For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who
have no one to help. He will take pity
on the poor and the needy, and save the weak from death (Psalm 72:12-13).
Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are
poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and to inherit the kingdom
he promised those who love him (James 2:5)?”
You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain . .
. . You oppress the righteous and take
bribes, and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts (Amos 5:11-12).
* * *
On a Thursday evening, the 10th of November last
year, a 37-year old man, a Christian, and an active member of his church was
arrested and charged with bank robbery and the murder of a police officer. After allegedly robbing the Bank of America
in Vallejo, California, he fled the pursuit of a 45-year-old, 19-year veteran
of the police department there-also a Christian. Both men were married, fathers of
children. The 37-year-old suspect was
out of work. He had been convicted of
crimes before, but had stayed out of trouble for more than 11 years, and had
seemingly turned his life around, becoming a responsible member of the
community.
The alleged assailant had been unemployed for more than a
year and the family home was about to be foreclosed on. It is speculated that his financial troubles
may have been behind his seeming spiral into violence.
The officer was not only a 19-year veteran patrolman with a
spotless record, but he was a pillar of the community. He was committed in word and deed to
improving the quality of life for at-risk urban youth in Vallejo, California. He volunteered as a basketball coach for the
local high school, a community center, and in fact had served as a role model
for one of the associate pastors of his alleged slayer’s church. The community was hit hard, grieving both for
the slain officer and the family of the alleged slayer. It appears that though devout and sincere in
his faith and his personal transformation, the alleged assailant was unable to
hold it together against the economic strain his family faced. His church’s general negation of the social
crises around them in favor of preparing members for prosperity on earth, and
encouraging them in their individual spiritual growth and authority as they
await heaven, was unable to stem his penchant for criminal activity and his
return to the same when he found the promised prosperity disappearing around him.
The so-called issues of the Social Gospel are the issues of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The exploitation, abuse and injustice leveled by
the rich and powerful against the poor are themes in the burden of the
Prophets, the Law of Moses, the compassion of Siddhartha, and several Surahs of
the Qur’an.
The church can spiritualize and ignore the real problems of
real human beings all it wants, or like some mainline communions, it can cater to the
middle and upper classes and get amnesia about the very people that John Wesley
dedicated himself to in England, and Richard Allen in America: The poor, the
marginalized, the outcast, and those who were being used as human machines for
plantations and the new industrial revolution.
Yet these issues do not go away and will continue to have an adverse
effect on our people. Furthermore God
will judge us for this neglect, this apathy, this rush to comfort,
acceptability and popularity that we seem so compelled to pursue.
* * *
On November 27, 1967, Dr Martin
Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a
Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice and housing for
the poor in the United States, aiming itself at rebuilding America's cities . .
. . Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Poor People's Campaign the "second
phase," of the civil rights struggle - setting goals such as
gathering activists to lobby Congress for an "Economic Bill of
Rights," Dr. King also saw a crying need to confront a Congress that
demonstrated its "hostility to the poor " - appropriating
"military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing
"poverty funds with miserliness."
Under the "economic bill of
rights" the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to
prioritize helping the poor with an antipoverty package that included housing
and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. Dr. King pointed out that "the wealthy who own securities have always had a guaranteed income, and the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits." For this reason he argued that the guaranteed income should be "progressive, set at the median income of society rather than at the bottom," and that it should "automatically increase with inflation."
Dr. King had recently published, Where Do we Go
from Here: Chaos of Community (1967). In
that book, Dr. King called for the complete economic redistribution of wealth
in America. He wrote further:
Up
to recently, we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting
job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home
life and suppressed initiative, and fragile family relationships, which distorted personality development.
Dr. King went on to explain in that
same chapter of the book:
I
am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty
is to abolish it directly by a now
widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. . . . We are likely to find that the attempt to eliminate the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished....
The
curse of poverty has no justification in our age . . . . The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by
the total, direct and immediate
abolition of poverty.
