Faith, Social Justice, and Public Policy: A Progressive’s View

The following is a guest post from Gary Maring, a member of my congregation (Luther Place), who has been blogging for a couple of years and has now written a book. His new book, Faith, Social Justice, and Public Policy: A Progressive’s View, is available through Amazon, and proceeds from his book release event have benefitted N Street Village, the non-profit mentioned below.

My new book regarding faith, justice, and public policy reflects what I have learned over the last 40 years being involved at Luther Place church in DC and immersed in development of the most amazing social justice initiatives like N Street Village, the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, Steinbruck Center and more. I think it is important to share how faith entities like Luther Place can use their loaves and fishes (i.e. land and financial resources) to feed and nurture the thousands. Through foresight of a few key leaders of Luther Place; 21,000 square feet of land was assembled in the 1950s on N Street across from the church. At the time, the anticipated use of that land would be for parking by church members on Sunday. As it turned out, God had another plan for Luther Place. In the winter of 1976, Luther Place took the simple biblical act of welcoming the stranger on a cold winter night. Little did we know that event of opening the church doors to the homeless would define our mission for the next 35 plus years. Out of that decision came N Street Village which is now its own independent entity serving more than 60 percent of the homeless population of women in DC. In the process of developing N Street Village programs for the homeless, we were blessed with volunteers from the Mennonite and Jesuit traditions. Out of their witness, we were inspired to begin a Lutheran Volunteer Corps at Luther Place in 1979. From that meager first year beginning with 9 Lutheran volunteers housed on N Street, the program has grown to 16 cities with nearly 150 volunteers each year. Over the thirty plus years of LVC nearly 2000 young people have come through the program and gone on to change the world. Further, we created the Steinbruck Center (named after John and Erna Steinbruck, former Luther Place pastor and his wife who were the key to founding N Street Village) to educate and advocate on issues such as homelessness.

In the process of struggling with the issue of homelessness in and around our church and N Street Village it also became obvious that our mission to bring the kingdom of God here and now must go well beyond our block. My book thus reflects this bigger picture of the role of faith in helping achieve justice in our society. That follows the example of the Great Prophets including Jesus who took on the power structures of their day on behalf of the ‘least of these’. Increasingly our Luther Place neighborhood and our country are seeing great economic inequality that if not addressed will tear at the very seams of our nation’s bindings. Theologian Marcus Borg, in his book Speaking Christian, says that “the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world yet we have the greatest income inequality of any of the developed nations.” At the same time our nation has the highest poverty rates in the developed world; over twenty percent of our children live in poverty!

In this year of possibly the most divisive and negative presidential primary on record, we witnessed the Religious and Political Right make some really offensive comments and policy proposals affecting the poor, immigrants, gays and lesbians, Muslims, and other minorities. I believe America has the capacity to rise above the hatred, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and homophobia that we have seen in the political dialogue the last few years, thus I felt compelled to respond and portray another view of what it means to be both faithful and engaged in our nation’s policies toward the disenfranchised. My book builds on a local foundation of a church continually engaged in biblical justice issues to addressing justice on a much broader societal scale.

What I see today is a need for rejuvenation of the progressive spirit in America to counter the more fundamentalist trends that, if followed, would take us back to a period before the 1960s Civil Rights era when the white majority was dominant, women knew their place in the home, homosexuals stayed in the closet, and other minorities were suppressed. Many young people have turned away from organized religion, but there is a large spirituality movement that has much in common with more traditional progressive church values. Many are turned off by members of the Religious Right who have captured too much of the media’s attention with such negative rhetoric. We in the progressive religious community need to find ways to connect with today’s spiritual movement, social justice oriented evangelicals, and secular progressives and be advocates for a more just society.

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Saints and Scholars: The Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo

My former economics professor David Ruccio has a guest post from my former Catholic Social Teaching professor, Todd Whitmore.

