Awaiting the City: Poverty, Ecology, and Morality in Today's Political Economy

By Chad Brand and Tom Pratt

People of faith have always been on search for the homeland, first promised to Abraham in light of the Babylonian civilization he left. That future hope was reinterpreted by Jesus and taken up by St. Augustine in The City of God, reinterpreted again by John Calvin in Geneva, and given a final form by the Puritan pilgrims who came to America to establish the City upon a Hill. Fundamental to this quest for a just, holy civilization has been the progress of humankind on the earth in light of the mandate to fill and rule over it.
Authors Chad Brand and Tom Pratt discuss that progress as they answer the vital questions for praxis: How should biblically oriented Christians think of and work toward God's justice along the way? How can we steer between a utopian vision and a limited vision to a new rational compassion?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kregel Academic
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780825488559

Chad Brand

Chad Brand is professor of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and associate dean for biblical and theological studies at Boyce college.

Book preview

Awaiting

the City

Poverty, Ecology

and Morality in Today’s

Political Economy

Chad Brand and Tom Pratt

kregel DIGITAL EDITIONS

www.kregeldigitaleditions.com

Awaiting the City: Poverty, Ecology, and Morality in Today’s Political Economy

© 2012 by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt

This book is adapted from Part 3 of Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.

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ISBN 978-0-8254-8855-9

Epub edition 1.0

To Dr. T. E. Pratt, Daddy to me,

who taught me to work, to think,

to love God’s Word,

and most of all

to know Jesus Christ

in the forgiveness of my sin

To Eddie Brand, Dad, or when I

really felt close to him, Pops,

who helped me to be

a better teacher,

and who taught me to love the Lord

and my family

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Western Civilization & the American Dream

Chapter 2: Moral Complexities in the 21st Century

Chapter 3: The Morality of Market Economics

Chapter 4: Social Justice & Distribution—Wealth,

Poverty, & Human Need

Chapter 5: The Spirit of Competitive Destruction—

Creation, Ecology, & the Destiny of Man

Chapter 6: Tending the Garden—Changing the

World or Rational Compassion

Chapter 7: Fickle Prophets, Biblical Realism,

& Rational Compassion

Epilogue

Appendix

Preface

The story of this book begins (for Tom, the oldest of your two writers), in conscious involvement in its many facets, in the academic year of 1964–65, in the deep valley of the Texas Rio Grande near Brownsville. One Sunday evening, four preacher-boys (my mother’s favorite name for young men called to preach but not yet mature) were returning to the campus of the (then) University of Corpus Christi (now Texas A&M at Corpus Christi) after a day of preaching and testifying in several churches representing the University and the BSU (Baptist Student Union). We had not eaten since noon that day, and by nine o’clock or so we were starving as they say and stopped in at the only café we found open that evening along the road in Edinburgh. We sat down at a table in the middle of the almost deserted room and waited for the waitress to come to the table. She was somewhat delayed, but we did not take much notice of it. When she arrived, she was visibly agitated and in an apologetic voice she pointed to three of us and said she could serve us but the fourth would have to go to the back door for service. The fourth happened to be Sidney Smith, a dear friend of my family with whom my sister had served two summers running vacation bible schools in East Texas among primarily black congregations and communities. Sid was a student with the rest of us at UCC and among other things was the best ping-pong player I ever knew! He was also black—or Negro, as we used the terminology then.

The strongest irony of the moment was that the woman who made this announcement, with real trepidation I feel, was Hispanic— Mexican to us back then, a simple designation of the derivation of the ethnic grouping from which she came. She was employed and under instructions from her manager to carry out the company policy on feeding racial minorities. She herself would only in the most recent years of the time have achieved the right to eat in a place like that and/or work there. My two white friends and I were duly shocked and dismayed and put quickly on the spot. I am not ashamed at all to say that as one man we simply rose to leave and one of us (I think I did) said if they would not feed Sid with us, not one of us would be eating there. We left the establishment quickly and went back to campus hungry, more concerned about what we had experienced together and what it might mean to our friend Sid than we were about our appetites.

