Christopher LaTondresse

Religious Leaders 'Noisy About Malaria' in Mozambique

2013-04-25T15:56:51-04:00

Each year, World Malaria Day (April 25) commemorates the global fight toward zero malaria deaths and mobilizes action to combat malaria. This year's theme is "Invest in the Future: Defeat Malaria." This post was originally featured on USAID's Impact Blog"

Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane's message isn't exactly what one might expect from a typical religious leader. Then again, Bishop Sengulane, who has presided over Mozambique's Lebombo Diocese since 1976, is not a typical leader, religious or otherwise. The large cross that hangs from a chain around his neck is fashioned from components of disassembled weapons surrendered by combatants after the Mozambique civil war, a prolonged conflict that he and other religious leaders played an integral role in bringing to an end in the mid-1990s.

Today, Bishop Sengulane is fighting to bring an end to another destructive force in his nation: malaria. The disease steals 650,000 lives around the world each year, devastating entire communities and undermining opportunities for prosperity and growth -- and disproportionately affecting the African continent.

At a gathering hosted by USAID last month in Washington, D.C., Bishop Sengulane was joined by Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer of the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), leadership from USAID's Global Health Bureau and representatives from a number of faith-based and community organizations, including Christian and Muslim groups. The Bishop's message was simple and clear: "[Mozambique] reached peace 20 years ago. But 10 years ago we said there is something else that is killing day and night. Its name is Malaria. Let's stop it. Let's start working on that as communities of faith because we know this is not God's will."

In 2006 the Bishop helped launch a nationwide campaign to end malaria called PIRCOM (Programa Inter Religioso Contra a Malaria) alongside leaders from Christian, Muslim and Baha'i faith backgrounds. Their ambitious goal: train thousands of religious leaders across the country with basic malariaprevention and control messages, equipping them with the resources and tools needed to bring these messages to their communities.

"People in Mozambique know that I often say 'Let's be noisy about malaria'. That's actually how PIRCOM started ... people heard us saying could we give them a platform to address even more people on their concerns about malaria."

To date PIRCOM has trained more than 27,000 religious leaders and reached nearly 2 million congregants with basic malaria education, made possible through funding from the President's Malaria Initiative. The PIRCOM network now extends to 36 districts councils and six provincial councils across Mozambique where efforts are coordinated. Reflecting on the unique role faith communities can play in saving lives through simple public awareness raising, Bishop Sengulane observed: "If a doctor talks about how important it is for you to have your home sprayed, of course he will talk about those things in those terms, because it is how he will get his salary. But when a leader of a mosque starts talking about health issues, about malaria, then people are ready to listen. [Religious leaders] have got a good audience."

Echoing this theme, Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer added, "No matter what the cause, if you don't have political, or community, or civil leadership behind, it isn't going to go anywhere ... these leaders represent a 'flag pole' for the cause."

Still, there is much work to be done, especially in preventing deaths of children under five. Concluding his remarks, the Bishop acknowledged, "At the present moment we continue to have too many children dying of malaria. It's very important that we ensure that with the under-fives, pregnant women and similar vulnerable groups, that we go back and do the very urgent work of providing them with whatever is needed so that malaria doesn't kill, as we see happening too often."

PIRCOM's example reminds us that effective global development not only requires sound public policy and results-oriented programming, it is also a fundamental expression of our values, both as individuals and as a nation.

On this, World Malaria Day, let's resolve to be noisy about malaria.

The Sojourners and Jim Wallis Backlash Misses the Point

2011-05-11T11:21:03-04:00

As a committed Christian and a queer atheist who both work to advance interfaith and intercultural understanding, we've watched with heavy hearts as Sojourners and its evangelical founder Jim Wallis have been taken to task in the blogosphere this week for declining to run an advertisement sponsored by Believe Out Loud, an organization committed to full LGBTQ equality in Christian churches. The overwhelming reaction so far has mostly consisted of resounding condemnation, including from many people we both know and deeply respect.

The advertisement at the heart of this controversy links to a video featuring two lesbian women slowly walking their son down the center aisle of a church on Mother's Day, past the judgmental stares of parishioners barely disguising their discomfort and contempt. From the front of the church the pastor says, "Welcome. Everyone." simultaneously addressing the congregation's silent judgment and creating a safe place for two mothers and their child.