What is in part remarkable about the event is that Toniolo was not your typical saint: he was an economist, the first to be beatified. More important for the rest of us, he was not an abstract theoretician; rather, he was a political economist whose work was shaped by a vision of social solidarity. Toniolo called for a democratically ordered civil society “in which all social, legal, and economic forces cooperate proportionally to the common good,” thus “promoting the social role of everyone” and “benefiting especially the poor.” He was an early advocate of labor unions, worker cooperatives, a just wage, and a limited work week. In these days when episcopal heresy dragnets ensnare even Girl Scouts, news of Toniolo’s beatification is an unlikely candidate for front-page, above-the-fold material. For me, it is evidence that grace can operate even in pathologically distorted institutions…

Toniolo was what in present-day parlance we call a “scholar-practitioner.” He founded a union. He led Italy’s Catholic Action movement. He started a periodical that aimed to generate broad public discussion of the issues of the day. Both the publication and the discussions were called “Social Weeks.” Today, such writing is often viewed in the academy as the mere “popularizing” of scholarship, but in Toniolo’s time it was considered a critical exercise of practical reason.

I had not heard of Toniolo until today, but his life is a great example of how to think about and be active in society. Dorothy Day seems like a more recent incarnation of this type of vocation- and I’m sure there are many others (both among the faithful and otherwise). Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, Day will join the ranks of the “blessed.”

Of course, at my (Lutheran) church, she has already been named “St. Dorothy of New York.” (Click through the link for a beautiful mural.) For its part, the Catholic church has entered her in the beatification process as a “Servant of God.”

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Paul Ryan vs. Georgetown Jesuits

Via the Colbert Report:

Christian Budget cuts or disciple of Ayn Rand  ?

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De Nada

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Comments on Re-Imagining Accompaniment

It appears that the Re-Imagining Accompaniment event at Notre Dame this week was a huge success. Dr. Paul Farmer and Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez shared their insights about working with the poor, global health, and the role of theology in all of this work. The video should be posted on the Kellogg Institute website shortly for those who want to check it. But I wanted to share some points that I find particularly poignant.

First, Dr. Farmer made three key points that are all closely related to the goals of our blog:

(1) Real service to the poor involved understanding global poverty, and this requires multiple disciplines as well as listening to those most affected.

(2) Understanding poverty must be linked to efforts to end it

(3) As science and technology advance, our structural sin deepens; as effectiveness of medicine and science increases, our failure to use such interventions compounds the inequality/the gap/ the problem.

Gustavo Gutierrez made some interesting points about the nature of poverty. He first explained how liberation theology was born out of a conundrum in Latin America: how to say to the poor person “God loves you” when their experience is that they are neglected, forgotten, and have no rights.

For Gustavo, then, poverty is a human issue. It’s not just about economics. Of course, the economics is important. But economists and everyone working in development must realize that poverty also means to be socially insignificant, forgotten, and to not have rights. He also stated that without compassion, one cannot really be committed to these people. This goes for theorists and practitioners working in development.

Paul Farmer concluded his remarks with a critique of only using cost-benefit analysis in economic models. For him, there is a danger in reducing every problem to a question of “cost-effectiveness,” when we don’t really understand what is “cost” nor what is “effective.” This is where interdisciplinary work is critical, so that these issues can be understood best as possible.

In conclusion, it was a very nice conversation and really a wonderful and unique event, to have a theologian and a physician finding so much common ground in their seemingly unrelated work. Unfortunately, events such as this one are incredibly rare on university campuses across the country. Hopefully, students and teachers and researchers can continue these conversations and Re-Imagine Academia as we move forward.

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Re-imagining Accompaniment

Next week, the University of Notre Dame will host a public dialogue with Partners In Health founder Dr. Paul Farmer and Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of liberation theology. This is truly a unique opportunity that brings together a physician who has accomplished pathbreaking work in global health, and a theologian whose innovative work in theology led to the notion of the “preferential option for the poor” in Catholic Social Teaching. What is amazing to me is that these two prominent figures in such seemingly unrelated fields can inspire each other and come together to have a truly fruitful dialogue.

This interdisciplinary discussion simply does not happen often enough, and its benefits cannot be overstated. And I must give deep credit to Notre Dame for creating an environment in which such a dialogue can occur – certainly there are not many other places where such a discussion could happen.