We apologized to Sid for both what had happened in the café and our own insensitivity to a situation with which he was only too familiar. What is sometimes, or at least has been, referred to as the black experience in America had taken us over and made us (the white dudes) keenly aware of our inadequacies as friends, and at least for me, as Christians. In some sense I would never be the same in my thinking, but it was not as if it was the first time race had come up in my life. My dad and mother grew up in East Texas as the youngest born of mothers who gave birth to them in their mid-40s. They would each have been candidates for abortions of convenience in our time (had the mothers not been the kind of women they were). As the babies of the family, they were separated from their siblings by time and distance and were thought of in the family, as I grew up around my relatives, as somewhat odd in their ideas about culture and race and Christianity. When my dad was called to preach and went about it as if he thought it was truly God’s plan for his life and his family, it was not well received among the siblings. His and my mother’s pursuit of education led them to places no one in the family had ever been or contemplated going; and it confirmed ideas they had begun to imbibe on their own about the condition of, particularly, Southern Baptist churches and of Texas Baptists in general, as well as the larger culture of Texas, the South, and the United States as a whole.

That culture was blatantly and hatefully racist at worst and condescending and patronizing at best, with only a few who had any idea what true racial harmony and/or colorblindness might mean. The years that led up to my experience in Edinburgh that night long ago would have at least two of my dad’s churches refuse to accept his leadership, as he announced to communities that all persons of whatever race, color, or ethnic background were welcome inside their memberships. The ramifications of these acts can be readily imagined. Daddy and Mother were both schoolteachers on the side and had repeated run-ins with administrators and other teachers over integration. Daddy eventually entered the administrative part of the equation and found himself embroiled with school boards over both the moral implications of racial segregation and the actual intent and application of the law in school districts where he served. His final battle was in a district on the north side of Waco, Texas, where gerrymandered district lines were used to exclude black students from the high school. His challenge to this policy led to his firing, but only after he had said to them what he said to churches and others, I was unemployed when I came to this job, and I suppose I can be unemployed when I leave it. He landed in a junior high school in inner-city Waco, serving as an assistant principal to a black principal—a man who became a fast and long-time friend to our family.

Sid Smith went on to become a servant to the Lord and Southern Baptists as liaison to black Baptists who wished to be affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and/or its work. He had a long and wonderful career and is with the Lord now. I went to Colorado and have spent the last forty-four years (except for two years in the North Charleston area of South Carolina) in the Denver metropolitan area, serving mostly lower income churches and neighborhoods, where the economic and educational background of the people as well as the ethnic mixes involved serve to make them mostly what I call working-class—a mix very similar to areas where I grew up in Texas, except that the churches were almost completely all white in Texas. The Colorado churches had no obvious barriers to racial and economic integration nor class-consciousness, but cultural lines set up in all communities along neighborhood lines, and we always served in the lower-end neighborhoods. Those churches were predominantly poor and lower middle class white, with a small percentage of ethnic mix. I might add that my experiences in other parts of the metropolitan area showed no bias one way or the other toward the Gospel from poor to rich or any in between. The Gospel is truly offensive to all economic, ethnic, and cultural groups.

Economic exigencies and the confrontations of the ministry (not the least over such things as racism) put our family on the edge financially almost all the time. My wife Karen has used her nursing degree off and on all our married life, and I have found myself involved in various business enterprises and moments of desperate need for employment. Consequently, I am deeply familiar with the ins and outs of capitalistic markets from every angle. I have begged (literally) a fast-food outlet manager to hire me in spite of the fact I was obviously over-qualified to sweep the floors, clean the toilets, pick up garbage on the lot, and (ick!) scrub the grill. I was a thirty-year-old college graduate and veteran, but unemployed, pastor and evangelist at the time. I have learned from scratch as a painters’ helper in the auto-body business and operated a body business with up to thirteen employees. I have catered to businesses, churches, the military, meals on wheels, and anybody else who would eat mine and my sons’ BBQ, pizza, and hot truck offerings.

