People of Faith United for Justice

Dr. Kinnamon made the following remarks at a gathering of Wisconsin Council of Churches/Interfaith Partners, March 10, 2009

I want to tell you that while I live in New York City, I am not from New York City – never will be.  I am from the Midwest, grew up in Iowa, and summer vacations were often at places like the Dells.  I did my PhD study at the University of Chicago, and summer camps for the churches I served during those years were at places like Green Lake.  So I have very fond memories of this state.  And those have been reinforced over the subsequent years by my association with wonderful communities like the Benedictine Women of Madison and, of course, the Wisconsin Council of Churches.  Jerry Folk and now Scott Anderson have given real leadership to the wider ecumenical movement. Scott, for example, was on the search committee that called me to be General Secretary of the National Council of Churches and is an excellent colleague to me and other ecumenical workers across the country.  So it is a real pleasure to be in Wisconsin. 

I love meeting with groups like this:  “people of faith united for justice.”  Think about this heading  It says that this is not some abstract organization.  We are people, with all of our particular experiences, who hold in common a conviction that this world is precious precisely because it is not of our creation.  We who gather like this are often called “activists,” but ours is not an anxious human effort to fashion a better world.  As the Christian writer, Henri Nouwen, once put it, “an activist wants to heal, restore, redeem, and re-create; but those acting within the house of God point through their action to the healing, restoring, redeeming, and re-creating presence of God.”  So, let it be known:  We are people of faith, people who act on behalf of the common good, not because it is necessarily in our self-interest but because it is the calling we have heard from the One whose gracious love is the foundation of our lives. 

Beyond that, we come today united for justice.  The people here are from different faith communities, by no means uniform, and yet united by a shared conviction that every neighbor, especially those who are most vulnerable, should be treated with fairness and compassion.  Justice is a difficult concept to define, even within a single religious community.  But for all of us, I suspect, justice involves a distribution of the earth’s resources that allows for the well being of all God’s children.  And this involves access to decent health care, access to quality education, access to sustainable income, access to a non-toxic environment, access to political decision-making.  We are people of faith united for justice. 

There is one other shared conviction that ought to be named.  We who gather for an “advocacy day at the Capitol” clearly believe that government has a responsibility to act on the basis of justice, and that religious communities have a responsibility to hold the government accountable to this purpose.  Not all people of faith agree with this conviction!  Let me speak for a moment about the church.  There are many persons in our pews who think that the church’s proper role is charity, not political advocacy – that individual Christians have a right to act in the public arena on the basis of conscience, but that the church should stick to “spiritual matters” and stay out of politics.  And, of course, it is true that political advocacy has the potential to divide Christians from Christians, Jews from Jews, Muslims from Muslims. 

But if our religious faith is truly central to our lives, how can it be separated from the decisions we make politically and socially?  If God is the Sovereign of all history, how can we divorce our belief in God from the world of public policy?  Even lack of political engagement is political engagement in that it perpetuates the status quo.  Advocacy, it seems to me, is an unavoidable part of the mission of our faith communities. 

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As you may know, the National Council of Churches engages in a good deal of advocacy in Washington, DC as an expression of the common voice of the churches.  My own experience – as the former chairperson of the NCC’s Justice and Advocacy Commission, and now as it General Secretary - is that advocacy is most profound when it maintains certain tensions.  I want to name four of these tensions for us to consider this morning. 

First is the need, on the one hand, for focused attention on particular advocacy priorities and the need, on the other, for advocacy that integrates multiple themes, that sees our particular problems within wider context. Later this week, nearly a thousand of my favorite people will gather in Washington, DC for Ecumenical Advocacy Days – a national version of what you are doing in Wisconsin.  One of my presentations at that event will be an address on the need for support of quality public education through revision of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.  But, of course, you cannot simply focus on education alone since part of the problem is inequitable funding based on patterns of race and class.  Education needs priority attention, but it cannot be dealt with as an isolated issue. 

In recent years, racial justice has been part of the NCC’s broader agenda – as, for example, in the work of our Special Commission on the Just Rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, which brings together concern for poverty, racism, and environmental destruction in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.  At our General Assembly last November, the churches affirmed that such an integrated approach is vital – but not sufficient.  Racism also demands specific focus, lest we think that the problem is somehow behind us with the election of President Obama. 

Since becoming General Secretary, I have come to appreciate the need to be very specific in advocacy efforts (e.g., in my proposals to the Israeli ambassador about changing Israeli policy regarding residency permits in Jerusalem and the West Bank), while at the same time to name broad basic Christian values that potentially refocus public discussion (about which I will say more in a moment).  Much of our advocacy work at the NCC, however, falls somewhere in between.  Not specific enough to get as much done as we would like, and not radical enough to lift up the counter-cultural voice of scripture. 