For those on campus, the dialogue will take place on Monday, October 24 at 7:00 pm in 101 Debartolo Hall. For those away, live streaming will be available here, and video uploaded within a couple weeks of the event. Also, expect reactions on this blog sometime next week.

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Render unto Caesar…

Sam Wells contributes once more to our picture of what a “Christian economics” would look like – this time with some excellent insights regarding taxation. While the entire passage is a worthwhile read, he concludes with four key points regarding taxation:

(1) Taxation is not in principle a monstrous extortion. It is the price we pay for society.

(2) Taxation is the entry ticket into a civilized politics – one based on compromise and the understanding that no one will ever get exactly what they want.

(3) Christians have another currency: mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. Maybe we’ve been using the denarius so long that we’ve forgotten that we have an alternative currency.

(4) If you’re obsessed with how much tax Caesar’s taking away from you, you’re giving Caesar too much power over you.

The point is that true freedom does not equal freedom from taxation. True freedom is a freedom to flourish as human beings in society. But importantly, this type of economic theorizing is an attempt to build another type of economics, one that takes into account ethics and values and envisions what type of economy we can build so that it might coincide with these values. For example, a Christian economy is not fundamentally based on “Caesar’s” or “Washington’s” currency. Drawing from Catholic Social Teaching, we can add that an economy that reflections a Christian ethics will be in the service of human beings, the members of society, rather than having the workers be in service to the economy or economic growth.

These are worthwhile considerations for those who wish to build a more just economy, as well as those involved with Occupy Wall St. who are frustrated with the current global economy. This type of theorizing is important to enable us to articulate clearly what alternative it is that we hope to build.

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Churches Seeking to Become Economic Alternatives

The New York Times has an excellent article about a new effort by churches in my current residence, Washington DC, to organize themselves and buy energy as a group, simultaneously saving money and using those savings to promote green energy. The effort is a collaboration of a community organizing group, Washington Interfaith Network, and the DC Project, which promotes green alternatives (disclosure- I am heavily involved with both organizations, and a member of a Luther Place church, which is part of WIN and the energy collaboration). Here’s what they are doing, in brief:

11 churches and a nonprofit youth group got together to solicit reduced-rate bids for electricity — most of it from renewable energy sources — from local suppliers. In the first year of its contract, which ends in May, the group expects combined savings of nearly $100,000.

As the good word has spread, and it gears up to negotiate a second contract, the original group has swelled to 40 members. The bigger alliance plans to exercise even more leverage in the next round of negotiations by requiring bidders to extend the same discounted rate to individual parishioners and members.

And more revenue is on the way: the group is planning to take a cut of those residential savings as a kind of eco-tithe…

The churches in Washington forged their alliance with help from the Washington Interfaith Network, which does community organizing for member congregations and is now receiving a 10 percent cut of the overall electricity savings. The other group that helped bring the churches together, the DC Project, is a nonprofit that promotes weatherization and green energy jobs.

Felipe Witchger, the lead organizer with the DC Project, said that the next contract will require participants, which now also include synagogues and affiliates like unions and advocacy groups, to either buy renewable energy or commit to energy-efficiency upgrades. For the upgrades, he said, workers from neighborhoods with high unemployment and poverty rates would be hired.

Needless to say, I think this is a great initiative, and may lead to even greater things.

I’ve written a lot about Catholic Social Tradition on this blog (well, not lately), and we have also written a lot about alternative ways of envisioning the economy. Generally, CST is a reaction to the broad economy, and promulgates ways for individuals to live in relation to the economy and to seek to change the economy. However, because CST is more philosophical in nature, it doesn’t go the extra mile of thinking about how individual churches can simultaneously be in the economy and change the economy.

Community organizing, on the other hand, has been practiced through churches for decades. It is a direct response to seeing the world as it is, and the world as it should be, and seeking to bring the two closer together. Churches in cities across the country, and increasingly the world, join forces to shape the political conversation around real economic issues. Often, community organizing is about marshaling a small (but still significant) amount of money from within, and a lot of people from within, to move a few people outside (politicians) to deliver a lot of money on the outside (like affordable housing projects, neighborhood revitalization, etc.).

