. We’re dependent on the owners of capital — the system is set up to serve them, not us. But bear with me for a second: I’m not talking about some cartoon class of fat cats. Maybe 300 years ago that kind of caricature of a small group who ruled the world to their advantage would have been appropriate. But most of us work for companies that are owned technically by millions shareholders. Most of those shareholders have no idea of what companies they might “own” in their 401Ks or other investments. The “owners” of capital have thus become an abstraction. And yet we rely on these owners — I could almost say imaginary owners — for our jobs and our paychecks.
What about the CEOs and boards of directors? Recently they’ve been looking a lot like that old caricature, right? Yes, but before you give them too much credit, remember that they are only the stewards of capital for the owners (a group that includes about half of the American people as shareholders). Their job is to increase the capital owned by the owners. They are actually legally required to work toward this end: shareholders can sue them if they intentionally do something else. Practicalities are a much better inducement though: if they don’t increase the chunk of capital that has been put in their care, then the owners will treat it with scorn and starve it of investment (”Sell!”).
By the way: understanding this “abstract owner” of the economy is the key to understanding the financial crisis. The owner is only interested in things that grow, and it doesn’t care how or why they grow. The owner is manic: it is a pulsing network of computers programmed with growth-maximizing algorithms, people programmed with career-maximizing algorithms and media programmed with ratings-maximizing algorithms. The owner is us — even if we’re only looking for 3% on our savings account.
This blind, hungry beast always eventually gets sucked back into the kinds of scams — legal and illegal, intended and unintended — that are coming to light newly each week. These scams offer increasing share prices, house prices, etc… But when the scams finally unravel, then the abstract owner is inconsolable (for a time) and refuses to invest anywhere. That’s why prices keep going down, down, down.
During a “bubble” like the one that soared for most of the past 25 years, there are plenty of jobs for everyone — even totally useless jobs. Remember some of those Dot Coms in the 90’s? It was an odd kind of socialism: Guaranteed work for everyone, no matter how dumb your idea! In those times, when all the numbers are going up, we feel free and independent.
During a “crash” like the one we’re beginning to feel now, there are few jobs. When the factories, stores and offices in our communities start shutting their doors, then there is a terrible sinking feeling. Suddenly it’s perfectly clear that we don’t control our own means of making a living. Suddenly we realize that even though we worked as a part of an interdependent society of producers, we are unable to stop the destruction of our means of producing. Suddenly it’s clear that the one calling the shots is that “abstract owner” of the economy — or, as it’s called in polite society, “the market.”
OK. Back to the new stories that Christians are trying to live by in their mission to end poverty. The first: We middleclass Christians in the rich countries should give away our money to the poor. The second: that we should withdraw and make our own living outside of the system.
How does the first story play out when capitalism is destroying the means of making a living of billions of people? (And when the income of rich country people is shrinking too?)
We can still give away as much as we can. But what’s happening in the world right now — 250,000 factories have closed in China in the past year! — shows us that we are called to do something much deeper and much more difficult than simply giving away some money. We do need to give away our wealth. We have to do it, and do it wisely. But what else?
The second story, is heading there: building up a means of making a living that is in the hands of people who care about people, not some “abstract owner” that only cares about numbers that go up. However, the scale of what’s happening in the world right now is also showing us that small cooperative enterprises are equally dependent on the “abstract owner” as everything else. That won’t be true in every case. But on the whole, coops are going to be subject to the ups and downs of the broader economy. Traditionally, crises are times when a lot of them go bust or get bought out by bigger companies. The food co-op down the street from me was just bought up by Whole Foods, for example. And something tells me they’re not going to keep it open for very long.
What’s the solution? The solution is to depose that abstract owner. This doesn’t mean some kind of violent revolution — or even an angry revolution — against the rich. Rich people own a lot of stuff and make up a big chunk of that “abstract owner.” But guess what: we middle class people dwarf the rich in our share of ownership of the economy. We are the owner! What it means is that we have the power to depose this system non-violently and with a relatively smooth political transition because this is a revolution to depose ourselves from a mindless, knee jerk role that most of us don’t even know we’re playing.
We shouldn’t be naive. This system we live under is a high-voltage, super-heated, radioactive tangle of wires, pipes and waste. Taking this thing apart is going to be incredibly dangerous. There will be unforeseen consequences that will hurt a lot of people. But that is already happening, for example, thanks to the latest financial bubble burst. The question is are we going to keep subjecting ourselves to these kinds of disasters?
There will also be people who feel it’s their duty to protect the status quo. Some of these will be in the pay of people who benefit from things staying as they are, but many will be acting on ideological grounds — in other words, they really believe that the current system makes us free and that all alternatives are chains.
And then there will be opportunists who try to seize the day in the toughest moments of the transition. When things are getting harder and we’re saying, “Let’s share more,” these will be saying things like, “Throw out the immigrants, so that we can keep more for ourselves.” This is the most dangerous thing. But that kind hatred is going to become very powerful as the economy continues to decline whether we act or not.
It’s going to be hard. But this is our generations’ charge.
Two tribes of revolutionaries March 11, 2009
Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , comments closedI’ve been in Europe for almost 2 weeks. France->Germany->UK. I’ve been talking to left-ish political parties and labor unions about the Internet and organizing in the context of the world economic crisis. The US has been an innovator in those areas recently. Others are interested in learning from our trials and errors.
While talking to these groups, I occasionally slipped in something about how the Christians, yes those crazy Jesus people you’ve heard about, are the vanguard of whatever anti-capitalist sentiment there is in America. Context: In most of Europe, mainstream parties and labor unions are actively questioning capitalism, even if only on their margins. In Germany, for example, there are several big conferences on capitalism and alternatives planned by big unions, parties and universities. This is left, but mainstream, stuff over here.
So when I bring up the “Revolutionaries” of the American church, people over here completely freak out. They cannot believe it. They will not believe it. Their faces wince up, because they know I can’t be making this up completely, but it’s just too much to process. They dismiss it. There’s a strong stereotype of the “ignorant protestant preacher” and they can’t reconcile it with what I’m saying.
Somehow, eventually, these two mainstream forces that are questioning capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic will have to get to know each other, but that’s probably a while off.
In Berlin, there was one “Christian Socialist.” He told me, “these other guys think I’m crazy because I’m a Christian.” He goes to church. He called it an “evangelical church,” but I think the word that sounds like “evangelical” just means “gospel” in German (as it does in Greek, right?). Anyways, talking to him a little more he told me, “Oh! No! Of course I don’t believe in God, what do you think I’m crazy?” So he just meant Christian as in participating in the church as a social institution. That’s the closest I found to a Christian over here.
Until…I got to London. There’s a cool neighborhood called “Spitalfields.” It’s sort of the Adam’s Morgan, Williamsburg or Mission District of London, as far as I can tell. On Sunday morning we went to Christ Church, Spitalfields (church site), which is the Anglican parish church. We walked in a few minutes late and they were singing one of the praise songs I’ve gotten used to. A couple of people had their hands up in worship. It was just like going to church in Kansas City, except for the accents. The sermon was all about Jesus and social justice, with lots of references to some of the same books popular among revolutionary Christians in the U.S..
It reminded me what a global movement this is — not just the church, but this particular sub-culture within the church. After all, the praise songs they sang come from Australia, the US and Britain; the people in the church there come from all over the world.