A related dilemma is that the NCC has often dissipated its energy and resources on an almost-endless list of causes, in part because our members have different priorities. If I meet with the Mar Thoma, it is persecution in India.  If I meet with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it is handguns in our cities.  How are we to take seriously the priorities of our very diverse members and, at the same time, stay focused on the overriding issues of the day?  These are things they do not teach you in General Secretary school! 

So that is the first tension:  focus and integration.  The second has to do with the need to respond with appropriate urgency to crises of the moment and the equally urgent need for long-term formation so that our advocacy grows from our very identity as religious communities.  In the U.S., in my experience, our churches seem to discover issues with an evangelical zeal, but often retain only short-term interest because they are missing long-term formation. 

A Christian advocate who powerfully makes this case is Audrey Chapman, former executive of the United Church of Christ Board for World Ministries, in her book, Faith, Power and Politics.  “In the absence of shared understandings about identity and vocation,” she writes, “…political ministry tends to be unfocused and diffuse, lacking explicit theological grounding and sustained membership support and involvement.  Political witness tends to become a specialized mission activity undertaken primarily by national agencies … on behalf of the denominations, rather than an expression of the community’s faith journey.”  And this leads to a familiar form of hypocrisy whereby what we preach to the world (what we advocate) is not exemplified in our own structures and lifestyles – thereby undercutting the impact of our advocacy.  Things like climate change will not wait for long-term education, but surely such education must accompany our efforts and immediate response. 

Perhaps this is a good place to name other factors that have, as I see it, diminished the public witness of many of our churches.  I will use my own denomination, the Disciples of Christ, as an example. 

·          Faced with declining numbers and resources, leaders within the Disciples fear that controversy will further weaken the church.  In response, we have, since the mid- 1990s, eliminated virtually all national staff positions responsible for social justice ministries and are on the verge of eliminating General Assembly resolutions dealing with contemporary issues. 

·          Within the Disciples, as in other mainline churches, there is an evident gap between the commitment of at least some leaders and many local church members.  As a result, our assemblies will sometimes offer prophetic witness only to discover that the initiatives lack the broad support needed for church-wide action.  That is one reason people have argued for the elimination of resolutions:  They too often have been “feel good” pronouncements that involve little serious cost or effort. 

·          Polarization within the church on issues of social concern, and inability to deal constructively with conflict, mean that advocacy is increasingly confined to special interest groups that can be ignored by the rest of the body.  I belong to the Disciples Peace Fellowship; but, as I keep saying to whoever will listen, the church should not have a peace fellowship, it should be a peace fellowship. 

·          And, to return to my basic point, the Disciples have shown little capacity for integrating social witness with worship, pastoral care, stewardship, or the other things the church does and is.  In the words of theologian Lew Mudge, “…there seems little connection in the minds of church members between the moral convictions to which they bear witness and the nature of the ecclesial community in which these convictions are nurtured” – which means that peace and justice can be relegated to one corner of the church. 

The third tension I have in mind, and the one I have paid most attention to since becoming General Secretary, is nicely set forth in a much-neglected book from 2006, Beyond Idealism:  A Way Ahead for Ecumenical Social Ethics.  In it, the authors argue for a perspective they call “hopeful realism” – realistic assessment of our social situation coupled with a willingness to imagine alternative realities.  On the one had, they argue, ecumenical councils have often responded to war or discrimination or  environmental destruction with idealized slogans and utopian pronouncements.  On the other hand, the NCC in particular has often been reactive to the world’s agenda, promoting reforms that, while important, leave the underlying status quo basically untouched.  Please do not misunderstand:  I have no intention to stop pushing for raises in the minimum wage or calling for more recycling or prompting a reduction in U.S. military spending.  But these are ways of tweaking the system that stop short of a truly prophetic witness which engenders hope for a different way of living in human society. 

Another person who argues this case is Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  Without a social vision of a Good Society that transcends the prevailing order, he contends, Christian ethics will remain captive to that order and social Christianity will restrict itself to marginal reforms.  I also like the way Chapman puts it.  “Our churches,” she writes, “seem limited to recommending incremental policy changes that differ little from secular political actions.”  What is often missing, in her words, “is a compelling religious vision, a sense of the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ of God’s [Reign] that challenges and opposes the injustices of the dominant reality by invoking God’s peace and justice.”   

You see this tension: hopeful realism.  We cannot eradicate evil.  The conceit of such utopianism has itself been the fuel of countless tyrannies.  But we also must not allow those responsible for present systems of injustice to define what is possible, because we are followers of God whose promise is not just for another world but for this world made other. 