At first blush, anger and disbelief at Sojourners' decision not to run the advertisement seems more than justifiable. After all, what decent human being could oppose welcoming a lesbian couple and their son into a church -- on Mother's Day no less? By declining the ad, it follows, the historically progressive Sojourners must have adopted a stance against welcoming gay people into churches. Furthermore, they clearly do not support LGBTQ rights. Right?

Unfortunately, this interpretation of Sojourners' decision and the resulting controversy is a gigantic oversimplification. It ignores Sojourners' public stance on LGBTQ inclusion, decades-long history of defending equal protection under the law for LGBTQ individuals and couples, support for civil-unions, call for the repeal of DADT and Jim Wallis' personal participation in anti-bullying campaigns this past fall. Just as troubling, it also ignores the deeper issues at the heart of this controversy, stemming from cavernous divisions within the Christian world.

Within global Christianity, many, if not most, churches -- even those welcoming gay people -- still believe that this welcome should not extend to ordaining gay people as ministers or having their churches bless gay unions. Sojourners' big tent includes moderate to conservative evangelicals and Catholics who hold these views. Nevertheless, the organization has made huge inroads with these communities on issues of poverty, war and environmental degradation because of their strong commitment to pursuing scriptural integrity and maintaining biblical authority.

Sadly we live in a world where there are real bigots, too-many of them evangelical Christians, who actively oppose LGBTQ rights in the public arena. For this reason, to use this controversy as an opportunity to argue that Jim Wallis -- who has said that true Christians have a duty to stand between homophobic bullies and the Matthew Shepards of this world -- is against equal protection under the law for LGBTQ individuals and couples, or that he would oppose welcoming two mothers and their son into the pews of his church, is as misguided as it is counterproductive.

Those who question the integrity of an organization that adopts a moderate position make it more difficult for many evangelicals to find common ground with the LGBTQ community, in the same way that bullying tactics used by conservative organizations like Focus on the Family under the leadership of James Dobson made it difficult for many of our queer friends to ever believe that they could build authentic relationships with or find common cause with evangelicals.

The fact that we, a queer atheist and an evangelical Christian, are friends is evidence that it is possible to overcome the divisions between our tribes. Though we're both from Minnesota (at one point, we lived less than a mile apart) our paths never crossed until years later. Why didn't we meet? Because we both ran in different circles. While one of us attended a conservative Christian college, the other was an atheist disinterested in engaging with religious people. But we met years later because we both identified a value in fostering relationships with those who hold radically different worldviews. And along the way we learned that people's hearts and minds -- including our own -- are transformed through relationships across lines of difference.

We don't actually wish to defend Sojourners' decision not to run the ad. Nor do we intend to diminish the important work of Believe Out Loud. But we would like to defend Sojourners' right as an organization -- especially one with a theologically and politically diverse constituency, who must walk an unenviable tightrope to broker relationships among an unprecedented diversity of Christian organizations and denominations with fundamental theological disagreements about what "full LGBTQ equality in the church" means -- to make the kind of decisions necessary to hold their constituency together and advance their mission of seeking out common ground and mobilizing for social justice. We may not always agree with every decision an organization makes, but those disagreements shouldn't eclipse the important work an organization like Sojourners has done and will continue to do, especially when the question here is not about whether Sojourners agrees that Christians should be welcoming but a question of their ad policy.

Both of us understand how emotionally charged this issue is for people on all sides. One of us has watched many friends and loved ones grapple with their sexuality within the walls of a conservative evangelical college, and now leads a national movement of young evangelicals. The other secretly struggled for years as a closeted, suicidal queer kid in a Christian youth group, and is today very active in queer dialogues around these issues and works to bridge the divide between the religious and the nonreligious. Because of our experiences, we both know how important resources that promote alternate perspectives on LGBTQ identity are of utmost consequence.

But we also agree that it is fundamentally important to foster desperately needed dialogue between the LGBTQ and evangelical Christian communities. The only way real progress will be made is if we seek out relationships with people who have different views than we do.

In a time when people in our neighborhoods and around the world are suffering and dying because of homophobia -- from LGBTQ students bullied in our schools, to homeless youth sleeping in our streets, to the many individuals who live under daily threat of violence all around the world -- we need to prioritize building coalitions to combat intolerance and injustice. These coalitions will need to include people who disagree on issues of theology and LGBTQ identity.