I have hired some of the worst and some of the best and sought to make business a place of integrity and honesty and customer satisfaction, while on occasion attempting to help the generally unemployable (ex-correctional inmates) and the marginally employable (ethnic and minority youth). I have suffered their conspiracies and thefts and rejoiced in their achievements. I have made money and lost money. I have encountered the EPA, OSHA, IRS, HHS, fire inspectors, health departments, state and county governments, unemployment offices, social services, and every sort of wielder of personal authority within the regulatory atmosphere of modern America. Meanwhile, Karen has served three decades in mostly ICU and emergency-room settings working evenings and nights so we could hand off our children to one another for care, rather than entrust them to others. As a two-decade veteran of emergency medical services in the Denver area, she has a very clear idea of how care for the indigent, merely uninsured, drug-seeking, drug and alcohol dependent, irresponsible sexual adventurers, merely young or old, and ignorant, works in major metropolitan hospital settings.

Frankly, we are deeply grateful to have had the privilege of taking care of ourselves and others by means of capitalistic enterprises. We have also met some wonderful people in the process, among them my colleague and friend Chad Brand, whose family was a member of one of those churches I spoke of above. Neither our family nor Chad’s would have come to where we are outside a free and market driven society that rewards hard work, education, savings and investment, entrepreneurial enterprise, postponement of gratification, marital fidelity, and a host of other virtues. As students and teachers of God’s Word, we have come to believe fervently that there is no answer to the world’s suffering and poverty in the present age—other than the Gospel that sets a person free to worship God with all he/she is, in an atmosphere where nothing is god but God.

All of which brings us again to this book. Sid Smith, a black man from slave heritage in the South; Chad Brand, a white man from poverty surroundings in Adams City, Colorado; and Tom Pratt, child of the culture of truck farmers and dry goods storekeepers in Great Depression-era east Texas, all stand with each other equal at the Cross. So far as I ever knew, it never occurred to Sid to call me or someone like Chad a racist (as is commonly done in today’s American politics) for believing in democratic capitalistic institutions and seeking to get everyone equally involved in its hope for independence and even prosperity without relying on governmental dependencies. But the years since Sid and I were turned away from that café that night have proved fertile ground for a kind of hatefulness and guilt-mongering that make it a constant struggle to know how to approach even men and women like Sid—for fear I will inadvertently offend the victim, or cause some unintended discomfort and prove to someone that I am a racist. This is what political economy as practiced now in the United States has done and is doing to many (I think most) of us. Attorney General Eric Holder recently refered to us as racial cowards. Chad and I claim no great courage that others do not have. However, it is a mark of my own advancing age, and the hope I once held with many in the ‘60s for a truly colorblind and prosperous society/world, that I/we have written. To whatever degree we can restore the courage that comes from truth-telling and believing, we offer the discussion that follows.

Let me (Chad) just add that we believe that this book is needed in America today. There is so much misinformation in our churches about the way the market works and about the nature of just generosity (to use a phrase being bantered around a lot these days) that we believe there is a needed corrective. All the time, I hear people apologizing for being successful in business and life, as if that were something that a Christian ought not to be. We hope to show here that this is simply not a biblical perspective. And the situation is probably more problematic today than it has been since the time of the Robber Barons (more of them later). Even in the time we have been working on this book, the situation has become more complicated, volatile, and confused. We are hoping to bring some perspective to this.

As Tom has briefly indicated, I grew up in a Denver suburb, the poorest part of town. My high school was half Hispanic, half white. I experienced a call to the ministry when I was eighteen years old, while Tom was my pastor. My ministry has led me to serve churches in five states. I currently teach theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as serve a small congregation, Salyersville First Baptist Church in Salyersville, Kentucky, located in one of the poorest counties in the state, with unemployment at twenty percent. I say those things because I probably ought to be sounding the clarion call for redistribution, government assistance at the highest level, and higher taxes on the rich. But that is not the drum I am beating, for a variety of reasons—not least of which is that if you live in a poor community, you become aware very quickly just how much damage those efforts at redistribution and government assistance have done. A nineteen-year-old student of mine from the part of Eastern Kentucky where I am now serving, Jordan Conley, related how during the Great Society build-up of Lyndon Johnson, the president came to his county and gave a famous speech about his new program, that photos were taken and are famously displayed in that county, but that the county has never recovered financially from Johnson’s program. It is worse off today than it ever was in 1963, the year Johnson took over the presidency.

