Religion Dispatches
The Reagan era was supposed to have ended in November 2008—killed off by 30 years of flat wages and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever.
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Yes, your colleagues would laugh if you went out to protest. Marie Antoinette laughed too, until she found herself smiling up from the bottom of a wicker basket.
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Many liberal religious activists, Rev. Merritt said, remain stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.”
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As largely secular protests to “Occupy Wall Street” advance in fits and starts, capitalism and church negotiate to bring the best of both to bear on the world’s most intractable problems. Except, not quite.
Read MoreThe more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Not long ago I helped lead a graduate seminar in leadership in which I challenged the old idea of the heroic leader and messianic deliverer; an idea that has deep roots in all three Abrahamic faith traditions. Not one person in that seminar room—not even the white males who were present—had anything good thing to say about the old model. Everyone agreed that we can do better by listening to each other, trusting each other, and finding new paths together.
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A leading worker justice organizer writes a book on how and why employers are stealing from the workforce, to the tune of billions every year.
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We’ve always had unscrupulous tycoons, market manipulators and connivers, but we’ve never had as obnoxious a bunch of weasels on Wall Street. These morally deformed punks claim the right to undermine perfectly sensible (and sorely needed) regulation because we haven’t learned to make dishonest gain for ourselves in the ways they have become almost kabbalistically schooled in doing.
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Is there something about civil religion in the US that gives those responsible a pass?
Read MoreConsumers face off with big banks in Chicago.
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