The two of us may be very different -- a heterosexual man committed to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and a queer atheist who spends his spare Sunday mornings dreaming up new tattoos -- but we share something more significant than our differences: a common desire to see compassion and reconciliation in the world between people of all religious and nonreligious perspectives. Sadly, controversies like these make it more difficult, rather than easier, to build these bridges and participate in the important work of healing the world's bitter divisions.

We trust that Sojourners and Jim Wallis know this, and attempts to publicly shame them for trying to build broad coalitions make their job, and all of our jobs, that much harder.

Was Osama Bin Laden Evil?

2011-05-02T14:29:34-04:00

The death of Osama Bin Laden offers an important opportunity to reflect on human nature, and more specifically, the problem of evil.

According to the Genesis creation narrative -- rooted at the heart of Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths -- God created Adam and Eve and placed them in a garden free from many of the worries we face today. We don't know much about this garden, except that it contained everything people needed to be fruitful and multiply.

Flash-back to the very beginning: God exists. God creates world. God creates Adam and Eve. They eat the forbidden fruit. Everything falls apart. Genesis offers this much of the story, but what it leaves out seems just as telling. It provides a context, a space to inhabit, a worlding-of-the-world. The creation narrative ventures to answer the question of how, but leaves out the question of why, and -- perhaps a more glaring omission -- why evil?

Flash-forward a few million years: As you pass the milestones of civilization, you will see many features, but most of them will look the same. Empires rise and crumble to ruin, consumed by the degenerative bile of their own hubris. Revolutions collide with institutions perpetuating the status-quo, sometimes succeeding, more often failing. Rivaling tribes set out to destroy one another, seeing evil in the face of the other and goodness in their own cause. Wars are fought. Battles are lost. Victories are won. The common denominators of human pain and suffering ties these stories together -- common threads running throughout human history.

Notice how the questions remain the same. The world exists. Suffering exists. Sometimes goodness breaks through both. This much everyone seems to know, be they Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Jewish, Christian or Arab.

But why does the world exist? And more significantly, why suffering? The omissions of Genesis -- the unanswered questions, unanswered from the beginning of time -- leave gaping wounds on human hearts from generation to generation.

Enter the 21st century: two world wars, multiple genocides, the atomic bomb, many monsters, and few visible saints. When we look back over the past hundred years we see the face of the devil in Osama bin Laden. We witness a portrait of goodness in Mother Teresa.

Back to the Genesis story, the Garden of Eden existed in a state of completeness. Humankind knew its responsibilities, not asking the wrong questions or making the wrong accusations. Good and evil were not even on the collective radar screens of human consciousness. These binary ethical options would not have made sense to Adam. They would have made even less so to Eve. After all, she was not there when the Creator showed her husband the trees.

Even in its state of completeness, there seems to have been a tension in a system otherwise infused with goodness. This garden was familiar with the existence of evil.

The reality that Adam and Eve did not know good and evil should not be taken to mean that good was not present or that evil did not exist. Quite the opposite seems clear. At the very center of Eden were two trees, one bringing life and the other bringing death. The first entailed -- in life -- unity with the Creator. The second produced a curious side-effect, allowing one -- in death -- to know both good and evil.

But in its essence, in its core, what is evil? What is good?

First a clarification must be made about what exists within the human heart, my heart, other hearts, all hearts. I find it confusing to talk to many Christians who, when asked about human nature, immediately say something like, "Human beings are sinful by nature." or "People are fundamentally evil (especially if they don't know Jesus)." The creation account seems to make no such claim. In fact, it draws a distinction between human nature and the nature of evil.

Genesis identifies human nature at its very core with the words Imago Dei: the 'Image of God'. These words unveil very the definition of what it means to be human. In essence, human beings are the image-bearers of the Creator. As for evil, Genesis offers no definition, no core description of evil in its purest form, save for -- perhaps -- Tovu Vavaohu: formless and void. The nature of evil remains unknown even to those who know it exists.

Most of the problem in needing to define evil -- giving it a face and a name -- lies in us. The greatest commandment is not to judge evil but to love others (Matthew 22:37-40). Having eaten the fruit that brings knowledge of the competing forces of good and evil, we still remain unable to rightly distinguish between the two. Only God truly knows what evil is. We just like to pretend we do. All too often we, like those who have come before us, see evil exclusively in the faces of our adversaries and good only in those who bless us. Additionally, we fail to see both at work in ourselves. The result: we commit evil in the eyes of God.

Most of us would like to hold onto the luxury of identifying good and evil in the other, while failing to search them out in the corners of our own hearts. As a result, we need archetypes to make us comfortable with good and evil as categories and to make us comfortable with ourselves.

We see evil in Osama Bin Laden and label him a monster. This plumbline becomes our paradigm for how evil operates in the world. On the other side we see goodness in Mother Teresa and call her a saint. This point-counterpoint, picture-counterpicture, of good and evil sets up caricatures of humanity that conceal more than they clarify. Our images make us less able to see the real ways good and evil really operate in the world.

Human beings are addicted to labels and stereotypes. These tools that allow us to put others in comfortable boxes that make sense. If we can peg a person down and place them in a category, they can no longer surprise us in ways that make us feel uncomfortable. When they do, we feel entitled to judge them. We can simply write off everything they say or do as, "typical". In so doing, we define them. We attach a nature to them. Effectively we say to them, "you are good" or "you are evil" or some gradient in between.

Re-enter the Garden of Eden again for a perfect example. Adam and Eve lived, breathed and worked in the midst of two legitimate archetypes of good and evil (perhaps the only two truly legitimate ones ever to exist). God is goodness; the very epitome. The serpent represented the nearest possible embodiment of evil in a world brought into being by a benevolent creator.

Interestingly, neither Adam nor Eve could really tell the difference between the two until they ate what they were not supposed to, and acquired knowledge they were never supposed to have. Even more telling, after they ate the fruit, they immediately confused good and evil seeing the later everywhere except in their own choice to eat the fruit.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a dissident writer living in communist Russia at the height of Soviet power, spent many years in a concentration camp at the hands of his own government. During this time, he discovered something that few people truly realize or even want to understand. In The Gulag Archipeligo he writes:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Evil happens when we deceive ourselves into thinking Jesus' greatest commandment to 'love your neighbor (and even your enemy) as you love yourself' does not apply to those we see evil in. We, in turn, are off the hook for not fulfilling it. "After all, wicked people ought to be judged, not loved," we tell ourselves. In this we miss what good God might be working in their lives and we miss the evil in our own moral judgments.

We also deceive ourselves into undo hero worship of those in whom we see the presence of good. In our minds, the righteous ones are those truly deserving of love. These are the people we want in our camp, on our side, fighting our battles. In this we miss the dark-side of even our brightest stars and the darkness of many of our own causes.

Farewell Rob Bell (or, John Piper's Inferno)

2011-02-28T18:05:32-05:00

"Farewell Rob Bell."

With this three word Tweet, John Piper -- senior pastor at Bethlehem Baptist church in Minneapolis, Minn., and elder statesman of the neo-reform stream of American Christianity -- triggered an online firestorm over the weekend. Within 24 hours "Rob Bell" became a trending topic on Twitter, fueled by a steady point/counterpoint barrage of new Tweets and blog posts that amounted to a whole lot of heat, but not much fire.

The fact that this controversy became the most dissected piece of news in the evangelical world at the same time the regime of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was escalating violent attacks on its own people this weekend offers a sobering commentary on the priorities (and irrelevance) of too-many evangelical leaders.

But I digress; that's another blog post entirely.

The controversy is over the content of Rob Bell's next book, Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Or more specifically, the controversy is over what people like John Piper think the content will address, since the book hasn't even been published yet.

Before diving any further into this controversy, I would suggest you first watch Rob Bell's video (below), where he frames the questions raised by Love Wins in his own terms. It's well worth three minutes of your time:

LOVE WINS. from Rob Bell on Vimeo.

At stake are huge theological questions about what Rob Bell -- an influential evangelical megachurch pastor in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a huge national following -- believes about the afterlife. Does he believe God condemns people to hell? What does Bell think about heaven? More importantly, who's in, who's out, and where does the line fall between the two? For example: Is Gandhi in heaven (even though he wasn't a Christian)?

We won't know for sure how Rob Bell answers these questions until the book comes out. Nevertheless, this controversy offers an important opportunity for Christians to reflect on a few principles that should inform this debate as it moves forward:

1. Christians should hope that all people can be (and will be) saved.
Hell: Population 0

Those who believe God modeled the ultimate example of true love in the person of Jesus -- and who, therefore, aspire to love their fellow humans as they love themselves -- should also believe that, in the end, God's love will win the day. So is it really that radical to suggest that this belief should accompany the earnest hope that it is actually within the scope of God's sovereign power and unrelenting grace to reconcile all things to himself?

For biblical passages alluding to this idea, read: Colossians 1:19-20; 1 Corinthians 15:22,28; Romans 5:18, 11:33-36; and Philippians 2:10-11. This is just a limited digest.

I haven't read Bell's book, but I suspect that this is one of the ideas he explores. This would put him in good company. Far from being unorthodox, this idea has captured the imaginations of theologians since the early days of Christianity. In 2001, Richard John Neuhaus -- founder of First Things, a religion and policy journal, and (though a Lutheran convert to Catholicism) featured on Time Magazine's list of The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America -- reflected on this idea and its long Christian history in an articled titled, "Will All Be Saved?"

The question of universalism--whether all will, in the end, be saved--is perennially agitated in the Christian tradition. A notable proponent of that view was the great Origen, who, in the third century, set forth a theologically and philosophically complex doctrine of "Apocatastasis" according to which all creatures, including the devil, will be saved. "Origenism"--which is not necessarily the same thing as Origen taught--has been condemned from time to time, with the Emperor Justinian trying, unsuccessfully, to get a total condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553

After touching on the history, Neuhaus unpacks the idea further:

The hope that all will be saved is precisely that, a hope. It is not a doctrine, never mind a dogma. But some respond that we cannot even hold the hope, since it clearly contradicts the revealed truth that many, if not most, will be eternally damned. A different and much more troubling objection is that it makes no sense to be a Christian if, in fact, one can be saved without being a Christian. In this view, the damnation of others, maybe of most others, is essentially related to the reason for being a Christian. The joy of our salvation is contingent upon the misery of their damnation. If it is possible that all will be saved, it is asked, why not eat, drink, and be merry?

Neuhaus concludes:

...Such a perverse view is also more than a little like that of the laborers in the vineyard who complained that those who came at the last hour received the same reward as those who had worked all day. The master replies, "Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? So the last will be first, and the first last" (Matthew 20). Some of the critics of the hope for universal salvation do indeed seem to begrudge the generosity of God entailed in that outcome. Theirs is a position of resentment dressed up as a claim of justice. "What was the point of my working so hard and so long if God is going to let in the riffraff on equal terms? It's unfair!" The eschatological upsetting of such attitudes (the last will be first and first last) is a constant in the teaching of Jesus.

In other words, regardless of what Christians think about Hell, and more specifically, the question of who's in and who's out, Christians should not only hope and pray that no one meets this fate, but believe that God has the final say in these matters -- even if this means confounding our best theological assumptions.

2. Jesus draws dividing lines, but his lines are different than our own.

Christians throughout history have disagreed about who's a real follower of God and who's not -- who's in and who's out -- and who will enter paradise at the culmination of history. These debates have not always been civil; they've even led to violence between Christians, and also between Christianity and other religions.

When these conflicts break out, they are almost always over questions of "right doctrine" rather than because a particular group did too good of a job of acting like Jesus. Don't get me wrong. I believe good theology -- what we believe about God, people and the world -- matters; for this reason, I take the gospel accounts about Jesus seriously.

And anyone reading the gospels will see that Jesus not only responds to the "lines" drawn by the religious leaders of his day; he draws lines of his own. But Jesus' lines are almost always different than the lines drawn by the religious leaders, and even more startlingly, his lines are different than the lines Christians draw today.

Compare and contrast the stories of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46), Jesus' words to the Rich Young Ruler (Luke 18:18-23), and finally, his famous late night conversation with Nicodemus the Pharisee (John 3:1-21). Each of these passages are about dividing lines, but that's where their commonalities end; in each passage Jesus seems to be redrawing the boundaries.

What's most remarkable about these four passages is that Jesus changes his message depending on what each group of listeners needs to hear to bring them to a place of repentance and transformation. To use the crass language of today's marketing world, Jesus offers a "customized value proposition" -- a message that's tailored differently for each unique market segment.

My point here isn't to say that rich people will be in hell, and that poor people will be in heaven. My point is that it doesn't make any more sense to take a passage like John 3:16 (you must be born again) and universalize it as the basis for drawing lines separating who's in and who's out than it does to do this with a passage like Matthew 25.

