A Theology for Radicals

I’m reflecting on some of the “disconnects” in American life. One is the glaring gap between personal faith and public policy.  How is it possible that the most overtly religious nation in the developed world has the greatest gulf between rich and poor? Why does a country with so many churches imprison more of its people than anywhere else on earth (and still insist on inflicting the death penalty)? What is our justification for resisting universal health care?    

Americans are among the most generous people on earth. They are also highly practical and love problem solving. Given accurate information they usually want to do the right thing.

But because our social lives are so separate (our places of worship, schools, and neighborhoods are often defined by race or class), we build up images of fellow Americans that are prejudiced or inaccurate at best. Our information sources are increasingly narrowly based and tend to reinforce our existing biases. They don’t challenge us to think beyond our own experience or viewpoint.

So a person who volunteers time and talent to helping earthquake victims in Haiti, or building churches or schools in Central America, or who fosters a dozen children, may also advocate public policies in their home town that deny education to immigrant children, reduce access to health care for those who can least afford it, or cut mass transportation to suburbs where most available entry-level jobs are located.   

A few days ago I was sitting with Ben Campbell of the Richmond Hill Retreat Center and some other local Christian leaders discussing urban ministry. Ben reckons that ninety percent of new churches in the Richmond region are non-denominational. There’s a growing interest in urban ministry among committed evangelicals in these flourishing new congregations in the ever-expanding suburban areas. This is a potentially powerful force for good. 

However, Campbell says that for the most part these dedicated, mostly young Christians have no knowledge of social issues or the history of racism and exclusion, no understanding of tax policies, or of the factors that impact housing, public education, and transportation. 

At the other end of the spectrum, many mainline liberal churches are actively engaged in social issues but have lost focus on core moral and spiritual truths. They are not providing an environment that is attractive to a new generation of Christians. In addition, failure to root social justice efforts in the bedrock of a strong inner life and lived-out values can endanger the most idealistic efforts. 

In The Beloved Community, Charles Marsh calls burnout “the activist’s occupational hazard.”  He points to the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC ) when, starting in 1960, thousands of white students came to the South to work for reconciliation and justice alongside African Americans. The movement, he writes, pursued a form of discipleship that was “life affirming, socially transformative, and existentially demanding: a theology for radicals.”  Resisting the “cultural paradigm of efficiency," it made time for “reverie and solitude and for rituals that were refreshingly unproductive. A certain kind of contemplative discipline was an important disposition in building community and enabling trust.” 

What would America look like if mainline liberal Christians deepened their spiritual lives and their moral accountability, and if conservative evangelicals committed themselves to a strategic engagement for justice?  We might see a theology for radicals that could lead to a profound transformation of the social and economic landscape.   

Trust in Investing

If you are feeling cynical about the world of finance and investment you should talk with Patrick Davis.  He’s a 25-year-old senior associate with the Calvert Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit that aims to maximize the flow of capital to disadvantaged communities. The organization enables investors – large and small – to earn a financial return while lifting families out of poverty.

Patrick’s enthusiasm is infectious. He believes we need to fundamentally rethink our relationship to money and to simultaneously build a new economy on the principles of sustainability and social equity.  And he thinks the time is ripe for such a revolution. He says investors are seeing the writing on the wall: “Unless we address environmental degradation, unemployment, and the education gap, even the most powerful corporations will have no customers.”

Long before the Bernie Madoff scandal and other Ponzi schemes made headlines there has been a structural disconnect in our economy that reinforces a disproportionate distribution of wealth. Patrick believes that the focus on short-term returns in the corporate and financial sectors has “produced a broken economy built on perpetual distrust and resentment.” 

Over a sandwich at Potbelly near his Bethesda, Maryland office, he told me, “We need to talk about the larger ecosystem, get away from quarter-to-quarter earnings and think about sustainability.” With degrees in Economics, Government & Politics, and a minor in Latin American Studies, Patrick was looking for a middle ground between wealth management and non-profits. The Calvert Foundation, which offers an alternative to traditional philanthropy or strictly market-based investing, was the perfect fit. 

According to its website, Calvert investors have put nearly $200 million to work in 250 community organizations in all 50 states and over 100 countries. These investors are supporting a diversified mix of high-impact organizations involved in affordable housing, microfinance, Fair Trade coffee, small business development, as well as charter schools, daycare centers and rehabilitation clinics.  Investors and supporters have helped build or rehabilitate over 17,000 homes, create 430,000 jobs in the U.S. and in developing countries, and finance over 25,000 cooperatives, social enterprises, and community facilities.

