For those who may not be able to hear World magazine’s weekly radio broadcast “The World and Everything In It,” here’s the commentary I offered this past weekend, complete with links to the quotes:
The political movement called “Occupy Wall Street” has become well known for its radical economic and social agenda, the law-breaking behavior of many of the protestors, and the support it has received from many Washington politicians and big-city mayors. What is less known is the support OWS has been receiving from left-wing Christian organizations and leaders.
For example, Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, perhaps the best known spokesman for the American religious left, recently wrote in the Huffington Post that “When they [OWS] stand with the poor, they stand with Jesus. When they stand with the hungry, they stand with Jesus. When they stand for those without a job or a home, they stand with Jesus.” The president of the United Church of Christ, Geoffrey Black, compared OWS with Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple, writing, “Jesus was expressing a spiritual yearning for economic justice and outrage at individuals and systems that exploit people.” Meanwhile, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church put out a statement saying “the growing movement of peaceful protests in public spaces in the United States and throughout the world in resistance to the exploitation of people for profit or power bears faithful witness in the tradition of Jesus to the sinful inequities in society.”
Piffle. What OWS mostly seems to stand for is the desire to get one’s hands on what other people have earned, using the power of the state to do so, with as little work involved as possible–the very antithesis of the self-giving, self-sacrificial love of Jesus. The misuse of the name of Jesus to baptize Occupy Wall Street is evidence that for much of the Christian left, the primary mission of the church is no longer the spread of the gospel of Christ. Instead, the political agenda of the far left has become a substitute gospel for those who, in the pursuit of an unbiblical fetish for “equality,” would impoverish us all, spiritually and morally as well as economically.
Remember, you can hear the whole program or selected segments of it here. Oh, and I’ll be doing these about once a month, so I’ll let you know in advance when the upcoming ones are ready for broadcast.
November 22, 2011 at 6:00 pm
My wife and I spent Saturday afternoon delivering food items,that we had bought, into our local church food pantry. Then on Sunday afternoon we researched food banks, homeless shelters, etc in Albuquerque and then we wrote very sizeable checks to these organizations because I had made money in a company stock transaction and we tithe all of our income. So I guess since I am not part of OWS then I was not standing with Jesus as we were delivering food to the church or writing checks to food banks and homeless shelters. By the way I made all that extra money on Wall Street. Somehow I just think that Jesus probably stood by me as we did all this. We could have just joined OWS and talked about feeding the poor I guess and Jesus would have been there for us.
November 22, 2011 at 8:23 pm
I’ve been a reader and fan for a long time and am constantly blessed by your insight, wit and courage. The work you have done lately to expose the OWS nonsense on the part of people who claim to speak for Christians has been very helpful. Yet this is the first time I’ve felt that perhaps you might be drawing the line a bit harshly. I’m not for a moment saying that the idiocy proffered by Wallis and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and the whole leftist baboon choir is anything other than what you’ve said. I just think that swinging the pendulum to the other side and focusing entirely on pointing out the unwashed knaves and petty criminals is missing an opportunity. Yes, there are among the OWS hordes plenty of feckless opportunists and bums and cause-of-the-month radicals. And whiners and pampered kids who don’t want to own up to their college debt. And anarchists and misguided young men who become a genuinely dangerous mob when they gather in groups. Our media carries plenty of stories of the hypocrisy of this phenomenon, and even the moments of horror when the innocent have been hurt in the encampments. The lights are turned on and we can see the roaches crawling.
And yet, and yet. Somewhere, deep down in our nation at this moment, deeper than this OWS movement, is the genuine cry of people who are now facing their 33rd month without a job, or who had to move in with the in-laws after the foreclosure finally played itself out, or who’ve had to go back to work even in their seventies because the pension plan went bust. The fact that OWS has any resonance at all grows out of this underlying reality, this cry of anguish. If the only Christians who are reacting to that are the Sojourners bunch (dimwitted as they may be), then our side is missing something here. It’s becoming too comfortable a stance to just mock the OWS crazies. It’s time to open our eyes and see what the Lord might be seeing behind all the folly, the widow and orphan literally and figuratively. There might actually be a movement to support here (not the vapid OWS or the sanctimonious Sojourners), but an insight that reminds us how employment and mortgages and pensions came to be so perilous, and the beginning of a movement in our hearts that could bring us to tears if we but felt it for a moment.
Some writers are starting to ask deeper questions (http://open.salon.com/blog/diane_elizabeth/2011/11/21/crossing_the_transom_will_occupy_mobilize_a_generation).
You are normally spot on, David. I wonder if you could help us in this case to ask some deep questions of our own.
November 23, 2011 at 8:50 am
Kyle: Thank you very much for your most insightful comment. I’m going to respond, but I want to give it some thought. You’ve raised important questions, and I want to give them the response they deserve, which will be the subject of my next post.
