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Evangelical Christianity and Social Justice

This is an excerpt from the transcript of an interview on Speaking of Faith. Krista Tippets, the host, is talking with Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who wants to put poverty, peace, and social justice back at the top of the religious agenda.

Ms. Tippett: But do we know how to eradicate poverty?

Rev. Wallis: Well, we have these three obstacles. One is, the poor have not been a priority. Two is, we have a debate about strategy. And three is the real one: We don't know poor people. Liberals or conservatives don't really know. Poor people are utterly segregated. They don't live all over the country; they live only in certain places. And, you know, until poor people are our friends, not just the objects of our concern on the liberal side or the people who are to blame for their own misfortunes on the conservative side, how can anybody say that out of wedlock birth and family breakdown and addictions are not a causal fact of poverty? How can anyone say that not affording health care and having no affordable housing to — and having education that doesn't educate aren't causes of poverty?

Ms. Tippett: I think what I hear you're saying is that poverty, in fact, brings together both the issues of family life, right, and addiction…

.....

Rev. Wallis: The biblical notion is that the truth about a society is much better known from the bottom of that society than from the top. We did this experiment way back a long time ago, as young seminarians, we found every passage in the Bible about poor people, about wealth and poverty, oppression, all that, and we found several thousand verses. It was the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew scripts, the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, the Synoptic Gospels, the first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, one of every 16 verses.

Ms. Tippett: Hmm.

Rev. Wallis: In Luke, it was one of every seven verses. And we took the Bible and we took a pair of scissors and we cut out of the Bible every single reference to poor people. And when we were done, the Bible was in shreds. It was full of holes, falling apart in my hands. I'd take it out to preach. I'd say, 'Brothers and sisters, this is the American Bible. It's just full of holes.'

The complete interview — either a transcript or an audio file — is available online at this website: programs/jimwallis/index.shtml

From Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural

We first read the following essay by Wendell Berry about 30 years ago. It spoke to us then, and it still does today. It's important. — Wally Smith

     ... The Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, as popular causes in the electronic age, have partaken far too much of the nature of fads. Not for all, certainly, but for too many they have been the fashionable politics of the moment. As causes they have been undertaken too much in ignorance; they have been too much simplified; they have been powered too much by impatience and guilt of conscience and short-term enthusiasm, and too little by an authentic social vision and long-term conviction and deliberation. For most people those causes have remained almost entirely abstract; there has been too little personal involvement, and too much involvement in organizations that were insisting that other organizations should do what was right.

     There is considerable danger that the Environment Movement will have the same nature: that it will be a public cause, served by organizations that will self-righteously criticize and condemn other organizations, inflated for a while by a lot of public talk in the media, only to be replaced in its turn by another fashionable crisis. I hope that will not happen, and I believe that there are ways to keep it from happening, but I know that if this effort is carried on solely as a public cause, if millions of people cannot or will not undertake it as a private cause as well, then it is sure to happen. In five years the energy of our present concern will have petered out in a series of public gestures-and no doubt in a series of empty laws-and a great, and perhaps the last, human opportunity will have been lost.

     It need not be that way. A better possibility is that the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.

     To me, one of the most important aspects of the environmental movement is that it brings us not just to another public crisis, but to a crisis of the protest movement itself. For the environmental crisis should make it dramatically clear, as perhaps it has not always been before, that there is no public crisis that is not also private. To most advocates of civil rights, racism has seemed mostly the fault of someone else. For most advocates of peace the war has been a remote reality, and the burden of the blame has seemed to rest mostly on the government. I am certain that these crises have been more private, and that we have each suffered more from them and been more responsible for them, than has been readily apparent, but the connections have been difficult to see. Racism and militarism have been institutionalized among us for too long for our personal involvement in those evils to be easily apparent to us. Think, for example, of all the Northerners who assumed - until black people attempted to move into their neighborhoods that racism was a Southern phenomenon. And think how quickly - one might almost say how naturally ­ among some of its members the peace movement has spawned policies of deliberate provocation and violence.