Last year, Patrick spent two weeks helping with the rebuilding efforts in Haiti. It was, he says, a life-changing experience.

Now he’s planning a workshop in October, as part of The Trust Factor 2011 program in Washington, to spread the word about “impact investing” to a lay audience. This approach produces “blended value – financial, social, and environmental returns.”  Patrick wants to demonstrate the role of “trustbuilding amongst financial advisors and clients, trustbuilding in local communities, and broadly a restoration of trust in the economy for the public.”

My guess is that there are thousands of talented people of Patrick’s generation who share his passion for a new vision in the financial sector where returns are “built on real assets that are visible in the community, rather than inflated bookkeeping and complicated financial arrangements.”  

And that makes me feel a whole lot more hopeful about the future.

A Promise Made Under Texas Live Oaks

Mark and Ariane are married. They exchanged their vows shaded by ancient live oaks on July 3. Even at 7pm the Texas sun kept the temperature hovering in the high nineties. In a touch of thoughtful creativity, the order of service was printed on fans. 

A guitarist played Bach's Air on the G String. Parents read Letters to a Young Poet and Pathways  by Rainer Maria Rilke; two Celtic prayers by David Adam; Blessing for a Marriage by James Dillet Freeman; the Prayer of St Francis; and Litany by Billy Collins.  

Susan and I now have a second daughter-in-law and we are thrilled beyond words to welcome Ari to the Corcoran clan. As the mother of three sons, Susan appreciates the increased female presence in the family.

The day before the ceremony, seventy family members and friends gathered for a rehearsal lunch at Torchy's Tacos at the Trailer Park Eatery, one of Mark and Ari's favorite Austin haunts. It was a joyous multicultural, multigenerational celebration.

Despite the odds, marriage and faithful relationships based on mutual trust are still the ideal to which most of our sons' friends aspire.  Mark and Ari’s promise and commitment to each other:

“Loving what I know of you,

Trusting what I don’t yet know,

With respect for your integrity

And faith in your abiding love for me.”

The day after the wedding I came across a column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times entitled More Perfect Unions  “Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature,” he writes.

"A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos….The hardest promises to keep are often the ones that keep people together."

During the wedding festivities Andrew, Mark's brother and best man, warned Ari of certain genetic Corcoran traits: selective hearing, endless capacity for argument, and obsession with sports (watching, that is). "Don't blame them, it’s not their fault; they were made that way." But he concluded with one important Corcoran quality: "We find the greatest women in the world and we never let them go."

I say amen to that.

America Healing

In March, I wrote about my experience at a retreat with fifteen practitioners and some program officers from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation where we shared personal stories of racial healing. Last month, the same group served as facilitators for the America Healing conference in Asheville, North Carolina, when the foundation convened 250 grantees, racial justice advocates, and leaders of national civil rights organizations.

We spent the first day in “racial equity healing dialogues.” For the most part, people in my sharing circle had spent years, sometimes decades, in the struggle for racial justice, yet for many it was a unique experience to be in a group where they could tell their stories. As one activist said, “For the first time I felt like I was not alone.”

One participant described a turning point in his life when someone had simply been willing to listen to his anger and pain and then had the humility to say, “I can have no idea what it was like for you.”

A senior African American, who grew up in the segregated south and went on to a distinguished corporate career, recalled hearing his father having to answer, “Yes, sir” to a 9 year-old white boy. “Healing is a journey that is not over. Even today most of us cannot live in America for a full day without something happening that reminds you of what color you are. How do you take hate and turn it into love, turn it into good?”

Other themes and questions surfaced: How to work with people who will not change? What to do with our frustrations? How to deal with multiple realities and identities in our increasingly multicultural national community? How to be part of the system and not be tainted by it? How to do the work and take care of ourselves at the same time?

The second day focused on hard realities of race and class in America today. Here is one stark fact: People who live in safe, typically white neighborhoods can expect to live up to 20 years longer than those in impoverished ones. 

Through panels and workshops we exchanged information on systems change, policy, community organization, and strategies for racial equity in education, health, and economic security. A powerful movement for racial healing may be gaining momentum. A new generation is embracing blended racial identities as seen in the extraordinary diversity of the conference attendees. But, paradoxically, many agree that the election of President Obama has actually made it harder to talk about race.