But isn't this what many Christians, including John Piper, do today? We pick our favorite biblical passage, where Jesus' vision for "who's in" includes people like us, and excludes people who aren't, meanwhile, we ignore other passages that redraw the boundaries that would force us to change in order to be included in Jesus' "in-group."

We should at least consider the idea that Jesus' purpose for drawing lines was not for the sake of making his prospective followers feel more comfortable about their place in his kingdom, but to challenge them, shake them out of their complacency, and call them to repentance for the things in their lives keeping them from participating in God's best hopes and dreams for this world. This message still resonates 2,000 years later.

3. Millennials are leaving Christianity because Christians fight stupid battles.

I almost Tweeted, "Looks like @JohnPiper has doubled down on being a belligerent jerk since his sabbatical." Except I would have used a different word than "jerk" (I'll leave that word to your imagination).

To be clear, I don't think John Piper is a jerk because of his theology.

I think he's a jerk because of who he picks fights with and how he picks them. Rob Bell now stands alongside a growing pantheon of brothers in Christ -- Greg Boyd, Brian McLaren and N.T. Wright among them -- who Piper has thrown under the bus (and even called "heretics") simply because their theology doesn't neatly jibe with his own.

For a generation harboring increasingly negative perceptions about (and distancing itself from) Christianity, there's no question that controversies like these have played a big role in making these trends worse. When asked to describe present-day Christianity, the second most reported description of young people (ages 16 to 29) was that it is "too-judgmental," with 87 percent of young non-churchgoers and 52 percent of churchgoers holding this view.

(Here's a great example of this Millennial Generation sentiment, expressed as a prayer: "Young Evangelical's Prayer for John Piper and Rob Bell" via Recovering Evangelical.)

I have no doubt that people like John Piper earnestly believe they are doing their own cause a favor -- imagining that God's Kingdom is well served by the mere act of standing up for truth, no matter the means, method or tone. But even if John Piper is right about everything, shouldn't he be all the more careful about how he broadcasts the truth?

I'm not saying there's no place for robust conversation within the body of Christ about important theological matters. However, we also need to realize that people in the real world who are struggling to negotiate their relationship with God in light of the brokenness of the world (and too-often, the brokenness within Christianity) are put-off by these debates. That's not necessarily a reason not to debate, but we can't ignore basic virtues like love, charity and empathy in the process -- at least not while following the biblical call to be salt-and-light and Ministers of Reconciliation.

Which is why I finally chose not to send the Tweet. My first instinct was to be angry with John Piper and fight back with a self-indulgent broadcast. It might have felt good in the moment, but it would have done nothing to break the rhetorical cycle of violence that has engulfed Piper, Bell and their respective tribes over the weekend. It would have only made things worse.

In fact, if I could take John Piper out for a cup of coffee, I would confess my anger, ask for his forgiveness and then earnestly seek to better understand how he thinks about this particular issue. My prayer is that in the weeks ahead, John Piper extends the same charity toward our brother Rob Bell, even if none of us ever hear about it.

Should Christians Care About Unions?

2011-02-23T11:40:25-05:00

More than 30,000 demonstrators have descended on the Wisconsin Statehouse to protest Governor Scott Walker's decision to severely restrict the collective bargaining rights of most public employee unions. The proposed bill would make it illegal for unions to use healthcare benefits and their pension funds as bargaining chips; only leaving discussions about actual wages on the table for negotiation.

In response to this controversial move, 14 Democratic State Senators fled into the neighboring state of Illinois -- beyond the reach of Wisconsin State troopers dispatched by Governor Walker -- in order to block the Republican-majority legislature from voting on the Governor's proposal.

Most states have a constitutional mandate to balance their own budgets. Wisconsin is no exception.

In one sense, Governor Walker is simply meeting his gubernatorial obligations to make tough decisions in the face of his state's $137 million budget shortfall. Even if he were a Democrat, with a Republican legislature it's unlikely he would have the political capital or public support necessary to cover Wisconsin's budget shortfall through tax increases alone. Spending cuts are really the only option on the table.

However, for the Governor to use the budget debate as an excuse to advance a pet political cause -- namely, busting public employee unions -- is opportunistic at best (and that's being charitable). Protecting collective bargaining rights for workers is not only critical to the existence of unions; it is foundational to creating an environment where economic opportunity and social mobility is possible for everyone else.