We have now gone full circle. While King’s birthday celebration approaches
the vulgar corporate secularism of Christmas, or of a pre-convention political
rump session, where the most opportunistic of people with money and power
dominate the platforms proclaiming their allegiance to something nebulously
referred to as King’s Dream, most fail to remember his speech of December 24, 1967, in which he stated,
"In 1963...in Washington, D.C....I Tried
to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess...that
not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a
nightmare.”
In an interview with NPR regarding
the Poor Peoples’ Campaign on Dr. King’s birthday, 2008, the Reverend Joseph
Lowery stated:
"The nation became conscious of the fact
that it has an expanding poor population," says Lowery, who co-founded the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. "It's one thing to
have the right to check into the Hiltons and the Marriotts, it's another thing
to have the means to check out."
For many of America's poor, there hasn't been
much progress in the 40 years since the Poor People's Campaign. In 1968, 25
million people — nearly 13 percent of the population — were living below the
poverty level, according to the Census Bureau. In 2006, 36 million people or
more than 12 percent of the population were living below the poverty level.
Poverty has been rapidly rising for some time. The black middle class, in fact the entire American middle class in a recent report from NewsMax, is disappearing all
over the country. Opportunities for
higher education are evaporating, even for those who would attend public
colleges and universities. The dropout
rate, murder rate and the incarceration rates for black and brown boys and men
is outrageous, and growing for black and brown women.
The ranks of jobless and homeless people are
growing exponentially while the gap between rich and poor accelerates. Wealth
is more concentrated in the hands of the few. “Pew reported
last week that there is a growing rift and resentment between rich and poor in
America, due in part to “the underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in
American society.” Pew also reported, “According to the most recent U.S. Census
Bureau data, the proportion of overall wealth — a measure that includes home
equity, stocks and bonds, and the value of jewelry, furniture and other
possessions — held by the top 10 percent of the population increased from 49
percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009.” Democracy
itself has vanished or is vanishing as corporate lobbyists exercise almost
complete control over the U. S. House of Representative and the Senate.
* * *
So where are the organizations that are addressing King’s
economic vision for America? Where are
the progressive economists, business people, educators, clergy and laity who
will collectively lift up his vision for economic democracy in America in
2012? I’m not simply talking about
giving speeches like this one, even though more are certainly needed from our
too heavenly-spiritually preoccupied churches, mosques, and synagogues.
One sign of hope has been the Occupy-Move On Movements. Yet I have heard so much criticism from
clergy and other leaders regarding these movements. I would challenge those critics, put up or
shut up. It is black people and then
brown people in America who are disproportionately losing their homes, unable
to send qualified children to college, and lacking the funds and resources to
keep our children out of the “cradle to the grave prison pipeline.” The prison industrial complex is growing
rapidly. Many young lawyers are eager to
become ADAs so that they can incarcerate more black and brown, men women and
children by any means necessary, using this as a stepping-stone to corporate
and political careers.
A sizable number of this army of attorneys are busy working with banks and mortgage companies, helping them to find legal loopholes whereby they can further exploit and suck dollars away from we who are still managing to hold on to our businesses, jobs and homes.
* * * *
Poverty and Faith
Over the past few years, mega-churches have
become more popular in black communities, just as they have in white
communities. These mega-churches have amassed influence and wealth partly
because of their sheer number of parishioners. Some have created satellite
churches and broadcast their gospel on television.
On April 3, 1968, in his famous “Promised
Land” sermon, Dr. King said, “It's all right to talk
about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately
people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing
with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums
down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right
to talk about the New Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about
the new New York, the new Atlanta, the New Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles,
and the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”
This having been said, I would challenge us to adhere to,
trust in, reverence, and rely on God. We need to
turn to the pages of the Bible in order to get ourselves back into focus. We need to recommit ourselves to our first
love. I have no problem in proclaiming
that Jesus Christ is both Lord and Deliverer, the savior, the one that God has
chosen to bring light and love and truth and hope to the world. In one of his 1934 readings, the late Prophet Edgar Cayce spoke of the Christ, "Not as only one, but the only one."
We need people who are unapologetically
Christian, instead of this wishy-washy “everything is everything” rhetoric that
is driving our children elsewhere. It is
God who advocates for us, who has already commissioned Jesus to lead the hosts
of heaven in winning every political and economic battle for us, and who is
outraged at the state of our planet, but especially at the state of ease,
comfort, entertainment, lazy thinking and the absence of thinking and doing and
loving in the church.