What we are engaging in here is a dialogue that has in recent years taken on the name of theo-politics and theo-economics. We are entering the field of dialogue known as the political economy, and we are dealing with it from the standpoint of the Christian Bible, the Christian theological heritage, and Christian ethics. But we are playing on the field of political economy. So, if there are times in reading this volume that you are not sure whether you are wrestling with political science, with economics, or with theology, then you are right with us! Neither Tom nor I pretend to be political science experts, or experts in economics. Tom is a pastor and a businessman, and I am a pastor and a theologian by training. But someone has to speak to the interface between these issues and if the people who have more credentials are not doing it, then we will take our shot and at least open a side of the conversation that has not yet really been broached.

Tom and I believe that for our nation’s well-being, and for the church’s spiritual vitality, there needs to be a new look at the issues of work, wealth, and stewardship. It is in hope and expectation that we might do some good, that we offer this book. We realize that the volume you hold in your hand (or are looking at on your screen) is weighty. We make no apology for that. We became convinced in the midst of the construction of this book that there was a body of information that needed to be presented, and that without all of it, the story could not be told. Here is our story. It is ours in the sense that we have lived it, and it is ours in the sense that we have assembled it. May the Lord bless you in your reading of the volume, and may he bless our churches with a passion to be Seeking the City.

[Note. This e-book stands on its own as a commentary on the political and economic issues of our day, from an evangelical Christian perspective. We are also convinced that conservative Roman Catholic, Jewish, and LDS readers will find much here with which to agree. For those who are on the more progressive or liberal side of the aisle—whether in regard to politics or faith matters—we encourage you to read our book and to enter into dialogue with us. Though this e-book stands on its own, it is in reality part of a larger project to be released by Kregel early in 2013, Seeking the City: Christian Faith & Political Economy, A Biblical, Theological, Historical Study. We hope that when that volume appears, those of you who have read this part of our work will also engage the larger argument we will present there.]

We have dedicated this book to our fathers—both of whom have gone on to be with the Lord in recent times—but we both know that this book could never have been written without the patience, encouragement, love, and dedication of our partners in life, work, ministry, and stewardship, Karen Pratt and Tina Brand.

Introduction

The last half of the twentieth century witnessed an astonishing and more or less peaceful revolution in the political and economic realities of the entire world. The West won the Cold War. The free nations defeated the totalitarian ones. The capitalists outperformed the statists. The believers outlasted the atheists. The United States of America, flawed and divided as we were, persevered to see the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and nearly all of its satellites implode. ¹ This process is all the more remarkable, coming as it did on the heels of two cataclysmic wars and a worldwide depression.

We are not suggesting that an era in which two major police actions (Korea and Vietnam) were fought, the ongoing Cold War threatened the annihilation of the planet during the period from 1945 to the early 1990s, or the fact that literally millions of civilians (besides military personnel) died at the hands of their own governments can be called truly peaceful. But it is wholly remarkable in the history of the world that such astonishing change has taken place without the outbreak of world war on a scale unimaginable. The age of totalitarian Socialist/Marxist governments has (hopefully) passed or is passing (even in China and Cuba), with the hope for millions that they shall never gain ascendancy again. And with them, it was hoped, also passed a way of economics and politics that had threatened all free societies. This was an extraordinary half-century for those who lived through the entire period. The time of fallout shelters, nuclear blast drills in the schools, mushroom clouds in commercials on TV, and the incessant reminder that our system of economics and government was in deadly competition with a power feared capable of burying us has receded. A new century with no present potential for such a cataclysm has dawned with a burgeoning global community of trade and cooperation (as well as competition) bidding to set the agenda for the foreseeable future.² It is the premise of the larger volume of this book that these developments, culminating in events at the beginning of the new century, have recast the terms in which Christians need to think and act ethically as marketplace participants.³

When I (Tom), a quintessential baby boomer, was born in 1945, most Evangelical Christians were aware of very few ethical dilemmas outside certain personal morality decisions.⁴ If there were business world decisions to be made, they had primarily to do with the implications of taking home office supplies for personal use and whether it was right to go to work for a beer distributorship. Nothing like the current, often bewildering, array of issues faced Christians concerned with conforming their lives to biblical norms.

The problem that, above all others, reared its head to forever dismiss such a simplistic view of Christian morality was racial segregation and its root cause, racism. In a sense, American Christianity has never been the same since 1954 and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The politics and ethics of race-consciousness now became thoroughly local when it was thrust into school systems across America by the Supreme Court, and followed by Federal enforcement measures. What had been a simmering back-burner issue for decades was now thrust to the national stage, turned into front-burner news, and made a political call to arms.

