A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on December 28th, 2007 in Progressive Faith

Pastor Dan has an excellent short series he’s entitled “Changing the Script” (see part one-a, one-b, and one-c). This post is my response to that (because I tend to write long responses that overwhelm the comments and because cross-pollination works best). So if something sounds like it’s coming out of right field, click over there. If you still don’t see the connection, blame my tangential brain.

The first thing that strikes me about Dan’s writing is how much of it I’ve heard with slightly different terminology because I’ve read different authors. It’s kind of like having the blind men describe the elephant (in which we discover that an elephant is soft and mushy). Or maybe it’s like asking a fish about the water. We are so in touch with our human nature that talking about it is akin to describing the taste of salt. Every description is close, but none is complete.

BF Skinner noted in Beyond Freedom and Dignity that democracy asks those who can spare the least to gamble the most in their political decisions. This is one explanation of why the Republican Party, which regularly villanizes the underclass and threatens to cut social support programs, has such large support among those with lower incomes. By playing the script (to use Dan’s term) that they are free to choose their future, Republicans lure poor people into voting for program cuts that are supposed to liberate them and allow them to move forward. Understanding this, it is difficult to fault them for doing so. After all, who wants to be a welfare recipient their entire life?

But the reality of capitalism is that some people must be better off than others. Not everyone can be the wealthiest, the healthiest, the happiest, or have the most toys. The wealthy control sufficient capital to create jobs for the rest of us by pursuing their needs and wants. In doing so, they allow a trickle of their wealth into our hands so that we can pursue our needs and wants by doing their bidding. This is the “Invisible Hand” of the market - which isn’t so much a hand as it is a leash. We aren’t so much guided benevolently as we are yanked by the neck in the “proper” direction.

There are two ways of dealing with the inequalities this creates - and the inequalities are vast. The first is to say “Well, that’s life - just work harder and you’ll do better.” For some people this is actually true. But it isn’t true on a meta-level. Remember that capitalism requires some people to do better than others. If we reach a point where everyone graduates high school, then a high school diploma loses its usefulness as a gauge of accumulated knowledge and ability to apply one’s self. In order for a diploma to remain valuable, there has to be high school dropouts.

The other way is to say, “We can adapt the system so that those who are left behind are not left totally on their own.” We can, in other words, rig the system so that losing isn’t so bad. Instead of having people resort to theft and begging at the lowest part of our system, we can set up programs that allow them the “dignity” of coming to a central clearinghouse and fill out paperwork instead of standing on the side of the road with a tin cup. It’s still begging (and some would argue theft) but it’s okay because it goes through the proper system for accepting assistance.

I have to say that I’ve rarely met anyone with a lot of money who hated the poor for living on welfare. Of course, some do - but more often than not, the poor are simply not noticed. Like Lazarus at the gate of the rich man, they depend on the dogs to lick their wounds while the rich gaze heavenward and plan for their everlasting reward. It is actually those who are on the edge of sinking into poverty that generally have the hardest feelings towards social welfare programs. According to Skinner, it’s because they have the most to lose.

It’s tied into the script (hat tip to Dan again) of the “deserving poor“. This is in direct opposition to the “undeserving poor”. Those who work hard but remain poor are deserving of help. Those who simply accept the help given them without working their back into a knot are not deserving of help. Nice paradox, no? You prove you are worthy of help by refusing help. If you ask for help, it shows you are not worthy.

So the deserving poor maintain their advantage over the undeserving poor by basically suffering in silence. When assistance becomes great enough to lift the undeserving poor within reach - or even above - the material level of the deserving poor, then moral outrage ensues. After all, what moron would work fourteen hours a day if they could simply stay home and cash their welfare check? By actually being successful in assuaging the pain of true poverty, anti-poverty programs carry the seeds of their own defeat because they show the deserving poor how badly they are doing - and often disqualify them from the programs in question.

Skinner argues that a society that moves beyond the illusion of freedom would not force welfare recipients into the indignity of making them professional form-filers. The money would show up as needed for both the deserving and undeserving poor. Of course, to prevent the sort of class welfare that has destroyed our social programs, welfare would actually need to be universal - like Social Security. There is no qualification for receiving it other than being alive to receive it (not quite - you do have to contribute to Social Security).

Understand now why the Republicans - who really represent the upper classes - want to destroy Social Security by turning it into a system that depends upon the vagarities of the market? If they can take the single most effective social program in history and create a class of people who remain losers even when they participate in it; then they can eliminate the desire to cushion the pitfalls of capitalism altogether.

So far, Democrats have not come up with an effective script to counteract this meta-script. This is why the Conservative Era has not ended, even if Democrats manage to hold both houses of Congress and win the White House next year. Rauschenbusch’s “noble ethic” falls short because it doesn’t counter-act the sub-script of worthiness that runs through America’s relationship with the poor. It simply papers over it by saying “all are worthy” but then fails to truly deliver universality.

It’s also where Campolo’s theology falls short of underpinning Progressive politics. Anything that depends on “personal transformation” opens the door for determining who is worthy and who isn’t - who is transformed and who isn’t. I don’t have an answer to offer at this point, but I think this error has to be addressed to step forward. Perhaps the best answer is from the Bible - all have sinned and fall short. If that isn’t a call for the universal, then I don’t know what is.

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