Reflection # 1

I am reflecting with a group of doctoral students, university lecturers and professors, on social theory and religion.  Most recently, we have been thinking about Marx . . .

Reflection #1

I often lament a perceived inability of current religious leaders to advance a coherent critical and libratory response to the increasing impoverishment and imprisonment of ordinary Americans.  The top 1% of the population is immune to application of the law, takes in one quarter of the nation’s income and controls 40% of its wealth.  Rather than addressing this disparity and the attendant issues of injustice, the public voice of many of America’s clergy remains focused on women and the control of their bodies, issues of sexual orientation, and yearning for an idyllic past which never existed.  This focus arises at the intersection of biblical literalism, and notions of natural law and eternal life.

Gregory Baum’s reading of Marx in Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology underscores my point.  For Marx, religion is the product of human self-alienation. “The discrepancies in the social institutions inflict burdens on people, diminish their humanity, distort their self-understanding as human beings, and eventually create false consciousness in them.” (24)  With this distorted awareness, the present social order becomes reality.  People then generate ideals that normalize and solidify the false social order.  Religion is such an ideal, directing notions of happiness away from the present world to a divine world beyond.  The material world remains unjust, and religion serves to maintain the status quo (24).

Yet, I am mindful that religion also has been used to support challenges to unjust social structures.  Writing from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King interrogated the idea espoused by certain Alabama clergy that the quest for racial equality should proceed only through the courts, not the streets.  King wrote:  “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” King staked his position in the tradition of the Apostle Paul and the prophets who “left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns . . .”  

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Today, Chris Hedges, a journalist and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and  Cornell West, a Professor of African American Studies and Religion, lend support to the Occupy Wall Street protest which seeks, among other things, to bring attention to the disparities between the rich and the poor.  The basis of their support lies in religious understandings of justice.  Hedges writes:  “Either you obstruct . . . the criminal class on Wall Street and the accelerated destruction of the ecosystem . . . or you become a passive enabler of a monstrous evil.”  West says that “[t]o be human you must bear witness to justice.  Justice is what love looks like in public . . .”

Perhaps religion freed from rules and absolute dogmas, and focused instead on love, here and now, can disrupt systems of hatred and injustice.  Then, religion can be used to imagine and create a love-filled world.