For decades since that time, Christian and non-Christian alike have been denied the possibility of quietly ignoring the elephant sitting in the living room. It was not that it had never been there before; it was just worked around quietly in polite society. But it was inevitable as the World War II generation came home, having mingled racially even in US-segregated armed services, that things would never be the same.⁵ The generations who have come along since that time will have a hard time understanding what a paradigm shift this was for Christians, many of whom had never discussed the problem of racism in moral terms—though, as we shall see, the entire discussion politically in this country was fought out over interpretations of the Bible.

But for others of us, especially those of us who grew to young adulthood during this era, our memories are filled with vivid TV images of high school integration enforced by federal agents in Little Rock, Arkansas; the admission of the first black student at the University of Alabama;⁶ the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his non-violent marches (culminating in his eventual assassination);⁷ the network news reports of lynchings and successful and attempted assassinations and bombings; the incredible scenes of race riots in major cities all across America,⁸ and much more. Christians were forced to face a much greater sense of moral responsibility. To a new generation of Christian leadership in the making, Martin Luther King’s dream that all men and women, boys and girls might one day be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character was not just another sermon; it was a biblical moral mandate. Without question, however, the gathering sense of moral direction was violently changed by the events of April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, when rifle fire took the life of Dr. King.

There is a sense in which the bullet fired by James Earl Ray into the body of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a shot heard around the world just as surely as the legendary first shot at Lexington during the American Revolution. For many in the generation who became adults during that period (and countless others who came before and since), Dr. King’s preaching and actions set a moral tone that could invigorate Christian social ethics. What once reverberated as a call to all men and women to rise in righteous indignation and right a long-standing moral wrong was to become in time the mere politics of class envy and warfare. With King’s violent departure, a unifying moral theme was lost, drowned by the voices of competing political constituencies demanding a piece of the action. A call to straightforward moral action was highjacked eventually by forces with another agenda besides mere morality. That object was, and is, political power.⁹

The American struggle over race became, in the last third of the twentieth century, a kind of me-too political game. It goes like this: If the race question is a moral/political battlefield, what about gender discrimination? What about sexual orientation? What about disability? What about the homeless? And what about any number of other apparent injustices done to any other possible constituency?

To be sure—especially among Christians, but regularly among the general populace as well—the morality card is played to justify political action. But it is with a whole new meaning. For, in the last eight years of the century, events came to bear that produced a new sense of what was moral and what was not. In fact, it was the complete reversal of what existed at the close of World War II where this discussion began. Nowadays moral is not a term used to evaluate one’s sexual proclivities or one’s personal trustworthiness to tell the truth. No. Now moral is a litmus test for whether one stands on the correct side of certain political disputes. Morality was not involved in the sexual exploits of the president of the United States in the ‘90s, in the minds of some, for that was about private behavior—a matter of personal taste but not of morality. But according to a very vocal lineup of political pundits and office holders, morality was most certainly involved in such political issues as welfare reform, minimum-wage legislation, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare reform, environmental damage, Medicare benefits, and Social Security (to name but a few). It would seem that morality is not what it used to be.¹⁰

The moral distance that has grown between that earlier time and the present is illustrated in the evolution of the use of terminology associated with the charge of racism. It is now common usage to charge with racism anyone who disagrees with a certain political philosophy. This philosophy is characterized by a conviction that all people of color are the victims of bias and discrimination, whether realized or subconscious, in the mind of the supposed victimizer. Thus, not only is racism the province of the KKK and other obviously race-conscious practitioners of discrimination, but anyone who opposes the politics of a person of color is by default a racist. Strangest of all to many who have lived through the entire sequence of events, the very idea that colorblindness should inform our relations among the racial groups is no longer a moral way of settling disputes. Rather, it is the very reverse that is now championed. One must discriminate on the basis of race in order to avoid the charge of racism—that is, in certain political situations. In others, that may not be the case. But the rules are based on the determinations made by one or more groups who are allowed to call the shots morally—the prior victims.¹¹ And, the victim list has grown longer and broader decade by decade. Most bewildering of all, these