America first learned these lessons the hard way in the 19th century, an age where massive economic inequality and social upheaval pit factory owners against workers unable to provide for their families -- let alone hope for any sort of social mobility -- often with tragic consequences. Violent employer crackdowns on striking workers eventually forced the U.S. government to intervene, officially legalizing unions.

In addition to eliminating pension and healthcare discussions as almost universally upheld union bargaining chips, Governor Walker's bill would require public union employees to cover 5.8 percent of their pension costs and 12 percent of their healthcare premiums. While these concessions are not necessarily unreasonable in light of the state's requirement to balance the budget, they're problematic for a few reasons.

1. This isn't really about the budget; it's about union-busting.

Governor Walker's proposal is not the result of tough-minded, but good faith, negotiations with the unions. Rather, it is a unilateral act that not only hurts these employees in the short-term, but eliminates the one avenue they have traditionally relied on for negotiations about these kind of cuts -- and will continue to rely upon in the future.

As former Wisconsin Congressman David Obey told Talking Points Memo, Governor Walker's decision is more fitting for a third-world dictator like Hosni Mubarak than a United States' governor:

"I think what Governor Walker is trying to do amounts to political thuggery. It is one thing to say that these are tough times -- everybody's got to cut back and public employees are going to have to take cuts like the rest of us ... but he's using it as an excuse to gut the ability of workers to organize and bargain collectively. In my view that's outrageous."

Picking up on these themes on Feb. 18 in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne remarked:

This isn't just about budgets -- or even primarily about budgets. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is drumming up a crisis to change the very nature of the relationship between public workers and the government. He would strip their unions of their bargaining rights on everything except wages. ... Whether you think the second is good policy or not, it essentially renders collective bargaining meaningless. Why shouldn't this be seen as a Republican governor and a Republican legislature looking for a way to strike a political blow against allies of the other party -- and using budget issues as an excuse?

2. Governor Walker is selectively picking winners and losers.

When President Obama chose to continue Bush's policy of bailing out a bankrupt General Motors -- holding its hand through the bankruptcy and restructuring process, while providing the financial backing it needed to stay afloat -- Republicans lambasted the Administration for "picking winners and losers."

If Governor Walker is so concerned about balancing Wisconsin's budget, why are police and firefighters unions selectively spared from his executive fiat, while teachers, nurses and other public workers are denied collective bargaining rights? Wouldn't the state also experience savings by including police and fighter-fighters in this bill?

Not only does this smack of hypocrisy -- Republicans cannot credibly critique Obama for picking winners and losers in the private sector, when they do the same with regards to specific unions -- it undermines the Governor's ability to position himself as an honest broker of already difficult conversations about Wisconsin's fiscal future.

3. Christians should care about what's happening in Wisconsin.

As Christians, let's not forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was not assassinated in 1968 during a Civil Rights march; he was killed in Memphis, Tenn., while in town supporting a strike organized by the black sanitation workers union, A.F.S.C.M.E. Local 1733. That this also happened to be the local chapter of the very same union Governor Walker aspires to unravel in his own state is not without a sense of historical irony.

Add to this the compounding irony that the national union benefitting these sanitation workers was originally founded in Wisconsin in 1938; what started as the "Wisconsin State Administrative, Clerical, Fiscal and Technical Employees Association" would eventually grow to become the second largest union in the country.

The night before Dr. King met the assassins bullet in Memphis, he preached what would go down as one of the most important sermons of his entire career: I've been to the Mountain Top. In addition to hauntingly prophetic allusions to his own death, he reflected on the state of the world in light of the theological commitments that marked his life:

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world.

And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there...

...Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

Finally, after reminding his audience of the specifics of the Memphis sanitation worker's strike, Dr. King invoked the parable of the Good Samaritan, laying down the gauntlet for his fellow Christians assembled that night:

...The first question that the [religious man] ... asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job." Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Dr. King's message on the eve of his death is echoed in Pope Benedict XVI's recent admonition to Christians (hat-tip: Duane Shank at Sojourners) reminding them of the moral imperative to uphold the rights of workers (from Benedict's 2009 Encyclical, Caritas In Veritate):

"...budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers' associations. Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past ..."

A version of this post originally appeared at Recovering Evangelical.