How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America

[99th_Monkey]

5. I keep waiting for Christian Fundamentalists to DEMAND a JUBILEE

It's in the Bible for Christ's sake.

God speed the year of jubilee, the wide world o'er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th' oppressed shall vilely bend the knee
And wear the yoke of tyranny, like brutes, no more—
That year will come, and Freedom's reign
To man his plundered rights again, restore.
—William Lloyd Garrison, 19th-century abolitionist

"We read the gospel as if we had no money," laments Jesuit theologian John Haughey, "and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the gospel." Indeed, in most North American churches today, it is exceedingly difficult to talk about economics. This topic is more taboo than politics, more even than sex—a subject with which our churches have recently become all too preoccupied. Yet no aspect of our individual and corporate lives is more determinative than the economy. And few subjects are more frequently addressed in our scriptures. ...

(Now we have) a trickle up" (economy): the transfer of wealth from the increasingly poor to the increasingly rich. And neoliberal policies of "structural adjustment" are not only hardening this income polarization, they are deepening psychic and social alienation. Whether through plant closings, the demise of the local grocery store, or the crisis of the family farm, we in the First World are now witnessing the epidemic of communal displacement that has already devastated local culture, institutions, and environments in the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Any theology that refuses to reckon with these realities is both cruel and irrelevant. We Christians must talk about economics, and talk about it in light of the gospel. "Churches," asserts Cornel West, "may be the last places left in our culture that can engage the public conversation with non-market values." Yet those who would challenge postmodern capitalism and its self-reflexive market discourses are struggling to find an alternative language and practice, particularly with the apparent discrediting of state socialism. This ideological vacuum offers a unique opportunity for the church to rediscover a radically different vision of economic and social practice—and one that lies right at the heart of its scriptures.

The Bible recognizes that inequalities will inevitably arise in "fallen" society—a realism it shares with the worldview of modern capitalism. Unlike the social Darwinism of the latter, however, the biblical vision refuses to stipulate that injustice is therefore a permanent condition. Instead, God's people are instructed to dismantle, on a regular basis, the fundamental patterns and structures of stratified wealth and power, so that there is "enough for everyone." This socioeconomic vision is articulated in a variety of ways in both testaments: through Exodus storytelling (Exodus 16), Levitical legislation (Leviticus 25), Deuteronomic exhortation (Deuteronomy 15), prophetic pronouncement (Isaiah 5), gospel parable (Matthew 25), and apostolic pleading (2 Corinthians 8-9).

http://sojo.net/magazine/1998/05/god-speed-year-jubilee