November 23, 2011 at 10:28 am
There is nothing new Christian in Occupy Wall Street. Their goal is to force others they don’t like to surrender property and liberties so a more powerful government can control more aspects of our life. The fact they use economic hardship to advance their cause is nothing new. We have seen OWS before in every push for totalitarian utopias. Many people are simply imprinting their own feelings on a movement that at its core is against private property, saving, hard work, common decency and civilization. Take a look at what they do–seize private property, hurt small businesses, disrupt the lives of neighbors–to judge them. And they are violent and getting increasingly violent. They have called for shutting down all US ports and hurting consumers and businesses directly to get attention. They are evil, and the Christian’s response should be to speak out against them as another manifestation of mankind’s dark side.
November 23, 2011 at 11:00 am
Way to generalize there, Jim. Did you mean to imply poverty is always the fault of the poor, and could simply be solved by the willingness to “work hard” and the application of “common decency”?
November 23, 2011 at 12:11 pm
No, Kyle. I am saying there is nothing new about demagogues exploiting poverty for their political ends. As Christians we must aid the poor and address the causes of poverty. But OWS is all about seizing power to impose a totalitarian regime on the rest of us. It is as evil as the Bolsheviks, Maoists and Fascists who did the same in the name of compassion and equality. The camps they have created offer no hope for the poor, only an example of how they would pull down society to the OWS level.
November 23, 2011 at 2:19 pm
I think OWS is all about the frustration that nothing seems to be changing for the better. I don’t think they are organized enough to be even thinking of imposing anything on anyone. I think Kyle has a great point – and I would add that the folks who led the banks who made all the bad loans chasing the almighty dollar seem to be faring a lot better than the folks who lost their houses.
November 23, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Frustration is no excuse for criminality, or demands to destroy the nation’s economy. The spokesperson for Occupy Wall Street told NPR he wanted to “overthrow the government.” There’s been calls for killing bankers, and destroying the system of credit that makes school, car and house loans possible. What’s Christian about that? If you want to do something, build a house with Habitat for Humanity, counsel a poor family on managing money and nutrition, start a business and create jobs. Make more of your own money and give more away. Don’t try to bring down others and grab what they have. That is what OWS is really all about.
November 23, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I think I will have to agree to disagree with you. OWS doens’t have “a spokesperson” who can speak for the whole movement. That was just one voice amongst many. If you asked 100 OWS protesters what it was about you’d probably get 100 different answers.
Would you argue that there is nothing wrong with the system of credit as it stands right now? That stronger regulations aren’t necessary? In Canada, where I live, there are much stronger banking regulations, and guess what? No Canadian banks needed bailing out. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
November 23, 2011 at 4:58 pm
*doesn’t
November 23, 2011 at 5:05 pm
“counsel a poor family about managing money”. Really? Most people I know who are poor are much better money managers than I am – because they have to be. When you don’t have a lot you have to make it go farther. Poverty isn’t caused by poor money management.
And yes, I do know what I am talking about – I’m a street outreach worker with a Christian organization in my city.
November 23, 2011 at 5:20 pm
I should have said that poverty isn’t necessarily caused by poor money management.
November 23, 2011 at 6:12 pm
We used to have strong policies on mortgage financing requiring 20% down. But beginning in 1999 the Federal government began pressuring, even threatening lenders to lower their requirements and extend more and more loans to people who could not afford them. It was a feeding frenzy on both ends of the deal. It takes two to consummate a liar’s loan. The feds should have stayed out of it and not created the housing bubble that was bound to burst.
The other problem is that the government is making losses public when the risk taking produces private gains. That calls for less intervention, not more, to correct the situation.
I don’t think it is regulations that are the problem with credit. It’s that there is too much debt taken on by people who can’t afford it and shouldn’t be incurring that level of debt service. You don’t have to accept and use a free credit card or take out $50,000 in student loans to student the history of theater.
As for managing money, no it is not “the” cause of poverty, but the failure to manage money gets many families into trouble with debt and failure to save and plan for the rainy day. There was a generation in this nation that could save and not spend money recklessly…and they had less money to start. it was harder being poor generations ago, by far, but people like my grandparents pulled themselves out of poverty with hard work and a hard head about money. And they didn’t whine about loans being too easy to get.
This is at best a partial discussion. Thank you for your service to the poor. In closing, you don’t make the poor rich by making the rich poor.
November 23, 2011 at 8:03 pm
They have discovered that we live in a sinful, fallen world, which is correct. However, are they advocating repentance and faith in Jesus as the solution? I don’t think anything else works. Just about everything else has been tried and found wanting.
November 23, 2011 at 9:30 pm
I think making it harder to get credit would also solve the problem, or at least be a good step towards it. Or, let banks that take stupid risks fail. Seems to me that not having strict regulations and then stepping in so that the banks can’t fail is the worst of both worlds.
November 24, 2011 at 8:19 am
Kate, making it harder to get credit would indeed solve the problem. However, banks and especially mortgage companies that did that were sued in the 1990s for “discrimination,” and much of that case law is now the law of the land.
November 25, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Seriously? On what basis? Have there been similar lawsuits directed at health insurance companies for refusing to insure people with “pre existing conditions”?
November 26, 2011 at 3:51 pm
[...] response to the post of my World commentary, reader Kyle Smith has offered a very insightful comment, which I urge you to take a look at before proceeding. His observations deserve a measured reply, [...]