Notice that neither CST nor community organizing speaks directly to the churches themselves being or becoming part of an alternative economy. And yet, churches are employers, social service providers, and consumers- often large ones at that. Realizing that they are economic units, and have autonomy over how they act as such (especially in tandem), can potentially be transformative. What started as an 11 church group-buying initiative is blossoming into a 40 church green energy effort. Who knows what may come next- an alternative energy co-op that creates green jobs? A joint-church solar generation effort? When churches realize that social justice can occur within and in collaboration with neighbors, we can begin to see an alternative economy, closer to the world as it should be, aspiring to the gauntlet that popes and prophets alike have set forth.

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Aiming at a higher goal

Benedict XVI’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, delivered the opening address at the Vatican’s Business Summit which engages business and finance with Catholic Social Teaching [ht:ba].

“Aiming at a higher goal” – a goal greater than profit – while not “rejecting profit”, represents the great challenge facing today’s business leaders who are seriously concerned to promote the common good and development – business leaders, in other words, who see their activity as a task and a vocation. The exclusive pursuit of profit proves inadequate as the economy and society nowadays have to deal with new challenges, including the environment, “common goods” and globalization.

This brings us to the great theme of business and social responsibility. Caritas in Veritate has pointed out that “business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference” (No. 40).

Ethical theories concerned with business and social responsibility abound, but not all of them are acceptable in the light of the Christian understanding of man and an authentic Christian humanism. This is especially true of those cases where socially responsible practices are adopted primarily as a marketing device, without any effect on relationships inside and outside the business itself, the destination of its profits, the demands of justice, worker participation, and so forth.

Nowadays business leaders who want to take the Church’s social teaching seriously will need to be more daring, not limiting themselves to socially responsible practices and/or acts of philanthropy (positive and meritorious though these may be), but striking out into new territories.

While this is Catholic Social Teaching, I do believe that there are many aspects that are broadly appealing. For one, businesses should make decisions that incorporate the interest of all stakeholders, including workers, managers, owners, and the surrounding community, rather than just the shareholders of the firm. Secondly, where socially responsible practices are undertaken as a marketing device is not sufficient. We need to heed the Cardinal’s call to be “striking out into new territories” when it comes to organizing our economic life. Thinking along these lines is the only way we will be able to build a just, ethical economy.

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Our tortured state

It is no longer surprising to see just how bold economists can be in research topics. This time, it is Baliga and Ely’s game-theoretic model of torture, as a principle-agent game, with the expressed hope of determining policy implications. The abstract provides a good summary of the paper, which finds that detaining suspects indefinitely is of no advantage over detaining them for a limited period of time. The model is based on the “ticking time-bomb” scenario, with a suspect who may or may not know the location of the bomb. How effective is torture to extract information?

Any model necessarily assumes philosophical, methodological, and ethical perspectives (consciously or not). Catholic Social Thought argues that torture is a violation of human dignity. Dr. Sam Wells expresses a similar perspective when he writes that “Torture is not simply about eliciting information, but degrading the body to dominate mind and spirit as well.” A response to torture based on these moral grounds objects to the degradation of human dignity endured by the victim. Freedom from torture is at the core of our nation’s values. Yet economics is only concerned with cost/benefit calculation; the discourses of economics and ethics are incommensurable.

The agents in a game theoretic model are cold, calculating, rational individuals. It’s hard look back at the many instances of torture in all of history, including the infamous incidents on behalf of the US during the past decade, and see rational, calculating individuals trying to elicit information or similar rational agents trying to keep information secret. Torture is about breaking down a person at the core. There seems to be very little cost-benefit analysis, and loads of emotion, passion, rage, humiliation, degradation, despair. It is hard to fit these in the principle-agent model.

The model of course also cannot include larger spillover effects, about how illegal torture methods used on suspected terrorists will foster stronger resentment towards the United States, counterproductive to goals towards international peace. In the end, the model seems so abstracted from reality and pretending to be value-free that one must question its usefulness. It seems that in many cases, game theorists are similar to chess players: given a set of rules, we have to figure out the optimal “strategy,” given that the opponent wants to defeat you. Within the framework of game theory, it is hard to dispute the results that they find. My question is, why are they all playing chess?

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