Speakers noted an insidious reframing of the racial issue in national politics, the media, and in some court decisions. In this “reactionary color blindness,” considering racial impact in order to avoid potential discrimination itself constitutes racial discrimination. In this Alice in Wonderland view of reality, to take race into account, even to avoid discrimination, is discrimination. Talking about race is racist.*

I was moved by the story of Mee Moua, a Hmong American who came as a refugee from Laos and was elected to the Minnesota Senate. She framed the immigration issue in the context of the larger story of all Americans and told how the Jewish community in her state, some of them holocaust survivors, had supported the rights of Latinos. She said, “We will not resolve the immigration issue until it is seen as more than a Hispanic/Latino issue. Those of us who could ‘pass’ must step up.”

Gail Christopher, Kellogg’s vice president for program strategy states: “Achieving racial equity will require changing hearts, minds and deeply held (often unconscious) beliefs that manifest in and through persistent residential segregation patterns and related disparities in access to opportunity.”

Perhaps the most interesting evidence of this change of heart came from Harvard professor Mark Warren, author of Fire in the Heart: How White Americans Embrace Racial Justice.  In interviews with white people who are making a difference in their communities, he discovered that what engaged them was not analysis or education. Nobody said, “I read about racism” or, “I took a course.” What got people moving was “direct witnessing experiences when they saw with their own eyes the hard realities of racism.” Motivation comes from a “profound moral and spiritual process” as they build “meaningful relationships with people of color and when their values and interests are directly addressed.”  

*A special issue of The American Prospect, April 2011, entitled Color Blinded contains important articles by Shirley Sherrod, Randall Kennedy, William Julius Wilson, Ian Haney-Lopez and others. http://prospect.org/cs/colorblinded

 

What Happened to True Friendship?

In January, 1998, I was in Washington working with a team recruited by the White House to design a dialogue guide for the President’s One America initiative on race when the media erupted over Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky. There was gloom in the room and groans of, “There goes all our work down the tubes.” No question, the initiative as a whole – along with much of the Administration’s work – suffered hugely from this distraction. It cost the country dearly.

I thought of this again in the wake of Dominique Strauss-Khan’s arrest on charges of attempted rape of a New York hotel housekeeper and the admission by Arnold Schwarzenegger that he had fathered a child with a member of the family’s household staff. Both men, like Clinton, were known as womanizers. Schwarzenegger was described in some reports as a serial groper and Strauss-Khan had a notorious reputation as a seducer. 

My question is this: Why did no-one hold these men accountable? Why did those around them enable these destructive patterns of behavior to continue? In the aftermath of every scandal, psychologists and behavioral experts fill the airwaves. But where was the friend who might have said: "You need to stop this.”? Or, “This is a really bad idea.”? I often reflect on this when public figures – whether a Tiger Woods or a John Edwards – are embroiled in situations where personal lifestyles have fatally damaged brilliant careers and caused untold pain to families.

Because of the pressures they live under and the intoxication of power and popularity, public figures in particular need friends who are not afraid to confront them with uncomfortable facts. But all of us in ordinary life need people around us who will hold us accountable. Yet in many situations where a dose of common sense might have saved a marriage or prevented a dishonest and ultimately disastrous financial transaction, we have delegated moral authority to professionals. It used to be that friends would offer simple home truths. Now we defer to counselors, therapists, or life coaches. 

Of course, there are many times when professional help is essential. But have we become too hesitant to challenge one another? Is our desire to be liked stronger than our care for those whose approval we crave? Perhaps, most importantly, do we fear being seen as judgmental in a culture where relative morality is the accepted norm? 

Paradoxically, in recent decades, as Rushworth Kidder writes, “as moral relativism grew in strength, so too did a countervailing social consciousness,” a desire for universal values: for human rights, for rights of women, and codes to stop corruption. Relativism is therefore in conflict with widely acknowledged social values of respect, quality, and honesty.*

Tolerance has become a preeminent value of our age; and thankfully we are moving beyond many prejudices of the past. But a true friend is also a truth teller. Cicero wrote that a friend must have “the courage to give advice with candor,” and the relationship demands “frankness without which friendship is an empty name.” 

A true friend calls it like it is.  As a song goes, “He looks right through you and he loves you just the same.” Do we need more honest conversations on friendship and accountability? I look forward to comments from readers. 

*Rushworth Kidder, “Rape, Relativism, and Respect: Duke University’s Dilemma.” Ethics Newsline, newsletter for Institute for Global Ethics, 10 April 2006.