One of the hard lessons I have learned is that those who
ignore and minimize the sacred texts do so, not because they consider the words
archaic or anachronistic or erroneous, but rather because they would rather not
be confronted with the expectations God places on us in the scriptures. It is easy to criticize fundamentalists and
evangelicals for having otherworldly views, but I frankly see no strong
commitment to economic justice coming from much of the liberal wing of the
church. Our seminaries are in full
retreat, having students focus on something nebulous that the majority culture
calls “spirituality.” I grew up in a
church where spirituality meant, “Let
justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a flowing stream.”
In fact people like Jim Wallace of Sojourners
and Dr. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Brooklyn,
N. Y., are some of the strongest advocates for economic justice for the poor in
America. Rev. Daughtry is no stranger to
us, having worked closely with Rev, Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton
and having founded in 1982, the African People's Christian
Organization.
The liberal church of which Dr. King was certainly
representative and which nurtured him in his ideological understanding of what
God requires, is now marching in lock-step with the rich and powerful under the
banner of “neo-liberalism.” The name of its game is accommodation-ism, and it
will bend over backwards and bow down to Hell rather than offend its rich
classist, heterosexist, racist donors and benefactors and its upper middle
class and upper class constituencies.
Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the father of American
sociology, was often criticized for being a tad bit elitist and detached. In 1899, while he was working on his great
study, The
Philadelphia Negro as a faculty member of Atlanta University, the
Wilmington Massacre occurred. As many as
a hundred lives were lost. Much of the
black community in Wilmington, North Carolina known as Brooklyn, had been
burned to the ground, and thousands of black residents fled for their lives.
The city had been a bastion of the black middle and upper
classes in the south, with a population of 11,324 African Americans and 8,731
whites. All this was to change
overnight. The Democrats were determined
to remove all of the black political appointees that President McKinley had
made, in gratitude for the role that African Americans had played in the
Spanish-American war. The Democrats
recruited farmers in the outlying areas, whites whose wives were forced to find
jobs and work for blacks in the state’s cotton mills in the city.
Their strategy was to shame whites, just as
the Republicans are now doing, into voting for "white economic interests" using racial code language. With the help of right-wing fringe groups and
respectable church liberals like Rebecca Felton of the WCTU, they enflamed the
white people of the city and surrounding communities. Felton quoted her mentor, the vitriolic white
supremacist WCTU founder Frances Willard, who had stated publicly that "white
women needed to be protected from marauding, inebriated black men," who Williard
had also characterized as "fierce beasts." This led to the lynching and mutilation
of Samuel Wilkes, which was the catalyst to the massacre. He was cut, mutilated and parts of his
charred remains sold all over the south.
Du Bois, who was startled by the gruesome murder, had
written a sober anti-lynching editorial that he was going to give to Atlanta
Constitution’s editor Joel Chandler Harris.
With his walking cane and gloves, Du Bois made his way to the newspaper
office, but was stopped short when he passed by a shop on Mitchell Street, where
Wilke’s charred knuckles were on display.
It was then that Du Bois realized as he wrote later: “One could not be a
calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and
starved.
I would challenge all who hear and read these words to
consider the state of our race, of our nation, and really ask whether or not we
can continue to delay or ignore Dr. King’s challenge of economic justice for
America. I would ask us to consider
whether or not the time for detachment and sensible responses is over. Perhaps
the Occupy Movement is a cue for us to develop a serious program that continues
Dr. King’s work for economic justice in America. I would challenge us to consider those who
are starved, excluded, incarcerated, exploited, and have their dreams dashed by
those who are interested in quick profits that leave the people hopeless and
powerless. We cannot keep men, women and
children out of the criminal justice system with just good
intentions.
I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and
upholds the cause of the needy (Psalm 140:12).
Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain, to set his
nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!
You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and
forfeiting your life (Habakkuk 2:9).
So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against . . .
those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the
fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me (Malachi 3:5).
What will we do with Dr. King’s call for economic justice in
2012?
Don Guest