At the meeting of the NCC’s Governing Board last September, our agenda included such things as immigration reform and Christian-Muslim relations.  These specific issues are of great importance, and we had proposals for dealing with them.  But, I suggested to our Board, the underlying problem is the fearfulness of the culture, a fearfulness, likely to be exacerbated by the then-impending economic crisis, which turns us against the neighbor.  Our task as churches, I suggested is not only to promote legislation and set up dialogues but to preach the faith in a way that confronts head-on this culture of fear.  

The final tension I want to mention is the dialectic, familiar to our faith communities, of God’s initiative and our human response.  Much discussion about advocacy emphasizes what we accomplish and human effort is obviously essential.  But seen in faith perspective such effort is understood as response to what God has done, is doing, and will do – as participation in God’s mission.  Getting this theological point straight, in my experience, has very practical benefits:  It is a check against self-righteousness.  It is a spur to working with others.  It is the foundation for deep hopefulness.  And it is a reminder to ground all that we do in study of our sacred texts and in prayer. 

As I see it, one of the things that has undermined the National Council’s social witness in recent years is inadequate theological and biblical foundation, which is usually a sign that we are pushing an ideological agenda rather than opening ourselves to genuine wrestling with our faith heritage.  I trust the same is not true here in Wisconsin. 

* * * 

I hope these tensions have been useful for your own reflection.  In presenting them, I have drawn especially on my experience with churches at the national level.  Over the years, I have also had the privilege of being extensively involved in interfaith advocacy at the state and local level.  In St. Louis, for example, I was a founder of an interfaith advocacy and education network we called All God’s People.  This effort was launched during the presidential campaign in 2004 in response to the widely-held notion that liberals are, by definition, secularists while conservatives are guided by religious faith.  I still remember a syndicated column by Cal Thomas which contended that “liberals” are “theologically squishy” types who do not believe in objective truth and who abide religion only if it supports their secular agenda.  

Needless to say, this is an affront to tens of millions of Jews, Muslims, Christians and other persons of faith who, precisely because of our faith, believe that the world is not unambiguously divided into good and evil, that care for society’s most vulnerable members is a public priority, and that God’s good creation is not simply for human exploitation.  Persons of faith, that is to say, who refuse to restrict “religious issues” to abortion, public display of the Ten Commandments, and gay marriage! 

As our first action, All God’s People wrote an open letter to the St. Louis paper offering ten religious convictions which we shared, and which had real implications in that election year.  See how they sound to you: 

1.       Because God's blessing is pronounced on peacemakers, we look for political leaders who seek non-violent solutions to conflict and treat war as a last resort. 

2.       Because God calls us to be advocates for those who are most vulnerable in society, we look for political leaders who work for economic justice and attempt to reduce the growing disparity between rich and poor. 

3.       Because each person is created in the image of God and is of infinite worth, we look for political leaders who actively promote racial justice and celebrate this nation's racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. 

4.       Because the earth belongs to God and is intrinsically good, we look for political leaders who affirm the human responsibility to protect God's creation. 

5.       Because people around the globe are related in God's one human family, we look for political leaders who regard AIDS in Africa, to take only one example, as an urgent concern. 

6.       Because one of God's commandments is to welcome strangers, we look for political leaders who uphold fair immigration policies and speak out against the fear of those who are "different." 

7.       Because every neighbor, as a child of God, deserves opportunity for fullness of life, we look for political leaders who support first-rate public education for all students and promote adequate, affordable health care for all citizens. 

8.       Because God calls the human family to live in community, we look for political leaders who strive to eliminate the violence and despair that erode community life in America's cities. 

9.       Because all persons can be transformed by the power of God's love, we look for political leaders who champion restorative justice, not capital punishment, and who seek to change a penal system that perpetuates oppression of African-Americans. 

10.    Because our traditions admonish us not to bear false witness, we look for political leaders who conduct their campaigns according to principles of fairness, honesty, and integrity. 

Friends, we gather here, not in an election season but in a time of real crisis for this state and this nation.  Moments of crisis are, of course, moments of both opportunity and threat.  In the face of economic recession, governments can aggressively address the needs of the poor – perhaps in a way they could not or would not during “normal” times.  Or they can turn mean-spirited and defensive. 

The same is true for our faith communities.  Such times can remind us of our best theological instincts – to care for the neighbor for no other reason than that he or she is a child of God.  Or, faced with declining offerings, we can focus on the survival of our community, and protect what is “ours.” 

I know what path you have chosen – and I am thankful for it.

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches